an interesting thing i've thought about but never prototyped: recursive sprites. every block is a 2x2 of blocks. no difference between sprite data and tiles. render consists of walking down the tree up to a stopping depth and drawing those pixels. possibly some blocks are not subdivided further.
The Mega Drive and Neo Geo consider a sprite to be made up of multiple tiles. Not recursively, but still, that’s a layer of abstraction that lets you move several overlaid blocks at once: www.segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Dr... wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?ti...
While not quite recursive, that reminds me of Wave Function Collapse and how it can be used to generate textures along with games that use fractals as part of generating the environment.
huh, i've never seen fractal WFC! that sounds interesting.