Thank you for your kind words. 💙 I hope to finish this, but in the spirit of the game jam I feel I should wait until judging is done.
Like the NES, the SMS has a maximum of eight 8x8 sprites per horizontal line. The current implementation wouldn’t work on genuine hardware. The workaround is that SMS video memory is directly accessible, so it would be possible to use tile memory to simulate the inflations. I have a theory on how to implement that, but in the interest of getting the basic game to work before deadline, I simply used sprites. 😅