#nes graphics

Seems like my socks develop holes almost as fast as I can darn them now. It's hard to complain when they end up looking so neat after being mended. All the mends pictured are done using the Scotch Darning method which is still my favourite way to darn.

The big 3. ABSOLUTE

I made the classic ones mostly the same height, with WW as the tallest. For the Absolute versions, I chose to make Kal-el pretty petite compared to Earth-1 Superman. Absolute Batman looks kinda wonky, it was hard making him so big under the size restrictions (16x32). Made Absolute WW Taller and Thicker, big legs big arms, mostly to fit the details of her armor and arm tattoo, though I should have made her with her robot arm, would've been easier.

I have tightened up the narrative beats of the story and while building out the first level I realized compositionally I was really happy with how I was able to separate the foreground and the background...But the scale wasn't right. The top image is 320 x 180 which can scale up to 1920 x 1080 but I wasn't happy with how limited was vertically and horizontally for player movement and enemies. I realized it was very tight. SO. I scaled up the play field to 480 x 270 which can also scale up to 1080 which you can see below.

I'm a lot happier with this version compositionally and I'm almost back to where I was originally with mapping out level 1 and oooooooo buddy am I excited. The Skeleton King has set on an adventure and it is taking him through diverse locales and all over the realm. The first level here where we find the Skeleton King is an old abandoned crypt that has fallen into disrepair.

Random pixel art time! This one's for a ROM hack of Dr. Mario I was thinking of making. As you can see, this was meant to replace the iconic plumber with Arle instead. Why not. Owing to the change in star character, I redesigned one of the in-game logo graphics as well. I gave the text a "blobby" look and made it look like the letters were sticking together - almost like they were made out of Puyos!

The top graphic is the original, using authentic NES colors from Pixly's NES color bank, as well as up to 3 colors per tile (though the fourth here is actually the background, so imagine that either the black or white is actually just transparent). The bottom graphic is a more 16-bit look to the logo, closer to what you'd see on a SNES. I'm not sure if these are SNES-accurate or not (although it could be since the SNES has a metric ton of colors - 32,768 to be exact!), so I put a question mark afterwards.

Enjoy this random, small, quick pixel doodle.

I learned how to Scotch Darn over the past month! I watched a really intuitive video (that I unfortunately didn't save the link to) about how to do it and thought, "I have a bunch of socks that need darned and this looks easier than woven darns or God-forbidden Swiss Darning." And it definitely was easier. This will be my go-to for sock mending for a long time now.

Close-ups and a later mend I did on the Piranha socks below the cut.

Hey Hey...not this site reminding me its been months since I’ve posted. A lot has been happening. I’ve scaled back all my side projects and tinkering to focus on making The Skeleton King. It was almost a year ago I did the Lost Cartridge 3 game jam that catapulted me into this project. 

It has hit a point in its making that I have to continue. It is like an itch I can’t exactly scratch. So while the content here turns more into dev dairies be on the look out for more updates.

Parts of the game are fully mapped out with some implementation. There is still A LOOOOT of art and work to do in order to get a fresh demo ready. But as that starts evolving I’ll be sharing some of that work. I’m just not ready to share the story yet...but keep them peepers peeped. and thank you for being on this ol journey with me. 

(you should do the livestreaming thing)