Thank you very much! 😊
I see where you're coming from regarding the flickering backgrounds. The tiles for the indoors sections are simply repurposed, recoloured textures from the earlier Wolfenstein-esque FPS game I had made; I knocked that game out in a hurry (in the last four-ish hours before a deadline...! 😵) so I didn't have any time for any real visual design. I used them again in this game for... consistency I guess? 🤷♂️
The outdoors sections - with all the dithering - were a late stage idea and is a meta gag in which the protagonist finds herself back in the setting of the first game, a platformer that admittedly moves a fair bit slower than this shooter 😅 That one was also a jam entry, and I wanted to get the environments out of the way quickly so I wouldn't need to think about them for long! I'd drawn up a basic tileset and dang it, I was going to use it... 🥴
A remaster is definitely on the cards... 🤔
The boss... 😌 I'll let you behind the curtain: each one of the player's shots counts for one point of damage, and the boss has 200(!)HP... I may have overdone it a bit... 😖 That would probably have felt more reasonable in a bigger game with a more gradual escalation of enemy resilience 🤔
The sound effects are just me tinkering with GB Studio's in-built sound effects setup; it's a little limited, but you get okay results. There are methods to make more complicated stuff but I haven't gotten around to that yet. The music: all me 😎 Basically reinterpreting the one track from the first game in different ways, which in turn had been inspired by the bassline to 🤨Otis Redding's Hard to Handle 🤨 (no, really...!)
(Apart from the boss theme: there's a hidden boss arena in Contra: Hard Corps where the soundtrack suddenly goes all "Uns! Uns!", and I was thinking about that a lot... 😆)