I just scanned in some artwork. I do a lot of hand-drawing for reference, but there is a bit of a gap between the hand-drawn stuff and the pixel art.

Again, I hand-draw with my left, and do pixels with my right.

Shocking.

Positively shocking.

Well, this might give you an idea of the kind of scope my cutscenes will go.

I probably should hire voice actors, but I think I'd rather do what I can without money first.

What's taking me so long? Designing assets for the volcano level. Also, allergies.

Boom boom acka-lacka-lacka boom, boom boom acka-lacka boom boom.

Three reasons to be going after the treasure:

Still doing cinematics.

It still requires a lot of drawing of new assets, and I just put in that Mode 7 effect for later cutscenes.

As part of making this game, I have to do a lot of animation without a lot of drawing, if you can believe such a thing is possible.

For one of the opening shots, I'd like Pinafore to clean up this photo on the wall, then see her reflection.

Again, this is more Sierra-styled than Sega CD-styled, but it gets the point across.

It doesn't help that the small-sprite BAC-PAC doesn't exactly pop from this kind of background.

Besides that, I'm making progress.

As part of the process, I learned that my new dialogue-scrolling system isn't perfect. It's possible to break it if you can push the button faster than humanly possible.

I guess I'd better dig out the Turbo controller for further testing.

First, I hand-draw it and ink it with a felt-tip pen. Then I scan it, making an HD image. Then I save it as a 16-color BMP, then clean it up and crop it. Then I add color and transparency effects.

For games, I shrink the HD version for the game's window.