New NES boss concept art

Decided to post this to fill the silence in-between, I'm currently working on new commission art in parallel with all the pixel art stuff but it will take few more days to finish.

This is something I actually wanted my previous pixel art post to have for balance, a good portion of more kinky ideas for you to enjoy.
After getting so much sidetracked with concepts not related to my main project I thought it would be better to go back and get rid of the guilt for not paying attention to what I rather should focus on (although the real thing I should actually focus on more is regular drawing) and felt like it's time to finally let out one very old idea I had in mind for one of the bosses.

Even before scalie species appreciation became more common for me I always thought eastern dragons like Mushu are sexy because they look a bit more mammal-like with all the fur and big noses. However, I still haven't done them almost at all but working on that project I realized I have a good chance to indulge on this a bit and create a very fitting eastern dragon boss for the Asian Food World.

The main idea formed in my head a couple months ago, a big character made of rice, dressed in a black kimono kinda like black nori used for sushi and onigiri rice cakes, riding a big bowl on sushi wheels and wielding a fan. Other minor elements like nipples and navel looking like sushi stuffing, noodle hair, salmon nose, tempura shrimp eyebrows and tail also looking like a shrimp came just recently while the drawing process itself.
I also wanted to give him eyes made of sushi but at this point black sunglasses became a staple of all bosses in this project, you know, live food in sunglasses is a common cliche of stock food advertising images, so I decided to keep it consistent.


Drawing him was pretty easy since he uses a plenty of empty black tiles and repetitive rice texture, so I had the luxury to work on his design freely without thinking about tile limit too much, even though it started getting a little bit hard at the end and I still ended up filling the entire full set of 256 unique tiles as you can see. The final result felt super satisfying and even better than I imagined, I'm glad I have a sexy dragon character now too.

Speaking more about mechanic concepts, another idea in question was to either make him immovable but riding back and forth on the bowl or make him jump in this classic expressive Kabuki theater pose, if you know Naruto you probably remember Jiraiya striking this pose all the time, jumping on one foot with one arm stretched forward and fingers spread. It would be a neat mechanic and jumping giant bosses weren't that uncommon in NES games, I remember it was pretty scary for me as a kid to see giant Mr Kong boss from Rockin Kats JUMPING.


But moving back and forth is a no less dynamical mechanic and all my bosses are too fat to move so I stuck with the bowl idea.

The idea of giant bosses moving back and forth is common as well and one boss which is the most close to what I imagined here is Technodrome from TMNT. This boss is HUGE and technically his graphics take one full NES screen and even a bit more, just like my concept, but he is constantly scrolling and you rarely see it full. Another similarity is that you can stand on top of Technodrome's chain track and so did I imagine for the bowl being safe to stand.

So I tried to make a quick recreation of a battle mechanic concept and I'd say it should rather look more like this, the boss could be appearing on screen fully, otherwise why else would I waste graphics on his back and this nice tail, but not too often.

And yeah, I didn't think it through too deeply but the basics I thought about are him summoning giant chopsticks swooping from above and cloud platforms randomly appearing every now and then to hit the boss in his head.

As for the sakura petals, they'd serve two purposes, purely decorative and also functional. This boss lacks color a bit so pink elements would make nice accents but besides they can also work as a distraction and also an indication of a wind attack so when the boss summons a powerful wind the petals change direction and speed to emphasize it.

Technically it's 100% doable on NES. Of course sprites were used as background effects very rarely due to harsh limit of 64 sprites on-screen and 8 sprites per horizontal line but it was still done few times. For example, all background stars in space levels of Battletoads & Double Dragon are sprites and there's even closer example for the petal idea.
Conquest of the Crystal Palace has a nice impressive big stage boss, it can jump, it has few simple animations and most importantly it also has similar wind blowing attack, him using it causes sprite based rock bits fly across the screen, they don't hurt you, it's just a fancy way to indicate the wind direction. Pretty cool trick!

But it's more just fantasies for now. The main thing is that I made a character and even decided to walk an extra mile and recreate him in NAW to export this concept as a rom file and see how CRT TV filter will look on him, these recent attempts to play with filtering when I worked on those cyber themed sci-fi concept felt so satisfying I decided to try it out with my main project materials for the first time.

And it looks pretty good! I definitely should try it with other bosses, enemies and level assets more. I wish I could recreate some animation effects in NAW and export as rom too though. Rom file is in attachments just in case.

That's all I wanted to share for now. There's A LOT more stuff coming soon, all that idea of realistic level assets with silly phallic humor similar to those recent cybernetic assets keeps getting me sidetracked and I made a ton of other stuff, so I have no more excuses to call it some insignificant random stuff, now it feels more like I'm working on two projects in parallel. But I need a bit more time to prepare it all for posting here, the same way I did it with cyber assets I have to perfectly polish it all, export to NAW and do some level layout samples. And for now I'd rather prefer to focus on commission and post it first, so, for each its turn.