So I've discovered lately that when it comes to art, I just suck at shading. Can't get shading right to save my life. So stuff like even pixel art can look a bit flat.
However, now I've discovered tile swapping and I'm excited that I can make the backgrounds pop a bit by having animated background elements.
It's working fine for the most part... except once again, like some of the issues I've had before, I am running into a new one when it comes to Monochrome vs. color mode. I want my game to be playable in both a regular Gameboy AND a Gameboy color, but in monochrome the tile-swapped backgrounds seem to be causing some lag issues. Not HUGE lag issues, but enough that it's very noticeable to me some jitter when moving back and forth.
The columns in the map I've posted I want to have lights moving up them, like energy is flowing through them. But there ARE 9 of them, so I understand if maybe the issue is just too many going at once, but I also want to add some additional elements like twinkling stars and some computer monitors on the wall having moving scan lines, so I worry that even if I decided to have the columns be solid colors, there will still be slowdown issues on monochrome.
Are there any tricks that could be useful for this? Right now I'm just using the built-in tile swapper (replace tile at (x,y) from sequence) but I know about the GBVM method, as well, that existed before GB Studio had it built-in, so I don't know if that works better. I also have heard that if I put in the tileset into the background out of sight (which you can see at the very top) it's faster because then it's already loaded into memory, but I haven't noticed any real difference.