A bunch of NES concepts + little collab with ExtraSizedBob!

Hi guys, just to make you know beforehand, I finished new commission I was working on in parallel with all this stuff, it's gonna be posted very soon, right now it's just waiting for commissioner's approval, just to make you know that pixel art is not the only thing I did during all these days.

So, just as usual, my mind was all over the place because of the recent NES experiment with Zed weight gain images and Mark's sprites. I got so captivated by the ideas coming to my head so I just couldn't help but dive into it with such passion and enthusiasm like if I already have a team ready to help make it all a full fledged game or at least skills to do it all by myself. Sadly I have neither and I don't have any real idea why I keep drawing it besides just how addictive and therapeutic the process feels. And I simply just love game graphics so I enjoy drawing it even if I can't make it a functional game.

As you remember by my last post, I made more images for Zed's weight gain and sprites for Mark which led me to pondering the concepts of what could all this stuff be turned into if it was a game, I imagined Mark traveling through several selectable food themed levels and hunting for high calorie treasures similar to NES Duck Tales or Mega Man. Well, I tried to make assets for these levels and I went really carried away with it!
First of all I started working on Fast Food level, obviously. The task was to follow NES limitations as strictly as possible which includes:
1. 4 palettes for a level, 3 unique colors for each, 1 fixed background color for all
2. Only one palette can be assigned to a 16x16 sector consisting of 4 8x8 tiles
3. One level or at least one section of a level can use only one tileset limited to only 256 unique tiles which means I need to keep the balance between unique elements and repetitive textures to save more space.
You know, all classic stuff, it's not the first time I explain it all.

I made things more difficult for myself by deciding that I'm not gonna use black backgrounds which many NES games loved a lot but at the same time I still need black color since I wanted to give everything black outlines for the sake of cartoony style. NES loved black backgrounds because this method kills two birds with one stone, you have a natural looking color for both the background and outlines, plus three variable colors for each palette. It's nice to have bright background but you still need black for outlines and shadows which means you have only TWO variable colors for each palette.
Many good games didn't use outlines, especially early ones like Super Mario Bros, Legends of Zelda, Adventure Island, Kid Nikki and so on and it helped to avoid the problem but I chose to have both bright background and black outlines and things got difficult.

These are my 4 palettes I selected for Fast Food level graphics. As you can see, first and second colors are all busy with black for outlines and pink for background. I had to select the rest very wisely to make it possible to create proper giant burger graphics which is the first mandatory thing for such a theme and still useful for other possible elements. Sadly I ended up having no palette with red and yellow being together which created a lot of problems but, oh well.
With 16x16 grid applied you can see how these selected palettes are used without crossing each other and yet everything looks natural, my main goal was to make such graphics for burger layers so I can play around with them and make different burgers of different height and configuration.

Then I made all kinds of fast food stuff with these palettes. Small hot dog, giant hot dog, giant burger opposed to small burger, small fries and giant fries, chicken nuggets, giant corndogs, bacon strips, bottles of ketchup and mustard, drippy ketchup platforms, tall glasses and bottles of soda, straws that can form all kinds of curves to be used as platforms and so on.

Of course it all was too much for just one tileset of 256 tiles, all these level asset images are more like just draw piles, compilations of everything I came up with but not all of this can be included. Although I still wanted to use at least a major part of my assets.
Solution I came up with was simple: it can be broken into two sections. The same thing was done in NES Barbie game which actually has restaurant level with giant food as well. Yeah, it looks pretty similar to what I did, especially given the pink background, but I tried to make everything in my own tileset as unique as possible.
The restaurant level in Barbie was broken into two sections, each with its own tileset, technically it's like two separate levels.To prove it for myself and make sure it's not two levels using one tileset I gathered all materials each level uses, run it through tileset maker and saw that drinks section used tileset capacity to its maximum, it's exactly 256 tiles, the food section is pretty close, 246 out of 256. So I thought it can be done in my case as well.

I divided my materials in two parts, one with smaller food and one with giant food, I came up with this idea just by accident because I wanted to make a really giant burger to climb like a mountain but then I thought why not make more gigantic food as well? Later this random idea became a leitmotif for other levels.And so, this way I managed to balance everything out with each tileset staying within the limit!


As you can see I created some enemy graphics as well. Not all of them are unique for Fast Food level but some of them are. There's a dog-like bottle of ketchup, a dog-like mustard monster (with a color swap for ketchup monster), a live onion, beet, bag of fries and flying jaws. I did some simple animations for every each of them, keeping NES sprite graphics rules in mind as well.

But really interesting things began when I started thinking about boss graphics! So far, it all was cute and innocent, both level and enemy graphics, it's too hard for me to decide how to implement kinky fat stuff into game mechanics, at least within NES limitations which don't allow a lot of stuff like big enemies, long animations and complex game mechanics, but I decided to compensate it with boss graphics to make it a reminder that the actual premise here is weight gain fetish and hunting for greasy unhealthy treasures that have to be kept by somebody fitting the concept. NES loved HUGE tile-based bosses a lot and game artists were focusing most of their creativity on them to impress the player so I thought it's a good opportunity to shoehorn something more suggestive here.

As a result, I created a burger-hotdog character which is supposed to be much higher than one screen.

So he should look like this when approached at first. The idea is you have to climb up using flying layers of the burger as platforms and fence off flying enemies before reaching the boss's head and fight it, also in a middle of your climb you have to fight his belly button which looks like a meatball sticking out of the largest patty. The ideas are similar to some of the games I love, the boss with scrolling layers you have to use as platforms can be seen in Mega Man 5.And fighting a belly button reminded me of a weird first boss from Adventure Island II where you fight some... Weird pulsating bulge of a tree or something.

The suggestiveness of this burger boss is pretty tame, just a bit too tasteful looking feet, an unhealthy accent on belly button and big fat mantits with nipples, nothing really openly kinky but still something you'd never see in a real official NES game, especially mantits and nipples.

(but of course I had to give him a dick just for fun)

Anyway, it was a pretty nice boss concept, I always wanted to create a sexy character made of food and here we are. Funnily, while making his concept I was actually thinking "I can already imagine furries drawing horny art of him if this game would ever become real. But who am I kidding, it will take a hundred years for me to get into an actual developing and make it a real game, let alone for anybody to make any fan art of it." and here we can finally talk about this collab with Bob (the one known as Extra Sized Bob) because as you can see my thoughts were actually WRONG to my big surprise.

I'm a member of one very small friendly chat with just 5 members including me and Bob, this is the only place where I shared all these concepts before Patreon and Bob was SO much impressed by this guy he drew him THE SAME DAY I showed the concepts! I was completely astonished and flattered, it's Bob after all, and I didn't expect at all that the very green buds of my game concepts can already inspire anybody to make an actual fan art. And of course I had to color it.The colored version was already shown above in a post but here's comparison of Bob's original sketch and my colored version. Can't call myself a real professional at digital coloring but I tried my best, I think it looks good.

Not sure if any other boss concepts will inspire him or anybody else just as much but one drawing is already enough to make me happy.

The next thing I did was boss graphics again, without making any level tilesets I went head first into drawing boss for Frozen Food level with Fast Food boss setting the standard for the rest, they all have to be fat, mildly suggestive, well drawn and HUGE. I was pondering different ideas, obviously all ice cream related, until I made this:This time the boss is not higher or wider than one screen but he surely takes as much space as possible! Mainly thanks to a lot of empty white tiles and repeating drips used for his body. The boss fits the limit of 256 unique tiles but to be honest he can use more because I decided to do one trick here which was very common in NES games.
The screen can be split horizontally on multiple zones, their background graphics can't cross each other vertically but each one can scroll individually, use its own tileset and its own palettes and you can make it look like one whole seamless picture if you want.

Going back to NES Barbie and my experiment with tileset analysis, you can see that on screenshots the game has status bar on bottom with complex elements made of background tileset graphics. But how could it be done if fast food level tilesets are stuffed to maximum capacity? That's an example of using screen splitting. Status bar uses its own individual tileset and level graphics have their own, many NES games do so, that's why status bars are never vertical unless it's something simple like Tetris or Dr. Mario.But speaking of seamless picture, this is how many NES bosses were done. One NES screen consists of 960 tiles, so 256 is about 3.7 part of the screen. If you look at images above, especially the top left one, you can clearly notice few things: 1. the boss clearly takes about 1/3 of the screen so it probably has its own fully used tileset and yet there's still other graphics on the screen 2. the boss has its own 4 palettes while the rest of the background uses different colors 3. it's pretty obvious that the boss exists in its own horizontal plane devoid of any other graphics and doesn't cross the border with other planes even though the artist tries to blend it all together and make an illusion, the bosses in these cases are all either stationary or scroll horizontally.

These are the signs of the screen being split to make such bosses possible. So this is how I decided to pick one extra palette for the boss with the glass bowl and ice cubes using their own white-blue palette which was a part of the boss first. The freed space was used for the red green palette so I can make the syrup red instead of pink and add green sprinkles for a variety. The cherry in his belly button is supposed to be a sprite and share the same palette as Mark.

All the technical aspects aside, I love the final look of the boss, he looks sexy, original, combines different types of ice cream such as ice cream sundae, "shaved ice" and classic three balls in a bowl in one decadent mix and I loved the idea of three heads sharing the same body like Cerberus.
Then I tried to make assets for the Asian Food level, with all my love for Japanese culture I just had to do it, especially since there's actually not that many food themes to use in a game.

I'm not gonna blabber too much this time, all the technical aspects of NES were already explained, you can see the palettes I used in a top left corner, it's clear that I used the same idea of all the food assets having larger counterparts for the second section, I also drew a funny dog-faced octopus so you can already tell that my canine obsession is another leitmotif here, his tentacles are supposed to be used as ladders but the octopus himself is a background graphics based enemy, all stationary big enemies in NES games use background tileset instead of sprites, not only bosses.

The only thing I need to clarify is that weird stick legged eggplant and cucumber are traditional food decorations used for Japanese Obon holiday which main tradition is to remember the relatives who passed away, eggplant and cucumber represent sky cow and horse which carry human souls to heavens.
Sounds maybe too sophisticated to use in a game like this but the thing is the first time I saw stick legged eggplant is Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3 NES game (a part of Kid Nikki series) where it was a regular enemy (in fact it was a bootleg Mario hack on a Dendy cartridge, original Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3 was never released outside of Japan). As a kid I didn't know about Obon ritual or that eggplants can have purple leaves, topped with weird NES graphics I simply didn't know what the hell is that thing, I couldn't even see that it's an eggplant. Later I learned about it, even saw this eggplant in a different game, Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius which had a very Japanese themed level.

So, this is a homage to both Japanese culture and my NES childhood nostalgia.

You may also notice that many assets I drew are very boxy looking and not very organic, they're either straight or horizontal. Well, it's because of another sad thing about NES, you can't set a terrain with complex relief as the character can walk only horizontally or at strictly 45 degree diagonal slopes, this way making rounded reliefs, curved platforms and so on is impossible in a strictly side view 2D platformer. If you see any rounded elements in my assets like the bowls or bottles then it means the character is not supposed to walk on these parts. There is some visual tricks you can use to trick the player but not in this style I chose for myself. NES is all about limitations and things looking not the way they should, and I wanted to challenge myself with these rules fully.

The Frozen Food level assets is still a work in progress for now, I did only some ice blocks, different types of ice cream, frozen vegetables and frozen chicken. Frozen food is not very varied and not very high calorie, it's all done mainly for the sake of ice cream and dreaded ice level trope that everybody hate for slippery ground mechanic but it's a classic trope of video games and I just had to add it. I'll try to make it as varied as possible and add more frozen meat, fish and vegetables later.

That's all for now. Sexy boss characters and Bob collab art were a good excuse to share all this stuff, otherwise I'd feel a bit embarrassed to make such a big post about something that has no relation to my horny art at all but as I said I was quite passionate about all this stuff lately and it was a nice warm up to get myself back in a working mood, maybe too much for just a warm up but, whatever.
I don't know what will be done with those concepts in future and why am I working on this with so much enthusiasm while having no team or programming skills, I don't know why I made all those Volk game concepts and dropped it (still not completely though), I don't know why I started these new ones, maybe I'm just not loosing hope for better future days when I find more enthusiastic people who can help me or just time to acquire new skills myself but for now I just enjoy the process itself of making this stuff with this hope and I hope you find it at least somewhat enjoyable as well.
I also hope it wasn't too long and too boring. I know some people enjoy learning about the process of making something they're interested in like art or video games but I always think that I go too much overboard with my mind flows. If you managed to reach the end of this article then thank you for your patience and your attention, if not then it's all fine and I hope you enjoyed the visual part at least which is the main part after all.