Another set of level layout samples, this time for the Asian Food World. This one was much easier to work on since Japanese food is very varied and it's very much about aesthetics and presentation while remaining a relatively simple look. In general, I'm a big fan of Japanese culture so it was easy to remember all kinds of Japanese cuisine which fit this project well as background assets, although obviously I don't remember all the names so I still had to do some little searching just so you don't think of me as a totally hopeless weeabo lol.
Here's a full list (some of the elements are presented in a second set):
- classic sushi rolls
- Ikura (sushi which are always arranged vertically with a cap of red caviar on top)
- Tamaki (big cone-shaped sushi)
- Nigiri (type of sushi with a piece of seafood resting on top of a long lump of rice, often tied with a black nori strip in a middle but not always)
- Onigiri (rice cakes)
- Tempura shrimps (presented as both background elements and enemies)
- Taiyaki (known fish-shaped cake, presented as an enemy)
- Dango (rice flour balls on a skewer, this classic three-colored variety most known to anime fans is called hanami dango)
- Ikayaki (grilled squid on a skewer, both a background element and enemies which mask themselves as such to suddenly pounce on you)
- Konpeito (colorful sugar candies shaped as tiny spiky balls)
- Baran grass (plastic grass shaped dividers used for separating rows of sushi, more of a modern novelty as real grass was used in past instead)
- Sake bottles
- Gourd bottles
And I left the most obscure thing for last. Eggplants and cucumbers with stick legs for Obon ritual. This is something not many people know about, actually it's not even a part of a Japanese cuisine but it uses vegetable so I decided to add it anyway. There's a Japanese three day holiday called Obon the main idea of which is to honor the spirits of one's ancestors. One of the customs is to make figures of a spirit horse and spirit cow represented as cucumber and eggplant on stick legs respectively, according to Obon concept they act as a vessel for the ancestors to come back home and return.

I'd probably never learn about Obon and these figures but I was fortunate to come across the stick-leg eggplant image in one NES game from my childhood. Being a Russian kid who had all his NES experience provided by Chinese bootleggers with Dendy NES clone I also had an access to some Famicom-exclusive games which weren't released for NES outside of Japan, one of them was Kaiketsu Yanchamaru III, the third game in Kid Nikki series. Although in my childhood this game was lazily disguised as Super Mario 14 which didn't change much but gave main character sprite a Mario head, classic. The rest of the game was the same as the original. And so, one of the levels had those eggplants with stick legs as enemies. As an 8 year old kid I had no idea what the hell is this, especially since tiny NES sprites looked confusing and they had purple leaves instead of green (as a kid I didn't know eggplants can have purple leaves)

Honestly, I don't remember how I learned about Obon, it definitely wasn't through researching Kaiketsu Yanchamaru III but once I learned it I was like "Oh, so THAT'S what it was supposed to be!"
I also remember seeing Obon eggplants in Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius and maybe Ganbare Goemon too but I'm not sure about the latter.
Anyway, adding Obon eggplants and cucumbers felt necessary to pay tribute to both my childhood Kaiketsu Yanchamaru memory and just the fact that eggplants were commonly seen in NES games, like Eggplant Wizards in Kid Icarus which got a cameo in Captain N show and evil eggplants in Adventure Island. Also, I simply needed to make better use of a blue palette which is the least present in this level setting.

Not very related but I have another NES memory connected to Japanese cuisine and bootleg games which I'd like to share. Snow Bros is a very Bubble Bobble-esque game which unlike Kaiketsu Yanchamaru III was actually released in US and Europe but sometimes Chinese bootleggers didn't care much what version to rip off for the Russian market so what I got was a Famicom-exclusive version which was nearly identical except the items dropped by enemies. In US/EU version it were sweets, in Japanese version it were different kinds of sushi which I guess was too exotic and hard for Western kids to comprehend but I'm glad I got the more Asian one.

As usual, this world uses two tilesets with 256 unique tiles each, one of which has bigger versions of some elements besides its own special assets, in this case bigger sushi, onigiri cakes, tempura shrimps and eggplants.

And yeah, if there's a perfect NES music to represent this stage then it's definitely this one:
https://youtu.be/LXSOuEkRKTc?list=P.....a7Z15SBf4-J-Fb

I don't want to litter my page with too many CRT TV filter stuff so if you want you can download the archive which also has rom files you can test on emulator with CRT TV filter yourself:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17I.....ew?usp=sharing