And 2-6 has come and gone! I could have finished it sooner if I hadn't spent the past two weeks slacking off.
I've now started working on - wait for it - the final level of world two. When that is finished, it'll be the furthest I've ever made it through *any* hack without cancelling it. (The current record holder being
Pokey's Adventure, which also stops at world 2's castle.)
I'm mostly done with the visuals for this one, and after some struggling with color math, even the gimmick is all coded up!
This is decidedly a bright, palace-y type of castle, and the gimmick is changing water levels. (Haven't come up with the level design yet, but I'm sure there's something that'll work.) The background is on layer 3, the water is on layer 2, and you can hit those switches to make it rise or drop to a predefined level. The switches are pretty versatile and surprisingly painless to code, so I might even release them next C3 or something.
After recording the gif I changed the switch palette to something more fitting, as seen in the second screenshot.