I tried to focus mainly on McCloud sequence recently so it's not like I have a butt load of new game project stuff this time but still I was distracting myself with some stuff a bit and finally unleashed some long drawn ideas.First of all, I finally made a concept for the Sweets world boss. The idea of a character with a fat muffin body, eclair snout and cotton candy hair who walks on several candy cane legs kinda like a spider was in my head for a veeeeery long time and I made it pretty much the way I imagined it the first time. Well, at first I was very tempted to use a classic multi-tiered cake for his body but again I got stuck thinking that cylindrical shapes are not sexy enough and I was very glad to be hit by this idea to use a muffin instead. It also became a very nice literal play on the "muffin top" term and I decided to emphasize it even more by calling this boss Muffintop Tom, I think this cheesy name fits him well. The only tiny issue is that I'm always aiming at the 90s culture with my works while "muffin top" as a term for overhanging belly fat was born only in the 00s but who cares, games like these would never be allowed in the actual 90s so it can be considered an alternative timeline stuff anyway with alternative 90s where muffin top term already existed and games about sexy fat furries could exist as well. Another idea I worked on is related to the Snack world boss
If you remember my old concepts you should also remember my idea of making John Beer's body a swimming section of the level that you enter from below after witnessing an armrest of the giant couch he is sitting on. The big gripe I had here is that his body design felt kinda too simple compared to other bosses, just a giant yellow blob of beer and this section REALLY needed some variety to make it vivid. Thinking about how his body design can be done more interesting I thought that it would be good to cover his body in numerous snack wraps, crumbs, food bits, stains and all the other stuff that helps to emphasize the image of a snack addicted couch potato of a slob that this guy is.And it also felt like a good game mechanic idea that would shake up the swimming section a bit with some obstacles. NES actually allows to show sprites behind background graphics with some limitations, the main idea is that you have several 4-color background palettes where only one color, key color, acts like an actual background color while the rest of background stuff drawn with other colors acts like things that cover the sprites. I used this idea by chosing yellow as a background color and drawing bubbles and all the trash with other colors so it creates an illusion of looking at the boss's body surface with all the stuff stuck to it and getting in a way of your view while your character is seen underneath the littered surface swimming INSIDE the body, as well as the enemies. You can see it not only on screenshots but also in attached video! Yeah, I thought this time it's necessary to record it. And no, I still haven't started recreating the actual gameplay mechanics for now, I'm still just drawing concepts in Gimp and converting it into NES motionless images devoid of any interactivity in NAW, it's just that little bonus this program has. Yes, it's more like just a graphical editor which works with NES limitations and allows to convert your stuff into NES roms and if you launch it on emulator it will be just a still image BUT if you press arrows or whatever keys you set as D-pad controls you can scroll the scenery! It's mostly useless but here it really came in handy to show off the background effect a bit better so I thought it's better to record it. But you can also try it yourself by running Snack World 9.nes file on any NES emulator.-------------------------------------------------------------------------There's also some good news in a NES dev world which made me a bit less anxious about the future of my ambitious projects. Just to recap some things, there exists the only good engine which allows to develop actual real NES games without coding called NES Maker. But "without coding" is quite an overstatement as the basic built-in tools of the program were very limited allowing you to make only a very simple game. Everything special above it still required a big knowledge of Assembly 6502, an outdated old programming language NES games were made with.And by special I mean.... Well, I can't call myself very pretentious as I just wanted a very simple platformer about a guy who jumps and shoots there's one thing which was an everyone's most hated problem of NES Maker which you'd expect to be one of the most basic aspects. 4-dimensional scrolling. Yeah, it's too complicated to explain but technically it's difficult for NES to scroll in every dimension like some games did, hence why many early NES games were either one static screen or horizontally scrolling only like Super Mario Bros. And yes, this is how NES Maker platformers were. Making a platformer game that scrolls only horizontally in 2020s feels wild in a sad way and I imaged my food levels to be more overwhelming and labyrinth like, basic horizontal scrolling just doesn't work here. It can be done, indie devs still make NES games and sometimes they have 4-way scrolling but, again, it's made with SMART people who knows well how to work with it and the problem is that I have no idea how can I cooperate with such people and ask for help considering how weird and kinky my ideas are and looking for such people among furries is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But things have changed. 8-bit Heroes (the team behind NES Maker) made an announcement in 2024 that instead of updating NES Maker they plan to develop an entirely new engine called Retro Game Forge which will support not only NES but also SNES and Sega Genesis! And of course a lot of improvements in NES development was promised. 2 years passed and there were VERY little updates. So little it was actually concerning, until just recently when they uploaded a very big update video on YouTube with all the awesome new features described in detail.https://youtu.be/cbDLLw0U7EYAnd guess what, yes, besides all cool things I'm excited about as well they showed off the so much thought after 4-way scrolling! THIS is a HUGE game changer for me, I gave up NES Maker for this reason but now I'm looking forward for Retro Game Forge. With it I think I won't actually need to look for a programmer (at least for this project) as everything I need is now integrated in a tool. Retro Game Forge is still not out yet but it seems like it's VERY close and now I have no doubts that it's gonna be awesome. Hopefully it won't take long and I'll finally start working on actually bringing my design concepts to life. That's all I wanted to share. Sorry for lots of nerdy talking, it's always hard for me to keep my thoughts short when it comes to stuff like this. I hope you enjoyed the big fat muffin guy at least! Now I have almost all the bosses for this project and it's only up for the last one for the final world.