New food boss + new assets

Promised new little portion of pixel art before going fully focused on urgent June plans.

I keep playing around with my game fantasies and now I started working on Snack Level assets. The level tileset is still pretty raw and needs more stuff to be added but what I can clearly call finished is the boss design.

As you can see, I decided to betray my canine obsession and make one of the bosses a deer instead of a dog. It all just fit way too well, the idea of beer and snacks being a classic match, "beer deer" making a good silly rhyme and deer being associated with American hunters who are usually depicted as simple men commonly prone to passive sedentary rest at home with beer-and-snacks being their common diet, so it all came together.

This time it was a bit tougher task to bring all the snack food together and combine it in a character design. Fast food and ice cream are visually rich so it's easy to make interesting characters by using just burger and hot dog for example. Snacks are small, simple and usually stand out mainly by a bright package and the biggest problem is that it's tough to make a big sexy massive body out of something small. I thought about a bag of potato chips as the most classic type of unhealthy snack being the body but wasn't sure about it as I wanted something soft. Then the thought about beer-and-snacks connection crossed my mind and I decided that the body made of beer is the best idea imaginable here.

Deer head made of chocolate bar and donuts was easier to make even though it went through some transformations, like the idea of making his horns and nose made of cheese puffs which came much later, and fitting it all into NES color limitations was a bit tricky. In the end I felt very satisfied with the final result and loved new guy a lot. His body is a bit too simple, if I had freedom to draw him the way I want I'd add lots of different snacks and empty wraps stuck to his body to highlight his slobbiness and create more color accents, maybe also chest hair imitated with popcorn (pubic bush as well for nsfw version) but with all the NES limitations its almost impossible to recreate, I already wasted an entire tileset on different parts of his body and now it's time to actually talk about it.

Since I came up with an idea of a boss who has liquid body I thought it would be a fun mechanic to literally swim inside of it and make it a part of the stage, similar to how I imagined burger boss making you climb up his tall body first before reaching his head but this time I went really far.

So far I never tried to recreate a level layout with my assets but here it was really necessary to properly visualize my idea and show what I mean.

As you remember, I had an idea of each food world consisting of two levels where the second one has nearly the same food as the first one but very huge, and you see snack level is no exception but now it also has some additional graphics required for this idea. I tried to cut it as much as possible, making beer deer's body visible juuuust enough to understand what it is to use less unique tiles, I saved on couch graphics as much as I can but still I ran out of the tileset space pretty quickly.

What you see here are all the materials intended for level 2 and they already take 247 tiles out of possible 256, I have only 9 tiles left, idk what to use it for, maybe I'll remove a toast with jam and keep it only for level 1, it takes whole 30 tiles which could be used for something else in level 2. But anyway, I think it's still a good set to make an interesting layout with and the whole idea of swimming inside gigantic beer belly definitely worth the sacrifice.

I already shared a sequence of 5 images recreating a possible level layout and showing how Mark is supposed to reach the beer deer's belly and enter the swimming part but here's also a full map showing it better. The belly might look a bit odd on a full map but it was common in games as such things were not supposed to be seen as a whole and it feels right only when perceived screen by screen, this is why I made those recreations as 5 images with original NES resolution to make it look as close to real game as possible.


And yeah, I even made boss image animated to show everything better and now Mark has animated swimming sprite as well.


Besides I also made few more enemies. A couple unique enemies for Frozen Food level and a bubble enemy which can be turned into either beer bubble for snack level of gum bubble for upcoming sweets level with a simple palette swap.

That's all for now. It's pretty satisfying to work on these concepts, even if I'm not making a real game right now the process of making all these materials inspires me for some really nice character ideas which I'm definitely gonna use in future outside game concepts and pixel art, these characters look a bit different from my main OC style but they already feel like a part of my universe so they definitely deserve their background to be expanded. But currently I need to distance from all this stuff and focus on June art plans. There's a lot of good stuff I wanna draw and I'm sure you're gonna like it.