Gameboy Development Forum

There's not really any trickery going on, just artistic skill and good use of the hardware.

A few notes on Shantae's graphics:

- Yes, indeed, Shantae is using stacked sprites with 3 different palettes for the genie herself. It's a bit of a sacrifice, but makes sense for the graphics that the player will look at all the time.
- Background objects are artistically designed so that they will melt in with the background and the tile based nature is less obvious. A potential downside of this is that some of the BG palettes always have to contain the background color to make this possible, leaving only 3 "regular" colors.
- The game appears to have a lot of variation in the palette between stages.
- The game makes full use of the extended tileset of the GBC, doubling the amount available tiles.
- The game makes use of the background priority flag for the tile map, which allows sprites to be "behind" the background. (This is available before the GBC as well, but only on a per sprite basis, and not per tile in the background map, which complicates movement between two adjacent level areas where you want a sprite to be in the background and foreground respectively.
- The game appears to update the player sprite every 5th frame, giving a rate of 12 animation frames/frame. (In traditional film animation, which is based around 24 FPS, this would be equivalent of animating "on twos", ie every second frame in that case.) However, the attack animation is faster. But crucially, the movement is updated at 60 Hz which makes the animation still feel fluid and responsive.