9-bit Lava Level :: Pixel Art Detail

Here's a (large) animated GIF i made of how the final level of Xymati will scroll.  I decided to go heavy on the parallax here to show off a bit.  You see, the system we're making this shoot-em-up for (the PC-Engine aka TurboGrafx-16) was not capable of true layer-on-layer parallax like the Genesis and Super NES were.  If you wanted to pull off something resembling true parallax, you had to resort to tile animation.  That's what i've done here... all the "inner" magma columns are animated tiles (of 4 colors each which halves the space in RAM they eat up), and the dark red rocks and the metal parts are just normal parts of the background scroll.

I'd like to thank Squirrelsquid for helping out with the darker rocks.  He's one awesome mammalian cephalopod