Thanks! I was inspired by Robert Mitchum's character in The Night of the Hunter and thought a wide-brimmed-hat wearing priest character sprite worked well within the 8x8 pixel-per-tile confines of Pulp.
The turn-in-place movement was based on code the developer intellikat had created for their wonderful adventure games but I thought it would work well for an action game where I wanted the player's choices to feel very deliberate and well-considered so that they feel in complete control. I'm really happy with how it turned out! It's a tough game but hopefully is satisfying to play to the point that you'll want to keep coming back until you can clear it!
And yes, I created the cross projectiles as a player sprite, used transparency, and then switched the tiles over to an item sprite, which maintains the transparency.