(I swear I'm not trying to start a new parallel project)I was having some fun with Astro after I made his sprite shared in a previous pixel art post. There I mentioned how his design was inspired by those NES sprites which didn't use any outlines or black color and after I did this sprite I also decided to try challenging myself to make level layout the same way with no black at all. It really proved how much of a convenient color black is when it comes to NES graphics since doing realistic stuff without it felt much harder. The pink sky jungle was my first attempt (shoved it in the end here just because it looks less interesting) and it looks more like some very early NES game with its primitive style although I'm not gonna lie I kinda aimed for this feel intentionally.
And I have to say it was simply a very half-assed weak attempt as I barely even used the tileset space as you can see. Well, it still was fun to do, as well as this little UFO that uses the same palette as Astro's face details. Also I had some fun designing new custom font of my own, I already did that dynamic wiggly font for my main project (which I also used for my recent RPG-styled Esher pixel art) and now I tried to do something even wackier and designed a ransom note styled font, tried it right on the layout sample. I think it turned out nice.But regardless of whether this primitive early platformer style was intentional or not, I still wanted to see if I can do something really high quality with such limitations so few days later I made a much more effortful attempt with way more impressive results.Just like during my first attempt, I wanted to do something very dynamic, very 90s in its absurd, surreal and comical nature which fits Astro (well, pretty much all my OCs in fact) and following the challenge of using as less black as possible except where it's really required.What you see here is more just random sheets of assets although I still tried to arrange it in a more appealing way so it's kinda somewhere on the verge of layout design as well.Considering strict limitations of the NES, it's very difficult to translate this dynamic and lively feel into level assets and there's very little games which managed to emulate it, even goddamn Wackyland which was almost straight up based on Salvador Dali-esque surrealism looked anything but creative in a Tiny Toon Adventures game. The same can be said about Roger Rabbit or Cool World, these are some of the wackiest movies where the tooniness was the core idea but there's zero such feel in their NES adaptations.
Despite being a generally frustrating and flawed game, I'd say Ren & Stimpy nailed that 90s insanity in its level design pretty well actually and this is what I was aiming for as well, just more refined. Linus Spacehead had surprisingly dynamic 90s vibe as well and there's also a greatly refined hack of an old 90s bootleg NES port of Earthworm Jim which proved that detailed dynamic visuals are actually possible on this console.
I guess it's a bit simpler to do when you don't have to care about designing landscape stuff that shoud give you a feeling of depth, scale, perspective, foreground and background etc., just a bunch of random objects floating in a colorful void but why not. And as you can see I really used this tileset to the max and fit pretty much a lot in it. Again, I'm trying to not tempt myself to turn it into something bigger, just having some creativity practice with random little things and giving my characters some life to live. This soft colorful feel of what I did here is very different from the style I used for my main projects which heavily relied on black like most NES games and it was fun to try out, not to mention some playing with perspective after working on more flat and stylized 2D platformer stuff all the time.