Three reasons to be going after the treasure:

There. The hand is drawn.

...now I've got four more angles for this hand to be drawn in, then I'll copy-paste and mirror them for the other hand.

Also, I've added a timer for scoring and convention reasons.

Behold, blending vertex positions!

Old position + ((number between 0 and 1) * the difference between the old and new position)

This took so much math, it hurts. ...not the CPU, but it sure hurts me to do.

...and I've got four more angles to do this with.

...well... This is awkward.

Yes, I CAN make an animated background within a matte, with a shifting color palette. However, I realize this doesn't look like lava, no matter which way you shake it.

...the effect's cool, though.

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.

There. Another hand angle. It shouldn't have taken me this long, but this isn't my day job.

If I know what I'm doing, I can flip most of that hand, easily.

No, this is not the final boss. This is the boss of the last mainline level. There's a difference.

Also, I'm so glad I can pull off stuff like this. There'll be two more forms, though.

I want to do a magic trick that can morph the polygons from one position to the next. I'm doing the keyframes first, then I'll make them automatically do in-betweens with math.

Drawing fingers in perspective is hard, but it'll be worth the effort.

Meow.

Tigers are difficult to animate, especially since they have two joints for their hind legs.

Well, it kinda resembles a tiger.

It doesn't matter if you're drawing in pixels, by hand, or with polygons. Hands are hard to draw, period.