Super Mario All-Stars Redrawn ( Lost Levels Demo is now Available in the OP )

[cartridge_rom]

Super Mario Bros. 2 player characters are fully changed. They were a lot of work so I hope you like them.
Toad has a little smirk when he's holding an item, it's a nod to how his super speed is activated when he's holding a baddie or a veggie. ( Not a key though for some reason. How lame. Sure would make outrunning Phanto easier for the little guy. ) I tried to make other little subtle things that hint at a character's stats and abilities but I wasn't sure they would read very well.

I kinda think I'd like Luigi's pallet to be a little darker to match the shade in his art, and Peach's dress could maybe be lighter ( though I think that might mess with Birdo. )

Mario and Luigi will look pretty similar to this in SMB1, but I would like to avoid them being TOO similar, to avoid things being too uniform between all four games.

Mario 3 will be a nightmare thanks to all the powerups and the chaotic arrangement of sprites. But I'm committed now, and i'm probably keeping those Mario Bros. Arcade style battle mode sprites.

Congratulations Pocket, the improvement is very good.
Nice I love it.

you value improving the same as Super Mario Bros. 3 as cartoon type.



on the Nintendo "NES"
I never liked the original Mario / Luigi sprite on SMB.3 "without the white background of the eyes" just one horrible black dot sprite eye, showed no expression of Mario's face.

Super Mario Bros. 2 had better Mario / Luigi sprites were like more Super Show cartoons.

[pocket]

Not only will I add the blue to Peach, I'll lighten up her dress and give her the darker edge on the bottom and her sash as well.
As for Toad's eye placement, a little facial restructuring was needed but here it is.



EDIT: Similarly, Luigi's shade of green matches the art better too, and both Bros. have a more vibrant blue shirt.



It does make Luigi stand out a little less if he's standing in front of those green semi-solid platforms but those aren't common enough in the game for me to feel like it's that big of an issue.

Congratulations Pocket, the improvement is very good.
Nice I love it.

you value improving the same as Super Mario Bros. 3 as cartoon type.



on the Nintendo "NES"
I never liked the original Mario / Luigi sprite on SMB.3 "without the white background of the eyes" just one horrible black dot sprite eye, showed no expression of Mario's face.

Super Mario Bros. 2 had better Mario / Luigi sprites were like more Super Show cartoons.

I do plan to modify Mario 3 sprites as well, but I won't be looking to the cartoon for reference, i'll be looking more to the game's official art. But that would still entail giving Mario the whites of his eyes.  Mario's overalls will be blue in SMB3 as well since they're blue on the box, as opposed to the cartoon's red. ( Although if I'm being honest here, I always liked the red overalls design more. )


on an unrelated note...

Is it possible to change the poll at the top of the thread?  I feel like the decision to go with NES faithful king transformations is the clear winner and I think I'd like to make a different poll now.

[Metalwario64]

I did this before I noticed you made updated sprites for her, but I still like what I did here. I made the hair a mix of the regular 2 hair and that newer sprite posted earlier, and I think it looks better, and I improved the shading in it to give it more depth, and the shape makes her a bit cuter, and more on model to her artwork of SMB2. I also added the red and blue gems to her crown, which no sprite did.

Also the darker blue works better on her, and I touched up other things like her shoes (they are super light pink on her artwork, but now they might not stand out from her dress enough, so maybe it's best to leave them be?).

I also touched up Mario and Luigi's sprites, since some frames had inconsistencies (Luigi's hair color and the position of certain parts), and I made their climbing sprites overalls more on-model. I did other touch ups like Luigi's hair on the back of his head which was a bit unnaturally placed before (and not accurate to the artwork), and touched up Mario's nose slightly.

Toad was a thing I did. I'll let you handle that though.

[Granville]

Those new Mario 2 sprites look absolutely lovely! Fantastic job!

Speaking of Mario 3, the original NES game was conceptualized as occurring inside a theater play. Hence the curtains at the beginning. But the level tilesets had some extra visual hints of this as well, such as the drop shadoes of some of the platforms and sprites. Some of which was removed in the SNES port. Does anyone have any artistic ideas or hacking possibilities for editing the SNES graphics to sort of "restore" these stage play elements?

[pocket]

If I can be totally honest, I'm not the biggest fan of SMB3 being presented as a literal play with shadows being cast on the background and stuff like that ( it bugs the crap out of me that they did this in Mario Maker across all the NES and SNES themes ). If someone wants to make an optional patch that would restore the backdrop shadows once this hack is done, I'm fine with it but I think i'll be keeping the background elements in SMB3 the way they are in All-Stars.

I did this before I noticed you made updated sprites for her, but I still like what I did here. I made the hair a mix of the regular 2 hair and that newer sprite posted earlier, and I think it looks better, and I improved the shading in it to give it more depth, and the shape makes her a bit cuter, and more on model to her artwork of SMB2. I also added the red and blue gems to her crown, which no sprite did.

Also the darker blue works better on her, and I touched up other things like her shoes (they are super light pink on her artwork, but now they might not stand out from her dress enough, so maybe it's best to leave them be?).

I also touched up Mario and Luigi's sprites, since some frames had inconsistencies (Luigi's hair color and the position of certain parts), and I made their climbing sprites overalls more on-model. I did other touch ups like Luigi's hair on the back of his head which was a bit unnaturally placed before (and not accurate to the artwork), and touched up Mario's nose slightly.

Toad was a thing I did. I'll let you handle that though.

Looks good. I'll take these tweaks into consideration. 
I probably should have shared my progress on the player sprites a lot sooner, lmao.

EDIT: Actually with the new darker bottom half of the dress, her shoes stand out better with your suggestion.



I do feel like Toad's eyes were a lot smaller in the artwork of early games, buuut your version does make Toad look a lot less like he's going to come kill my family so I'll keep those changes.  Side note, his "throwing" pose was changed pretty drastically from the original to resemble the Wario's Woods Box Art.

[Neon Streetlight]

I managed to get the dog in by replacing some (unused as best as I can tell) graphics that get loaded with the throne room sprites. When the new graphics are done for the dog, I'll insert them and modify the sprite assembly further if needed. Then I can post the patch/source code for it.

Wow! Nailed it! So excited for this hack.

[pocket]

Wow! Nailed it! So excited for this hack.

That reminds me...



I noticed something about the seven Kings in their true form.  Not all of them are wearing crowns. But all of their transformed forms are wearing crowns. The King of Grassland and Giant Land are wearing turbans, and the King of Pipe Land appears to have a viking helmet. Although if you ask me, the Viking would make more sense in Ice Land and the king of grassland should swap with the king of desert land.

So, question one, should I give their transformed forms the corrects head wear?
And question two, should I swap the position of the king of Desert Land with Grass Land, and the King of Ice Land with Pipe Land?


One annoying thing I've had to deal with when editing the kings is that the crown is for some reason it's own sprite ( although I was able to ignore this for the Kappa. )   I was thinking about deleting the crown sprites to get around that.

[Celice]

This has got to be one of the coolest hacks I've seen in the last like 15 years I've followed romhacking. The art is great and the intention is awesome.

Thanks for sharing your work with us! It looks amazing.

[Spooniest]

Mario and Luigi's sideburns in the Mario 2 sprites are brown, but their mustaches are black and it's bugging me.

[Metalwario64]

Mario and Luigi's sideburns in the Mario 2 sprites are brown, but their mustaches are black and it's bugging me.

Then you must have been bothered by every Mario game and piece of art, since that's always been the case.

[Spooniest]

That can't be right. Am I just losing my mind?

... My God wait a minute you ARE right. :/ Disregard me please

[niuus]

Regarding the Mario Bros. style battle mode sprites, i'll keep em if a few more people speak up on that.

Keep them! 

[pocket]

Donkey Kong Junior is gone. Feels like a bit of a shame to remove a character that got shafted so bad after the Donkey Kong Country series took off. But this transformation in particular always bothered me because DK Junior is not a species but an individual character ( ...or at least I think he is. Game & Watch Gallery seems to think otherwise.... ) So it didn't really fit for a King to be transformed into him.

And... here's the Dinosaur restored to the throne.


There have been quite a few Dinosaurs in the Mario series to base this one on. Yoshi, Dino Rino/Torch, Plessie, Rex, Ect. I tried to take a little bit from each while still basing it off the original Dino, being yellow with large, pale dorsal plates.

Side note, this dude's pallet gave me hell. There seems to be a few clones of the DK junior color pallet, when I put this guy in the game, he changed colors on me. Twice.

Keep them! 

I've already decided that they're staying 

This has got to be one of the coolest hacks I've seen in the last like 15 years I've followed romhacking. The art is great and the intention is awesome.

Thanks for sharing your work with us! It looks amazing.

Gosh that's some high praise! Thank you, you're too kind.

EDIT:



We now have bug. Nothing really special about it.  But the crown placement is bugging me ( heh ) and is another point in favor of me removing the crown sprite and placing them manually.

That just leaves the grassland and ice land kings, and the sky king... I can't tell if it's meant to be a pterodactyl or just a really big bird. Not sure which direction to take it.

[DarkSamus993]

We now have bug. Nothing really special about it.  But the crown placement is bugging me ( heh ) and is another point in favor of me removing the crown sprite and placing them manually.

There are x/y coordinates for the crown that can easily be edited (I had to do so when I was testing the dog sprite). I can take care of that when the new graphics are ready for me to insert.

[Spooniest]

You guys are literally debugging a bug.

[pocket]

And here's the bird.



...a bit boring wouldn't you say? And pretty obvious that I just kinda barely edited the albatoss sprite.  That's kind of a mix of Albatoss's sprite being yet another space too small to do anything interesting with, and not really knowing what direction to take the design. I'll be open to suggestion.

There are x/y coordinates for the crown that can easily be edited (I had to do so when I was testing the dog sprite). I can take care of that when the new graphics are ready for me to insert.

Great, I think it's obvious at this point that Seal and ordinary SMB3 dog are the clear winners of the straw poll ( not that there were that many votes ), so i'll go ahead and send them to you now, along with a patch of everything so far.

You guys are literally debugging a bug.

EDIT: I apparantly had a batch of SMB3 enemies I forgot to add to OP. Oops. I'm actually very fond of how Boom Boom came out.
Dry Bones, I decided against taking the same approach I did for SMB1.  I wish I had more room to work on the Koopa type enemies to make them more accurate. I think this explains why they stand upright in later games.

EDIT AGAIN: New poll in relation to a question I asked earlier.
The viking like guy feels like he would be better suited to Iced Land, and The King of Grass Land and Giant Land both kind of look like desert sultans  Note, I would only be swapping their true forms, their changed forms will stay where most of them make thematic sense

EDIT:

Bowser had a pretty interesting design on the Japanese box and manual. I don't think i'll be using this design for the final battle in SMB3 ( especially since the cape would be too difficult to add ), but I would like to reference it in the portraits on his wall in Bowser's Castle, and maybe the letter he sends after kidnapping Peach.  Maybe in the final battle he can have just the jewel on his collar?

[cartridge_rom]

I understand the basis of the design work is the reference of the original Japanese Artwork handbook of the Nintendo titles "NES" / Famicom.



I think it's great, an amazing work of art, Pocket.

[MathUser2929]

I think you should change the mario bros like sprites. Keep the game feeling fresh.

[JacobLeBeauREAL]

This is looking fantastic! Do you plan on doing something similar to any other game? I love your sprite work, and would love to see you do more like this!

[pocket]

Well there's no backing out of the Super Mario All-Stars + World version now, while I was waiting for the Seal and Dog to get inserted properly, a little bit of work has begun. Here's a preview.



I won't be going all in until base SMAS is finished, but now you know you can expect it.

This is looking fantastic! Do you plan on doing something similar to any other game? I love your sprite work, and would love to see you do more like this!

Thank you very much! I appreciate your kind words!

I'm not sure what I will do after all this but I do have ideas.

I've considered doing overworld sprites for EarthBound, trying to make Kirby Superstar look more like Super Star Ultra, Doing another "Artwork Faithful" hack but for Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green, but based more on the gen 1 art than the gen 3 art, with less saturated colors and redrawn sprites, Maybe some work on A Link to the Past... I'd really like to do something with BS Zelda, but that game looks good enough as it is, it's just Link and Ganon that i'd probably do much work on. 

Actually I would like to make more than just graphic hacks sometime. Super Mario World is the only game where that's realistic for someone of my skill level though, thanks to Lunar Magic, but SMW hacks are a dime a dozen so I know that's not really that exciting.

EDIT: ooh, or maybe an "artwork faithful" version of the SNES homebrew, Classic Kong.