Something about rollin' down a street, and also gin and laying back.

Earlier in the day, I made 0 HP creatures die, except when they'd rather stab at thee from Hell's heart with a "last breath" action of some sort. I guess I'll use that mechanism to let players continue on death.

Not too long ago I also managed to get something of a scrolling stage system working.

For now, I just take a big 8000×1000 image of a few layers of gradients and polka-dots, position it so only the botton 1000×1000 shows, and scroll it until it reaches the top. Sessile enemies can scroll with it, but I haven't yet properly moved the creatures' HP gauges with them. There will definitely be no left- or right-scrolling. I'm pretty sure I can get a stage to scroll backward as Recca (1992, for the NES) does, but I don't know if I'll get so fancy. (The image below, if any, is a smaller JPEG to keep ImageShack—and your internet—from crying. Pretend that it's 1920×1200 all the same.)

My plan is to add some sort of trees and rivers so it can look like your typical platform-game Stage 1, and (much later) to take Vralanea out of one of those corners and put the other three witches' portraits into the blank ones. Not quite sure how I'll do the former yet, especially if I decide those rivers should flow. Maybe I'll animate radial gradients or something.