More fat Zed pixel art + more extra NES content

Posting last little things before finally diving into working on new commission. It's been some time since I did any pixel art, especially NES one despite I had huge plans for it, so I decided to warm myself up with some old projects.

You probably remember my old post with my last NES art featuring fat Zed, at that time it had only one weight gain step with fade-in/fade-out animation and Mark's dialogue icon. And just as usual, drawing a fat character motivated me to draw a full progression from thin to obese where initial image becomes just a middle part. In just one day I drew 5 previous steps following the first one and one where Zed turns even fatter. I still plan to draw the final step 8 but maybe someday later, for now I need to focus on other things.

Every image fits NES limitation of 256 unique tiles per screen, the only one where I went a bit overboard is last step 7, even with couch graphics removed, its tileset still turned out 268 tiles so I had to give it some extra tweaking.
You won't notice any difference at first glance but here's before on the left and after on the right where the number of unique tiles was reduced to suitable 252. It's all about those unfortunate nasty lines which touch a neighboring almost empty tile with just 1-3 pixels thus turning it into new unique tile and with too much excess of such accidental needless tiles you can exceed the limit easily.
Like here. The small glare on Zed's belly has a line of 6 pixels I drew inside a tile that could be just another solid cyan square and not count as new unique one, solid colors or repetitive patterns are good for saving space and yet drawing big things, so it's better to use as many of them as possible. The same with accidental two pixels next to Zed's breast that could be easily erased and turned into another solid black tile. Cleaning little things like that can save a lot of space and this image had a plenty of such tiles. I'm sure step 8 will have the same problems so I'll have to work on it extra thoughtfully.

As you can see, I made fade-in/fade-out animations for every step and combined them together into one big animation for easier demonstration. When I finish step 8 I'll add it to make an updated version of animation. Although previous steps still need a little tweak. Only going back from super fat to slim Zed I realized how tiny I drew his feet which usually look much more imposing and balanced considering overall toony proportions. It won't screw up the count of unique tiles and it will be easy to do but every each weight gain step needs feet to be redrawn on it, I'll deal with it later.

I also did some simple side work with Mark's NES sprites as well. As I already said many times, I have that issue of thinking "What if it was a game" very often when I'm doing pixel art, and when I did what was first just a random image of fat Zed in NES graphics my imagination got carried away and I starting fantasizing about what a plot of a possible weight gain themed NES game about Zed could be. I came up with a silly idea, as silly as a premise of most NES games which often was nothing but just a very vague excuse for all the random absurd stuff going on in a game. Something like "Zed and Mark were watching news on TV and suddenly saw a man who won lots of money for breaking a world record and becoming the fattest man on Earth. Fueled by his competitive spirit and greed for money, Zed decided that he'll do anything to become twice as fat the guy from TV to get rich and famous and of course it meant that Mark has to help him and do all the dirty job again." With story like that, Mark is supposed to be main playable character in a platformer game where you select one of the levels, each one is food related in its own way, beat the boss, get some greasy food related treasure, like Butter Bomb Cake for some Candy Land or Triple Tallow Sundae for a Freezer level and all stuff like that, similar to NES Duck Tales where you select levels and hunt for treasures as well, and after each level you get a cutscene showing Zed growing fatter and fatter with some raunchy dialogue to spice it up.

And so this is why I felt motivated to work a little on Mark sprites.

Initial concept was too complicated in terms of color count considering NES limitations, it's not completely impossible and could be done with some sprite overlaying but only if Mark were a non-playable NPC and STILL it would be quite a waste of memory, not to mention making it a playable character sprite.

So I had to come up with something more uniform and simplified which is quite tough considering all my characters are very complex with lots of different colors while NES sprites can use only 3. Black and white are essential for Mark since he is a dalmatian, so I had only one free color left while Mark has red snout and brows, green lips, purple ear and yellow eyes and nose. Snout is the biggest part of his body besides black and white body so it's top priority, this way I chose crimson as a compromise middle ground between purple and red, but I had to do something with yellow eyes and nose as well. White is too bright, red is too dark so it is quite a task, the only best solution I could find is to pick the lightest yellow from NES palette which is light enough to still resemble white and saturated enough to still resemble yellow. I think it's the best I can do here.

I started off with just walking animation where I used Mega Man's walk cycle as a reference but then got a bit carried away and did more simple stuff. One frame blinking for idle stand, one frame hurt pose, two frame jumping, one frame crouch and two frame death animation. It was fun to do as just some practice but I decided to not go too far, I don't know if all these concepts will ever become a real game and even if they do I have no idea for now what other animations Mark can require, will he climb up ladders, swim or slide, what kind of attack he may have etc.

It actually would be an awesome game but (sigh) for now I'm not really good at making my game dev fantasies come true and feel very awkward whenever I share fantasies like this in such detail, so consider it more like just a fanfiction thing with some random sprite animation practice made along the way. I still can't find time even to study the very basics of NES Maker to turn my first NES animations into proper ROM files and finally post it online, without it I have to keep it Patreon-only even though they're 4 months old already and could be published online long time ago. Hopefully one day I'll find time for this.