Counting this as UI because at my job I'd probably be responsible for things like this -- let's check out something you're liable to see a LOT of in Metal Gear Ghost Babel, the codec conversation screen.
i was immediately shocked when i saw this, because the Game Boy is not usually what i think of when i imagine graphics having "depth". And yet! By layering background tiles, moving sprites(maybe) and what I assume to be on-update palette swapping, they took what could have been a very flat and static screen and given it a pretty remarkable CRT-video screen effect!!
Disclaimer: i'm only barely out of layman-status when it comes to how the Game Boy handles graphics so bear with me 😳
this is very interesting. when i first saw this glitchy rolling line meant to mimic a spotty transmission, i assumed it was a 32x1px animated sprite of a bunch of noisy pixels that travel down the portrait. i scrubbed through the video to try and get a frame count though, and eventually realized that surely they wouldn't waste this many frames on such a small effect when surely 6-8 would get the idea across, right? how do you reckon they're achieving this effect then? is there maybe a way to pull in random tile data here? someone smarter than me sound off please 🙏
now check out the slowly rolling bar of light that mimics the effect of recording a monitor screen at a frame rate that doesn't match the display's refresh rate. it's such a cute little effect and i...THINK i know how it's achieved? my guess is that they're continuously swapping palettes in a downward motion to a similar but slightly lighter color palette? it seems like it would have been an incredibly tedious task to get this effect but I see you Tose!!
okay this is more words than i usually like to write, but i am weirdly passionate about what developer Tose did with this game's graphics; beautiful fucking work. i think the only thing that'd make this perfect is to use palette swapping to add a bit of screen flicker (mockup by me below). not sure if that would be possible in combination with the rolling bar effect though! if nothing else it would have been a much less cool but much more economical effect than what they actually accomplished.
