I was doing a lot of random stuff inbetween so now when the commission is done and January is almost over I thought it's a good time to share it all in one bunch.First of all, going back to my last pixel art post, I did a bit more assets for the moai tileset. As I already said before, this location was supposed to be a wild mix of different ancient cultures including Easter Island and I thought it needs some "averagely ethnic" assets which don't resemble any particular culture and can work well to blend more recognizable elements such as Aztec, Egypt or Easter Island ones together. This is how I made those temple textures. It's still just a rough sample but it already looks pretty good. Also now when Fast Food and Frozen Food world level layout samples are done I couldn't resist the urge to do the same with Asian Food world. It was very fun and honestly much easier to deal with although there still was some extra work I had to do, mainly because I suddenly got myself almost 30 free tiles while turning my assets into tilesets, there just was too much repetitive elements taking up space and cleaning it up gave me an opportunity to fill it up with something new. That's why now first Asian Food world tileset now also has temaki (cone shaped sushi) and baran grass (those plastic dividers for sushi rows) and second tileset now has classic gourd bottles. I also made one of the enemies more complex, it was once just a snail-like upside down bowl of rice but now there's also a sprite of it rising into a pillar of rice with a face, you can see it on one of the screenshots.Now I can work on Snack world assets but I feel like I need to put it off for a while, enough of distractions for me. Next I did an Earthbound battle styled piece for Esher, it's already posted on his telegram channel but not on my public pages. It was just a sudden random urge which I ended up investing too much time and effort into. I just liked the idea of Esher having such an inconsistent and ever changing design being turned into a character's feature, I love to imagine it being a part of his nature as if he is a shape shifter of some sort with his patterns, colors and shapes constantly changing. Pushing this idea further, I thought it would be fun to see different variations of Esher coexisting together as a weird symbiote like amalgamation.Initially I wanted to make just a regular full screen artwork but then I realized it starts to look as an RPG enemy even though their designs on NES are usually much smaller but it's not like such concepts are impossible, I managed to run it on emulator after all, it's just one of those things NES didn't take an opportunity to try in the end of its lifespan but it could.
So, adding the GUI forced me to sacrifice 25% of the tileset and make the Esher image smaller but it still looks very fun!
A lot of sprites were added here to deal with red details because I already had to use white, black, dark cyan and greenish yellow background palette and the level of detail was too precise to add red elements without screwing up yellow and white face features so it had to be done with sprite overlay. Barely managed to fit it though, there's too many red parts and you know NES can't display more than 8 sprites on one horizontal line without flickering. Thank god I could do at least one bit of a leftmost head with background tiles because this one particular area didn't use white so I could replace it with red, otherwise it would be quite a trouble to solve.
Actually I could do it more accurate to Esher's original colors since NES obviously has gray tones and a more yellowish yellow but I just wanted to be more fancy since NES is known for being very creative with colors and this color scheme just fits the ominous vibe much better.And the last thing I did is just another very random little thing which however made me feel proud of myself.I remembered about Astro, one of my later OCs I love so much but didn't pay much attention compared to Zed, Mark or at least Jack and decided to put my NES skills to the test by making a proper NES sprite for him, I mean as detailed as possible, easily readable even with CRT TV distortions and yet rational and minimalistic enough to not make it any problem if you imagine it as an actual game sprite which is supposed to exist with other sprites within strict NES limits. This is a tough task because Astro is a very colorful character and it's very hard to limit it to just three colors. Somehow, such limitations work out much better and feel way more natural with Zed and Mark.
In fact, I already tried to do Astro sprite long time ago but it was kinda meh. It's okay by NES standards, especially considering how small this sprite is and could be used for something simple but still I know it could be way better than this. So I gave it a better try and I think I made the best sprite possible, at least from a rational perspective.There's two things I took to consideration:1. I was too inclined to making sprites with black outlines. Indeed, it was the safest route on NES since it's the easiest way to make the character stand out visually without blending with the background. But in the other hand a plenty of NES sprites didn't use black or at least very little of it just for details and not outlines.
There's a plenty of examples actually but I'll name just few. Adventure Island, Kid Nikki, Mario Bros, A Boy and His Blob, Barbie, Goonies, Konami Wai Wai World and Gremlins 2. I especially love Kid Nikki soft and colorful style which barely uses black at all including level design too.It was a common style and developers weren't afraid that the character would blend with the scenery, you just had to keep in mind that you shouldn't use the same colors as the main character for the background which is not that hard. And you still can use it for solid obstacles which the character can't get in front of anyway.So, since it didn't feel like a risky move anymore I decided to tell black color and outlines to fuck off and use the palette for more important colors in Astro's palette.2. The other thing I thought would work nice here is an overlay sprite mask.It's a wise trick used by some more advanced NES games like Battletoads, Mega Man, Darkwing Duck or Duck Tales.You see, NES can display only 4 sprite palettes simultaneously, each one is three colors + transparency. Since your main character is constantly onscreen, the palettes you chose for him get simply locked and can't be switched whenever you want which limits the choice of palettes of enemies that can appear on the same screen with you. Due to this issue, developers usually tried to stick with just one palette for the main character but some weren't afraid to do a little sacrifice to make main character more detailed.
Battletoads used black-darkgreen-green palette for the body and darkyellow-yellow-white for the face and eyes sprite overlay, hence why you could see so many green and yellow enemies in a game. The same with Mega Man which used black-blue-cyan palette for the body and black-beige-white for the face.Darkwing Duck sprite and Scrooge sprite from Duck Tales however are probably the most intricate and wasteful sprites I ever saw on NES.You see, Darkwing Duck uses two palettes, black-violet-yellow and black-yellow-white but since one 8x8 sprite tile can use only one palette and there's a couple of spots which require all 4 colors at once they had to add two extra sprites just for these tiny bits of pixels for his hand and mask. Scrooge sprite is even crazier. It uses whole THREE palettes at once, I never saw sprites using that many before and it's not even that noticeable as Scrooge is not super colorful. One palette for the legs, one for the suit and one for the overlay sprite with beak and eyes. It simply left no wiggle room as it means that any enemy on screen could use either yellow palette, red, the weird yellow-blue-black one or the only free palette that could be changed anytime. And obviously the weird beak palette was barely used, they simply sacrificed it to give Scrooge that little detail.
With all that being said, I thought Astro fits for using the same technique. His sprite is very thin so adding an extra one for overlay won't hurt much (you know, having more than 8 sprites on one line makes them flicker) as well as using two pretty colorful and useful palettes which are easy to use for enemies unlike the weird Scrooge beak and eyes palette, so it felt like a rational decision.
And he looks pretty good even with CRT TV filter, just the way I wanted! Not to mention, Mesen's CRT TV filter is actually still quite imperfect so it can look even less blurry on a real CRT.Empowered by my success I couldn't help but make a couple animations you saw above in the end of the image list, the walk cycle and naughty victory stand with him shaking and spinning his dick around. Also did a couple of still sprites with him kicking and belching, exaggerated big foot and mouth can be considered a nod to Battletoads of some sort. But that's where I told myself to stop. Having two parallel projects on my shoulders is already quite a burden, not to mention the drafts I have for this other concept with a human guy in a Zed world I shared long time ago, adding stuff with Astro on top of it would be ridiculous. It was a nice little practice but lets just leave it as it is for now. I think I shared everything I wanted. If you want to have fun with emulation testing and filters then you can download the archive below, it has all rom files for all the stuff shared here.