AuthorTopic: GR#127 - Super Mario Land - Gameart Revamp  (Read 23488 times)

Offline Charlieton

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #10 on: May 16, 2013, 07:39:53 am
Recommended listening for browsing this thread: http://youtu.be/lH_u4pPZ1B0?t=1m46s

Giant seahorse and submarine/airplane, please!

Keep up the good work! :y:
Det skulle vara lätt för mig att säga att jag inte gillar dig, men det gör jag; tror jag

Offline Arne

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #11 on: May 16, 2013, 06:44:33 pm
It's certainly a different look for the game. I liked the simple clean look of the original but I enjoy my more cutesy version more tbh. Maybe it's like cooking one selves food.

Gave the fly back the club hands. Can see the appeal of those. Strange how large the 16 px enemies look in this game. Might scale a few down actually...

Running Maoi/potato is... difficult to work with since it moves using different physics. It appears they snap it forward a tile and change frame, making it very jerky looking. I've tried to be consistent with the Moai look across the board, but I tried to make a different kinda Moai so it's more... Marioverse.

I'm now at 99%, with that last % being the hard stuff and excessive tweaking.


Worked some in Arnimation. It helps so much being able to instantly see the animation.
My Pauline is so much less iconic than Mario, and is a bit messy with the diagonals. I've yet to see how she looks ingame. Animation is OK'ish looking. There are some shared tiles making things difficult/static. Doesn't appear to be any throw frame used for big Mario ingame, even though one was drawn.

(Edit: these frames are now dated)

Could make separate IPS'es for the player and Fay Wray characters I suppose. Trying to figure out who Pauline would rescue. Used the modern look for Daisy and Peach.


Edit: Found the water tiles using magic!
« Last Edit: May 21, 2013, 03:01:21 am by Arne »

Offline PypeBros

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #12 on: May 16, 2013, 07:52:20 pm
Trying to figure out who Pauline would rescue. Used the modern look for Daisy and Peach.
DK junior ?

Offline Quady14

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #13 on: May 17, 2013, 01:21:11 am
This was one of the first games I ever owned; really love what you're doing with the sprites: Keepin' it accurate but adding those tiny details really adds up. I'm not very experienced with pixel art yet so I don't notice tiny inconsistencies or potential improvements very well, but I see no major flaws with your stuff, it's all pretty visually pleasing overall and definitely a step or two up from the original work. Keep up the good work and do what you've gotta do would be my best advice I guess!  ;D
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Offline Arne

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #14 on: May 17, 2013, 05:40:23 pm
I went through the effort of marking all of the seemingly unused tiles and spotted this peculiarity behind the ship. It's a single static fame/sprite repeated twice.... might have been a ladder? It disappears some second after they have entered the ship.

I wonder if I could make something of it. Can't do a pilot character since it's repeated. Ladder would be hard since it misses the ship and isn't tilted enough. Maybe smoke puffs, but they wouldn't be animated.



I'm probably at 80% of that last 1% now.

Offline Helm

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #15 on: May 18, 2013, 03:58:18 pm
This is lovely stuff and it fulfills some sort of childhood fantasy for me to update the graphics of 8-bit games in-engine. I guess I should learn some basic hacking? I want to edit Prince of Persia, either DOS or original Apple II version and make it Princess of Persia (and you rescue the Prince).

Offline Arne

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #16 on: May 18, 2013, 11:07:22 pm
Page: http://androidarts.com/sml/sml.htm

I figured out the text strings! Enter Pauline! I'm limited to 5 characters though. ELLEN and ALIEN works. Just realized that her name might be intentionally similar to ALIEN.

Helm> Some games are harder than others to dump (I write my own tools but I'm sure there's stuff to download). Computer games can be tricky since the hardware is more flexible with graphics... no strict tile tables and such. The programers sometimes wrote custom file formats and if the data is variable width due to compression you're toast since any edited data will take up more or less space affecting offsets and such.

GB and NES games are generally easy because of the tile tables. Gets tricky once the games start streaming tiles (from some piece of code) into video memory though. SML only does it for the water effects.

Prince of Persia might be difficult to edit since the characters are variable width with lots of empty spaces. As a programmer working with limited memory I would be tempted to compress that somehow.

Offline Helm

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #17 on: May 18, 2013, 11:10:42 pm
Oh I'm 100% certain Mechner compressed the data to hell in the Apple II original, it's a technological marvel, should not exist on that machine. But! There's a c64 version written very recently by fans, I could get in touch with that coder perhaps, and the c64 is my favourite micro anyway.

Offline Arne

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #18 on: May 19, 2013, 12:59:50 pm

Offline Helm

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Re: Super Mario Land sprite remake/edit

Reply #19 on: May 19, 2013, 01:23:15 pm
Yeah, I've followed his blog, really enlightening stuff. Still do not know how to code at all.