Engineer-art solutions: not good, but fast.
Plus it's very freeing to have a shippable version in-hand, so everything up to the last minute is just tweaking. Always be shipping. My project currently has stick figure enemies, half a level, and the bare minimum title screen. But there will be no panicked efforts to solve technical problems in the final hour... this time.
Ooh, you posted the demo. Oh that is rock-solid. I knew this could be done at the tile level, but would not have bet on this look working at all. And it's double-buffered. You can't just be scrunching a nametable. I need a better emulator just to figure out what I'm looking at. That is witchcraft.