This is a first pass at trying to do something like Out of This World (or Another World depending on which side of the pond you land on).
Background is a static, shaded vector image that is rendered once at the beginning of the scene into a temporary buffer and then copied to the screen every frame.
The man is a moving vector animation that is rendered to the screen every frame.
Things aren't really structured for an actual game yet, but at least this shows that the concept could work.