Belated monthly progress update #13 — Let's pretend it's February 29th

Recently I've been practicing drawing expressive pixel character figures using 32x32 canvas and limited palettes, and not only have they been mildly successful as character birthday art, but also made me settle on this exact art style for the character sprites in AAMLC, and considering the fact this is the third iteration of sprites I'm going through I don't think I'll be experimenting with other styles anytime soon, haha c': I've also spent a bit of time checking out some of the isometric games on GBA once again (mostly Bratz titles..... don't ask) and briefly dabbled in 32x64 sprites, which I'm also planning to integrate into the game, although twice the size would require me getting used to for a bit longer. 

I've no idea if having less free time in a week will make me actually more productive in terms of personal projects (I did somehow release a tiny title screen animation ROM for another GBA Jam this week, after all), but I will definitely continue updating the devlog with whatever AAMLC-related info I'm able to share (and hopefully with actual game ROM updates).

Speaking of related info, let's start off the first character info section I promised to include in devlog posts some posts ago with describing the Math & Logic club gang's most important character traits — their Gameboy device and video game genre preferences.

• Nyra Hanajima owns an AGS-101 she picked up sold-as-junk(?) and had Yuuji help her in fixing and modding of. She doesn't have any specific genre preferences and simply enjoys a good challenge and test of gaming skills topped with cool graphics and neat soundtrack.
• Tooru Tsuzuki owns an original unmodded AGB-001 Yuuji gave him as a gift. All of the games he owns were also received from Yuuji and consist of various North American imports, as well as rhythm games, beat 'em ups, and edutaintment software.
• Yuuji Sugeno owns basically every official device capable of playing GBA cartridges, but prefers using the GameCube + Game Boy Player combo for both playing commercial games and testing homebrew programs (and occasionally handmade flashcarts). He's mostly into metroidvanias and stylish minimalistic puzzles (think Bit Generation).

To close off this post, here's an external link to a badly compressed in-game animation of Nyra playing something challenging on her GBA in front of a classroom window with the team's manager silently observing nearby. Drawing and programming this brought me quite a lot of joy, and I'm sure this will be the same for the rest of the game's content.