I set myself the target to get more level features into Bee Happy tonight and after some prototyping in photoshop this morning I ended up with this lil image to work towards.
![](https://refreshgames.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/image-5.png)
This meant changing how level data was constructed and read from, keeping within my limits of not just lazily turning the rendering off for a few frames. Initally everything went well, adding the hedges seemed to cause no problems until I added the code for the Hive placement which proved to be a little too much for the PPU to handle inside 1 frame.
The problem was that I knew I was close but there were a few cycles I could spare and, with a few minutes of tinkering about with my level loading code I was able to optimize it down to run, what seems to be, safely within the NMI CPU time.
Figured I’d best post a lil video to go with it, the only real difference is that the hive outline isn’t black but that’s something I can live with.
Next up I think I need to handle background collisions in a smart fashion, ideally pre-calculating which tile each player is over before deciding what to do with that information in the NMI window.
Wish me luck, as I think I’m going to need it!