Wanted to post it right after Stretch-O-Mutt commission but it was 3:30am already and I decided to put it off for today. Finally going back to my main game project again! Didn't give it much attention in a while, first because I got distracted with other random NES ideas and then because of a very busy March where all my NES pixel art creativity went into 4skin Day art book and other things. So, here's all the stuff I made recently in parallel with the comm piece. It's not much but still. If you remember my latest updates on this project you'll recognize most of the stuff here. A majority of Snack World materials was already made long time ago, it was just a matter of polishing it all and assembling into level layout samples for future public posts. There's just some new things here and there like:- Pink stripes of gum. Gum is not quite a snack but I can't call it a regular sweets either but considering it's something we chew mindlessly I thought it kinda goes well with the lazy nature of home snacks.- Peanut butter toasts. The most high calorie snack of all, how could I ignore!- Onion rings are now sentient enemies with eyes (they didn't have eyes at first and were supposed to be just a tumbling barrel-type of obstacle)- Beer bottles and cans graphics got more refined- Beef jerky stripes as ropes for climbing.- Colored O-cereals as regular background obstacle After this I decided to do something with way less refined Sweets World which still had a ton of free space left to fill with assets. It's a bit too early to make complete layout samples with it and it's gonna take me a while since I need to focus on McCloud porn right now so for now I'll just list all the new stuff I did.
The fragment on the right shows all new assets which were added to the old ones I did long time ago.As you can see, I drew Belgian waffles, pancakes (although I'll probably make them two times thicker to match overall scale), good old American candy corn, yule log and most importantly a whole gingerbread house which I invested the most effort into. As always, the goal was to waste as less tiles as possible yet make it look complex, detailed and interesting, I think I succeeded here. I also fixed the licorice spiral graphics, I wanted to just cancel this idea because I didn't like that it's square and had no idea how to make it more round without wasting too many tiles but on the other hand the tileset would benefit from a black accent that it lacked and I just like licorice so I'm glad I found a way to fix it.I also finally started drawing boss concept for the Sweets world and did a pretty good head desigh already but that's where I drew the line because, again, there's a lot of art plans behind pixel art for me to think about right now. I'll show the boss concept once it's 100% complete. The last thing I want to share is that I finally came up with the name for the Asian Food world boss, I want to call him Emperor Yakimaki. I wanted the name to sound good yet simple while reflecting character's nature in a bit silly stereotypical way and this was a tricky task I couldn't figure ever since I drew the concept.Both yaki and maki are common words in Japanese cuisine as yaki means fried and maki means to roll and you can see them in words like teriyaki, taiyaki, ikayaki, yakizushi, makizushi, temaki, futomaki etc. At first I wanted to call him Makimon where mon is a common archaic male name suffix seen in names like Doraemon, Goemon or Danzaemon but then I came up with Yakimaki and thought it sounds even better.However, I googled it and realized that both names are not entirely original. Somebody already made a Digimon OC named Makimon which is a lizard sushi hybrid and there's a TON of small business Japanese cuisine restaurants around the globe named Yakimaki with the most known one being in Sri Lanka (and there's also one Russian restaurant where all grilled rolls in their menu are called Yakimaki something). It was expected but I decided to just embrace it. Many toony things play around old tropes and things that are so generic they become classic, it's always about balancing between being cliche and being original when it comes to stereotypes and spoofs. Yakimaki is pretty much like this American "Eat at Joe's" trope. And after all, who cares about all these small restaurants called Yakimaki which come and go while a sexy dragon character called Yakimaki has way more chances to be more remembered.That's all the updates, for now I want to finally watch Super Mario Galaxy movie and start doing bad things to McCloud.