New NES project materials (Patreon)

Sadly I didn't manage to finish part 3 of Oguma x Louis sequence before August, it's currently in progress but since it's the last day of July I thought I need to share some other already finished stuff I was working on lately before the month ends.I kept working actively on my project and made a big progress with the final world, I did pretty much everything required for it and most importantly the final boss design. As you remember, my game project featured 5 food themed worlds, Fast Food World, Frozen Food World, Asian Food World, Snacks World and Sweets World, and there was supposed to be the 6th final world which is the very culmination of the overall hedonistic and excessive feel of the entire game called just Fat World made of everything fat and high calorie with the main mass of it being lard and also different kinds of meat, cheese and pasta. And pizza, mostly just because I didn't have enough space for it in a Fast Food world tileset.I chose black color for its background to make it stand out compared to other worlds which all used bright colors, this way final world looks creepier and more intimidating.

And of course there's new enemy sprites exclusive for this world, I love the pizza especially. However, all sprites shown on a black background better not be displayed on top of anything else because they use background color for black detail which is technically sprite transparency, it works fine when there's black on the back but if it's something else then it will be like that (shown below)

NES games actually had similarly made sprites and devs often ignored silly moments like this but of course only when it's not that obvious, still it was preferable to keep such sprites within restricted field where background couldn't ruin the illusion

But let's get to the main treat, the final boss. After all the previous epic boss concepts where characters were taking an entire screen I thought it needs something truly ginormous and astounding to top it all off. Again, I had boss design idea ready in my head for quite a while but actually bringing it to life was a completely different thing. I thought that entire final boss's body can be just one big level where the player should climb up until he reaches the head which is technically the real boss.

To build the body I dedicated half of the tileset to all kinds of diagonals and gradients so I can make any smooth curves I might need. As you can tell, it's made of the white stuff which makes the Fat World itself and the boss also has numerous meatballs, sausages and macaroni stuck to his body. The idea is that you start at his left foot (and yeah, he got some sexy feet), go all the way to the right and only there you can find a meatball low enough to jump on and then proceed higher up where you should jump to the left on sausages and meatballs where you can climb on top of boss's belly, fight off his hand which is sorta like a mid boss, then climb up his chest and reach the head.Note that meatballs and sausages placement on the "map" is not accurate and doesn't represent the actual level layout, it doesn't make much sense right now and I'd imagine it as something less repetitive and more intricate. For now it's too early to think about planing the actual level layout, all my previous layout samples were more just proofs of concept as well intended to just show all background assets in 8 scenes for each world, here I just took one scene and copy pasted it multiple times to fill his body without wasting too much time on it.

The head also uses a lot of the stage graphics, all these diagonals and gradients are very useful for drawing anything you want, and only quarter of the tileset has extra content required for this boss such as eyes, teeth etc.Needless to say, I'm very proud of how his design turned out, I made him as sexy as I imagined him in my head for months, Tex Avery character design at its finest. The only difference is his body design, at first I wanted to make his limbs fat and puffy just like in case with other boss designs but then I switched to my beloved thin limbs to make this boss even more different from others and also I thought it's even more interesting conceptually. Previous bosses were fat all over, fatness like this is associated with satiety and those who always have food in excess and don't know what hunger is. And respectively skinniness is associated with hunger and having not enough food to sate yourself. Those previous bosses are those who reached their plateau of hedonism and know what it's like to be sated. This guy is above that. He is an embodiment of a hunger so strong that it can never be fully sated, his hedonism just has no end or limit and his body which has both fat and skinny aspects emphasizes it well. I think it's a good image for a final boss. The last thing to mention is that I already have a name for him, I came up with it long time ago along with his image, it's Lardy Larry. Of all 6 bosses currently 5 of them have names except Frozen Food World boss, I still can't come up with anything catchy enough.At this point, my work on graphics for all 6 worlds is finally over, all I have left to do for this project is various additional stuff like game over screen, title screen, cutscenes etc. And of course wait patiently for Retro Game Forge to be released so I can finally start putting it all together into a functioning game.That's all for July but new part of Oguma x Louis sequence won't keep yourself waiting long.