the hammock imp can officially be offended by a strawberry in real time. implementing this as usual took more effort than it should have, but also as usual it involved doing something for the first time that I expect will be easier on subsequent uses of the same technique, which as usual probably will not be.

the gif version has a shadow. the one in the screenshot doesn’t because I only just added it and it still looks awkward. But it looks worse without one. Wolfenstein 3d (and blake stone) sprites had shadows drawn on the ground but conventional doom engine never did, since they can leave the ground and in the 1993 code there was no way for an object to check if it was on the ground. And also perhaps the only way to ensure the shadow was never lighter than the ground was to have it always be full black, which looks cartoony. Never mind the bright red blood or weird saturated blues in the palette. But cartoony works for what I am doing, at least to a degree.

there is a way to automatically generate duke-nukem 3d style shadows behind objects but that looks bad with anything meant to appear attached to the ceiling or that might possibly appear near an edge, as the shadow will always display in full even if it runs out of level ground

the snapping motion is for if the player attempts to attack it with something other than a strawberry, which for the moment flings the player backward into the air (surreptitiously using four wah blasts fired at once) without inflicting damage. HOWEVER, this view change makes clear that despite the shadow issue the object still isn’t REALLY attached to the ceiling! If I make the ceiling lower, the top of the sprite gets visually cut off from the ground view which prevents you from seeing the creature escape through the ceiling when it does and also that I applied a minor palette conversion to make sure the trap door is the same color as the ceiling!

see?! you almost can’t! see it! which means it might as well not be there at all! aye yike so much to do

also this is my first time running the game since upgrading my RAM from 16 to 32 gigglebytes back in may. Now the game only slows down approximately exactly as much as before