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Extra Mario World: New Character Portraits, Dialogue Boxes, and Sprites!

Hello and welcome back to what will one day be the greatest ROM hack of all time! That's right, our goal stays the same! For the uninformed, Extra Mario World is a collaboration between Von Fahrenheit (programmer), PercentN (background artist), Eminus (sprite artist) and Ruberjig (composer). Together we are Team Välfärd and aim to push SMW hacking to new levels through the power of friendship.

This year we're going to do our best to get out more updates (I guess 1 update to start the year is better than 0 LUL). Who knows, maybe you guys will get a playable demo before the year ends ;) Anyways, let's take a look at what we've done since last time.

Character Portraits and Dialogue Box

We have some new and updated portraits for the characters in our game, courtesy of Eminus! (please forget those).

Before I forget, I'd like to point out that the portraits use psuedo-5bpp graphics which allows for 30 colors/tile (rather than the usual 15, which allows us to display these vibrant portraits AND the message boxes at the same time). Check it out:



Playable Characters and Co-op

One of the main draws of our hack is the new playable characters and multiplayer co-op. Von Fahrenheit has spent a lot of time since Summer improving the controls and tweaking the physics of the character engine to make sure it feels just right. It's difficult to convey in text and pictures but it will be obvious once we release the next demo. Out of a planned 6 characters, 3 are finished enough to be presentable (one of these is Mario but hey, Von Fahrenheit had to change quite a bit to make him work in multiplayer). This system comes with a character select menu available on the overworld. Enabling multiplayer is as easy as pushing start on the second controller and selecting a character and dropping out is just as simple! Here's a sneak peak:



Related to character selection and multiplayer is the new HUD:



It's pretty simple, stripped down to the bare minimum. Each player gets a 4-digit coin counter, a life meter (Mario has his reserve item there) and in the middle is the shared Yoshi Coin bar. Yoshi Coins don't respawn and are used to purchase upgrades, but you'll get to see those in a later update. The individual coin counters encourage some competition, even though it all goes into the coin hoard at the end of a level. The coin hoard holds up to 999999 coins and is used to purchase cosmetic things, such as alternate palettes for your characters or new trinkets and furniture for your home base. In case anyone is wondering, ALL coins are given to the player that earns them, including kicking shells at blocks (that one was pretty tricky for Von Fahrenheit so he wanted to mention it!). This is 2018 and we're not savages, so we have decided to not use lives/1-ups in our hack. Instead, we have included gold mushrooms that fully heal you and give 100 coins. Yoshi Coins are worth plenty of cash as well.


Levels

We have an unfortunate lack of new levels to show this time due to focusing on other things. We do have some new stuff we want to show you though!

The thick vegetation you see here is the Living Garden. It a level where the terrain itself lives! This level has tons of vines, and some of those vines have heads. If you cut the head, you can clear the vines!



If you can figure out how to get that Yoshi Coin, you're pretty clever ;)
Once you get to a certain point in the Living Garden, a thick, poisonous fog starts rolling in. What could lie beyond?




Also, here is a video showing a cave section from one of our levels called Crossroad Plains. You'll notice a few custom sprites, and there's one in particular we're about to get into details with!


Enemy Spotlight: Tar Creeper


don't sue us blizzard

What's this? It's an insanely overly complex sprite we've made! It's the Tar Creeper and it's meaner than the smell of Kamek's old undies! It moves around and blocks players with its size-shifting hands. It remembers any ledge it sees and is happy to toss you down one. Jumping on it doesn't hurt it, but it doesn't like it either so it blocks you from above too. This can be used to your advantage however, as the Tar Creeper might just be willing to carry you across some spikes if it means getting rid of you later.

While the mighty Tar Creeper can't be killed by conventional means, it does have one ultimate weakness: it is made of tar. Which is very flammable.


Note: the Tar Creeper uses a vector system that can apply force to objects like players and sprites without altering the speed registers. This interaction is still a little buggy with Mario. The reason the enemy is so complicated is its dynamic tilemap generation to account for every possible arm angle, hand angle and hand position, as well as these interacting with players. It's also pretty smart and is able to block both players regardless of how they approach it.


Altered Vanilla Enemies

After coming to the conclusion that a lot of vanilla enemies felt out of place alongside our more advanced custom sprites we decided that we would alter some of them. We added extra bit support for a lot of enemies to use different behaviours and gave them a psuedo-dynamic graphics loader that makes sure we can use any combination of enemies we want on any level. We also made new versions of some of our favorite sprites. Look at these tiny-ass moles! I bet they couldn't even hurt me...

Eminus also made some high-quality redrawings of the koopas with additional frames and more colors.


One of Von Fahrenheit's favorite additions is setting the extra bit on blue kicker koopers to make them hold their fire until someone steps into line of sight. Here's him being owned by one of them:


Truly, the standoff of the century...



New Graphics

Here are some recent graphics for an underwater level that has yet to be done:


The background here has the particularity to have a pretty complex parallax effect applied to it, giving a 3d effect (think Donkey Kong Country).


Cool Musics

Aside from the video you haven't heard many of the musics so far. They're quite valuable, since all the musics are custom made by Ruberjig! Here are some spc files he made:
- Onto the Crossroads
- Subterranean Surface
- Lightning Lounge

That's all we have for now, but we do want to keep you guys in touch more often than before, most notably in our WIP thread. Hopefully you'll hear more from that soon enough.
All of this is incredible! I'm speechless! The co-op system and that sexy 3D parallax scrolling are the things I like the most.
Great stuff you showed here. I'm wishing you the best of luck on this awesome project!
Oh! You mean the Tar Creeper was inspired by this?

Also, I thought that hack reminds me of Extra Mario Bros., which was made by a Japanese hacker.

Keep up the good work, Team Välfärd! Excelsior!
The Hacking of PuyoPuyo. Come join the fun, friends. 『いけいけ団長、頑張れ頑張れ団長!』
Help us raise funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. #ДопомагаємоРазом / #HelpTogether
“Even if you personally are so dissatisfied with life that you want the world to end, surely the cruel reality is that it will continue on, unchanging. All the better for someone perfectly content, like me.”
Aya Shameimaru, Touhou Suzunaan ~ Forbidden Scrollery
Oh my God, that vine background and the Tar Creeper S M O O T H N E S S. That burning death animation is so cool too lol, I can barely believe this is the SNES! The new shell-less blue koopa was also a very nice touch. I've been keeping my eye on this project since the beginning and I couldn't be more satisfied with the course it's been taking. C-can I hug you guys?
Originally posted by Gloomy
C-can I hug you guys?

Yes. Yes you can.
(it's always great when you comment Gloomy!)

Originally posted by kamekku14
Oh! You mean the Tar Creeper was inspired by this?

Also, I thought that hack reminds me of Extra Mario Bros., which was made by a Japanese hacker.

Keep up the good work, Team Välfärd! Excelsior!

The Tar Creeper was actually inspired by the Hearthstone card of the same name. That's where the idea for the dynamic of it being a very strong defensive enemy comes from too. It's always nice when we remind someone of Extra Mario Bros. That's one of the main inspirations for our hack, as you might guess from the name.

Originally posted by Wakana
All of this is incredible! I'm speechless! The co-op system and that sexy 3D parallax scrolling are the things I like the most.
Great stuff you showed here. I'm wishing you the best of luck on this awesome project!

Thanks Wakana! That means a lot coming from you.

allow shy guy emojis in post footers you cowards!
Its always great seeing progress of this hack.

All the new ASM additions and Sprites are always a delight to see. O.O
The final product will be great once its completed.
The Tar Creeper reminds me of the Koindozer enemies from DKC3.

Stellar work, everyone!

Originally posted by PercentN
Note: the Tar Creeper uses a vector system that can apply force to objects like players and sprites without altering the speed registers. This interaction is still a little buggy with Mario. The reason the enemy is so complicated is its dynamic tilemap generation to account for every possible arm angle, hand angle and hand position, as well as these interacting with players. It's also pretty smart and is able to block both players regardless of how they approach it.

My god...
HackPortsASM"Uploader"

When is the opening time?

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My name is Hanmiso.#fim{<3}
I love you! I'm a girl.

As it snows, the atmosphere is very unstable and lightning keeps hitting me. ㅠㅠ

I like the cartoon character of the girl the most.

This place will update photos every month.
Hey guys glad you're enjoying the show!

Originally posted by kamekku14
Oh! You mean the Tar Creeper was inspired by this?

Hey you're not wrong actually, although the main source of inspiration was the Tar Creeper from Hearthstone as Von Fahrenheit said, back when I drew the sprite I still had fairly fresh memories of Shantae and the Pirate Curse in my head, and that enemy did have some influence on me. Then again this is such a simplistic design (ironic for our most complex enemy yet) that you'll probably be able to compare it to a bunch of things. For instance some people told me that they reminded them of the Heartless from Kingdom Hearts, but I never played the series ever


Also remember how our dialogue system has character portraits? Well I drew some new ones because I wasn't fond of the old ones (please forget those). Check it out:



By the way, thanks for all the comments guys it's the most powerful source of motivation for us!
I remember this hack. I do hope the difficulty isn't too high (yes, I know you have infinite lives, but still...), and I hope that some resources, including code, become publically available at some point after release. The Tar Creeper is cool, though I don't know if it fits very well in a (non-RPG) Mario game, and I really hope that cave foreground is a placeholder, because the vanilla graphics really don't fit with all the detailed custom ones.

Still, though, it all looks very nice, a lot of good things in one place, and I look forward to its completion.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 64/95 levels.
Originally posted by imamelia
I remember this hack. I do hope the difficulty isn't too high (yes, I know you have infinite lives, but still...), and I hope that some resources, including code, become publically available at some point after release. The Tar Creeper is cool, though I don't know if it fits very well in a (non-RPG) Mario game, and I really hope that cave foreground is a placeholder, because the vanilla graphics really don't fit with all the detailed custom ones.

Still, though, it all looks very nice, a lot of good things in one place, and I look forward to its completion.

Difficulty is certainly a topic that comes up a lot within the team. We're always tweaking enemies and whatnot to make them as fair as possible. In addition to that, you choose one of three difficulties at the start of the game. You can also enable special modes like time limits, no checkpoints and 1-hit kills to make the game harder if you want. You have a lot of control over how hard or easy the game will be. Our benchmark is that normal with no challenge modes should be only slightly more difficult than vanilla SMW.

We do plan to release resources after the hack is done. A lot of sprites and the like might be hard to use as many of them rely on custom patches to work properly, so they could end up very inflexible.

The vanilla cave GFX have actually been replaced since C3 started, we barely had too little time to get them up before that :p
Thanks for the feedback and encouragement!


Originally posted by SMW S.N.N
When is the opening time?

If you mean release date, it's still very unclear. We hope to have a really good demo ready Winter C3 2019. When the full hack will be done is still impossible to say though.

allow shy guy emojis in post footers you cowards!
Speaking of the gfx, here are some gifs of the replaceds gfx. Just ignore any vanilla gfx you see pretty much ;) (like in those dialogue boxes. no vanilla gfx to see there :^) )

Also, those mini-moles will make Mario move and jump to try to get them off. Mashing buttons will throw those pesky things off him!
Originally posted by Von Fahrenheit
Difficulty is certainly a topic that comes up a lot within the team. We're always tweaking enemies and whatnot to make them as fair as possible. In addition to that, you choose one of three difficulties at the start of the game. You can also enable special modes like time limits, no checkpoints and 1-hit kills to make the game harder if you want. You have a lot of control over how hard or easy the game will be. Our benchmark is that normal with no challenge modes should be only slightly more difficult than vanilla SMW.

Nice. That's a good way to do it.

Originally posted by Von Fahrenheit
We do plan to release resources after the hack is done. A lot of sprites and the like might be hard to use as many of them rely on custom patches to work properly, so they could end up very inflexible.

I see. I probably have a number of sprites like that as well.

Originally posted by Von Fahrenheit
The vanilla cave GFX have actually been replaced since C3 started, we barely had too little time to get them up before that :p

Ah. Fair enough.

Originally posted by Von Fahrenheit
Thanks for the feedback and encouragement!

Sure. I'm always glad to see more good hacks around.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 64/95 levels.