Akumanor Escape DX

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You have been captured and taken to a Haunted Castle, the Akumanor, but you've just managed to escape from your cell in the catacombs, armed with your sword and shield, you have to do your best to save yourself from this mess! Good luck! 

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Keyboard Controls 
Arrow Keys: Move 
Z: Jump X: Attack 
Arrow Down: Raise Shield 
Enter: Pause
Esc: Reset game

Gamepad Controls (PS):
D-Pad/Left Stick: Move
Circle: Jump
X /Triangle: Attack
D-pad Down/Left Stick
Down: Raise Shield
Start: Pause
(Note: Any controller you have plugged into your PC should work, so long as it is Gamepad 0 or Gamepad 1, the buttons on other controllers correspondent to the ones listed above on a PS controller should work identically) 

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In the description of my submission to GBJAM 7, Akumanor Escape, I said: "Maybe someday I'll make a 'DX' version wherein I can fulfil my ambitions for this one..."
Well, this is that! With this game, I set out to not only fulfil said ambitions, only in colour of course, but also to address just about every issue anyone had with the original version!

This colour remaster includes:
- New Stages
- New Enemies and Hazards
- New Songs and Sound Effects
- Boss Battles
- An ending cutscene

I'm also including a downloadable Windows 32 version if anybody would prefer that over the browser version.

I made sure to stick to the specs of the GBC as accurately as I possibly could, only one BG layer (plus the Window layer, but that's just the HUD) only 3 colours per sprite/background tile, 7-ish palettes of 3 colours + transparency each (not really sure if the GBC has 7 or 8 palettes per layer, the info I got on that was conflicting, so I mostly just stuck with 7 palettes just to be safe, if anything, I could just do a scanline interrupt at the HUD on real hardware and it'd still look identical)

I could not simulate the sprite limits, either total or per-scanline, but I've been rather conservative with my sprite usage to begin with, aside from layering sprites with different palettes to get more colours for the protagonist, but even then, that shouldn't really be an issue even in real hardware. I tried to make my sprites as narrow as possible, I thought the GBC could handle up to 64 sprites on-screen, like the NES and the PC engine, but partway through development I found out it can only do 40, needless to say I was rather disappointed, but I can work with it, I did a lot of flickering on minor sprites in order to minimise sprite usage. 

Any and all parallax scrolling was made using one or more of the following tricks:
- Animating tiles when the camera moves
- Splitting the BG layer horizontally and moving the different parts at different speeds
- Rendering sprites as BG objects (usually behind the BG)
(Note, I didn't just make extra layers in-engine to simulate these tricks, I actually did them)

As for the sound and music, I tried my best to stick to the 4 sound channel limitation, I've made all songs and sound effects in Deflemask using the Game Boy soundchip, which means that they are all playable in real hardware, but as for playing them in-game, I've recorded channels 1 (Pulse) and 3 (Wave) in their own file, as they never get cut out, channel 2 (Pulse) in its own file, and channel 4 (Noise) in its own file, and whenever I need to play a Pulse-based sound effect, I mute channel 2, and when I need to play a  Noise-based sound effect, I mute channel 4, unfortunately that means that I have 3 sound files playing simultaneously, and I have no way of preventing any possible desyncs, I can't even check whether they are in-sync at any point! That's just not supported by C2's audio plugin... So in order to remedy that, I've made sure that every time the main file loops, I also set the other two files to their loop points, but that means if the music ever goes out of sync (which does happen) it only fixes itself when it loops, so I've made it so that you can use the backspace key to reset the song if it ever goes out-of-sync, that fixes it 90% of the time, and you can press it as many times as you want, so if it doesn't fix itself the first time, it probably will the 2nd or 3rd. This wouldn't be an issue if I could simply play the actual Game Boy Sound files in the browser, and was also able to mute/unmute individual channels, but alas, no such plugin exists for C2, at least yet...

[Edit] I was wrong, it is actually possible to compare the position of different audio files, it's just that it isn't an event you can find on the Audio plugin, I had to use a System function to compare two values, and then get the playback time from the audio plugin using a string I didn't know about for the different files, and then make it so that if they strayed too far (and by too far I mean more than 1 frame either way) I just seek the position of the different sound channels back to the same as the main file.

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I'd like to give my special thanks to Popfan (@gensakudan) for helping on playtesting the game, as well as helping me fix the Stage 2 theme, and also to Spoonybard13 and boomboompsh for helping on playtesting.

[Edit] Also thanks to Retrocade Media for the tip that helped me fix the audio sync issues!

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Original Soundtrack: https://michirin9801.bandcamp.com/album/akumanor-escape-dx-ost
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYDM1BwnMlU
Box art: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/78055891