First flicker/perf test on this headache. #sgdk

Those sprites that cover the ship are overlapping a bit by the looks eg the tops and bottoms, i wonder if you baked that into the animation and got rid of any overlap as that all adds up to the line limit.

no also the position is not the correct o e, it's just for test. I thought of something similar in case of extra flicker, like bake the middle enemy in the boss sprite and just spawn then when a certain number if the external one are destroyed

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The flickering is barely noticeable and disappears quickly when you take out the first group of enemies. I would have suggested making the main enemy using tiles from one of the backgrounds, but I already see that both layers are being used. As always, great work!

that was my first idea too but I decided to try all sprites and see how it went

The PC-Engine could NEVER do this 😜

Impressive and great progress!

I don't know anything, could you use larger 64x64 sprites reuse tiles, color cycle animation to simulate more rows until you start to blast up a few "enemies" and then swap out smaller 32x32 or smaller sprites when its an odd number or singular?

One thing I noticed is the shots flickering more than the enemies sprites. To avoid that, the shots sprites should go first into the sprite table and then the enemies. Eliminate Down doesn't take care of that, ending up with many invisible bullets in crowded scenes.

the shots are not flickering, they have the wrong priority sometimes and get obscured by the BG for the parallax trick. I'll fix them in next test

The uncircumcised cocoons made me giggle as a kid and they're outright hilarious as an adult. Their designer knew what they did lol