Originally posted by lx5
maybe later, it needs an animation to tell the player that the time is running out and I have no idea how to display that in a nice way
How about doing the same animation as SMW's, except the big Mario sprite has the P-balloon palette instead? It's actually a tiny pet peeve of mine right now how when Mario enters a pipe he suddenly turns into back his normal colors. You could reuse that recolored sprite for pipe transitions as well.
Also, nice update. Seems like a lot of the jank is gone now.