Umihara Kawase-themed Rom Hacks of Other Games

[Princess Rescuer]

There's rom hacks of Umi, but what about other games? I know Mario has plenty of hacks. What about other games known for mods? Is Umi's content just not enough? Post here if you see any.

[KawaseFan]

Surely there's gotta be an Umihara-themed Bionic Commando rom hack out there?

[imgibbon]

I was contemplating doing some simple sprite hacks of Dig Dug and Dig Dug II to be Umihara-themed, considering the early Umihara Kawase prototypes seem to specifically be riffing off them. Would be a nice little callback

[Combi~ringer]

That's an adorable idea. Would you make new sprites or use the sprites from the prototype?

[imgibbon]

Hmm, that's a good question.

Dig Dug 1 & 2 are NES titles and have limited pixels to work with, so you wouldn't be able to do a straight reuse of the prototype sprites



But you could probably do 8-bit approximations at the very least.

I figure you could swap Taizo for Kawase, obvs, but also the little dragon dudes for eels, and the red goggle boys for fish.

Not sure what else I'd change, really.

[Combi~ringer]

imgibbon! I liked your idea so much that I just cooked up some sprites! Just Kawase for now.


This image is upscaled, so don't download it. See the attachment!

I used her Shun design since I couldn't get a readable 3-color sprite for her SFC design. All of them are the same size as or smaller than the sprites they replace, and they use three colors: tan, brown, and blue, plus black for transparency.

I'll probably revisit them once I've sprited the rest of the game's graphics, since I'm now noticing problems as I post them, but they're done enough for now. Lemme know what you think!

[imgibbon]

Oh my goodness those are wonderful! ^_^

I guess I should go boot up a gfx editor heh

[imgibbon]

So I did in fact go find a gfx editor and get to work, but sprite hacking is more complicated than anticipated so this is gonna take a hot minute lol

Having fun tho!

[Combi~ringer]

What graphics editor are you using? I'll give it a shot too and see if I can help.





Here's a fish, along with some revised Kawase sprites. Three colors plus black, same size as original, etc. I used the same colors as Pooka for simplicity's sake, but you could use a shade of orange or something instead. Here's a non-upscaled version, which I also added as an attachment.



I'm not sure what to do about the second enemy. You said an eel, but then what would I do for the fire? Maybe I could change it into electricity...
...I was also thinking I could make the enemy a shark, and the fire would become a swarm of this attack:





What do you think?

[RetroBreak]

Not sure what else I'd change, really.

Maybe change the flowers at the top of the screen to backpacks? Looking forward to seeing how this turns out, it's a great idea

[imgibbon]

I'm using yychr and I'm having a good time of it. the tricky bits are that the dig dug dude sprites are actually five colors, not four, as there's a hidden collision bounding area, with them getting a little tricky with some layering to get the red tools, but it's not really a big deal to ignore that and just make the sprites four color for a first pass. I'm having fun learning about all this stuff ^_^

I notice that there's also some "getting squished" sprites in there as well, for when a boulder falls on you. I was just gonna improvise but idk if you wanteed to make some "official" ones for our spriteset or not :3

[imgibbon]

Also, Combi your sprites are amazing! ^_^

[Combi~ringer]

Maybe change the flowers at the top of the screen to backpacks? Looking forward to seeing how this turns out, it's a great idea

I had the idea of changing them into the pencils from SFC, the carrots from Shun, or some other background object from the games.

I'm using yychr and I'm having a good time of it. the tricky bits are that the dig dug dude sprites are actually five colors, not four, as there's a hidden collision bounding area, with them getting a little tricky with some layering to get the red tools, but it's not really a big deal to ignore that and just make the sprites four color for a first pass. I'm having fun learning about all this stuff ^_^

I notice that there's also some "getting squished" sprites in there as well, for when a boulder falls on you. I was just gonna improvise but idk if you wanteed to make some "official" ones for our spriteset or not :3

yychr? Okay, I'll see what I can do.
...And whoa, I totally missed that sprite. Well, here's Kawase getting squished.


And the non-upscaled image. (Is there a better way to say it than "non-upscaled"? Unupscaled isn't a word, right? Non-upscaled doesn't roll off the tongue very nicely.)

I also put the other sprites behind a colored background - that way you can differentiate between "part of the sprite" black and "part of the background" black, in case that's needed. They'll look a little weird not being on black backgrounds, but hey, function over form. I'll do that for future sprites too.

Also, Combi your sprites are amazing! ^_^

You're amazing!

[imgibbon]

Work is swamping me this week but editing progress continues as I am much more familiar with the pattern by which the tiles are laid out in memory now.

My next thing is editing the actual palette preset for kawase in the rom, which my romhacking friends tell me is pretty unavoidably a tedious process of "guess and check" heh.
Hopefully won't take too long to find the right palette sequence in memory and change it accordingly.
Using the same palette for goldfish that the pooka was already using saves the effort there as well, so thanks for that heh.

Maybe change the flowers at the top of the screen to backpacks? Looking forward to seeing how this turns out, it's a great idea

I had the idea of changing them into the pencils from SFC, the carrots from Shun, or some other background object from the games.

Not strictly from the series, but perhaps traditional "fish on a stick" campfire cooking method for the flowers?

[Combi~ringer]

Sorry for the silence!


Normal size

I decided to go with the electric eel route I suggested. If this gets your OK, then I think all the character sprites are done!

I've also learned about how the game stores graphics. Rather than being tightly around the sprite, there's a lot of black space around the 8x8 chunks that make up the sprite, like the Pooka and fish in the bottom-right corner. ...I feel silly for thinking otherwise, considering it's how so many games handle it. >~> Still, it was good to stay within the strictest possible limits. Maybe some things could even be redrawn to utilize the new space.
Eventually, I'll have to properly split these sprites into 8x8 chunks. I'll still do the colored BG since that conveys more information than a pure black background. When inserting, simply use a "select by color" tool to replace the light green with black.

Not strictly from the series, but perhaps traditional "fish on a stick" campfire cooking method for the flowers?

I love it! This will definitely be the next thing I sprite.



Speaking of, which of the game's remaining graphics should we change?

- Ground/dirt tiles
- Rocks that fall down
- Font
- Title screen logo
- Various score-increasing items that appear (there are 11 in total)

Obviously the font and title screen can be changed to UK-related equivalents, but the rest are tricker.


My ideas were:

- Ground tiles
-> blue water tiles, as if Kawase is going into the sea to find fish

- Rocks that fall down
-> a checkered square like those that appear in the first level of SFC

- Score-increasing items
-> all the weird background objects throughout the games, like pencils, celery, cans, carrots, lamps, MILKSOFT, pocky, whatever this funky brown tree is, and so on. If there aren't enough of these, we could also other enemies like the tadpole and bucket fish, or traditional Japanese items like wind chimes and geta sandals.

Let me know what you think should be changed and what they should be changed into.

[imgibbon]

Oh goodness that eel is great!

Sorry for the lack of updates myself, work has been really busy lately.

I was thinking the ground would be better served copying the floating geometry patterns of the early games, since shoveling through water would be a bit heh



But I'm open to exploring alternatives!

I like your ideas for the score-increasing items 

For the title screen I was thinking of seeing if we couldn't swap it out to "Umihara Kawase" like what the UK SFC translation patch (though probably with one world on top of the other instead of longform?) but with, like, a "Prototype 1" subtag or something heh

[Combi~ringer]

1x

Fish on a stick! Used the same colors as the original for simplicity - I'll choose a better palette later.
To the left are some carrots, since I couldn't get the fish looking good in such a small sprite.

To the right of that are three ideas for logos.
- The official English logo downsized.
- A logo in Japanese
- A logo modeled after the Dig Dug original. The "Hara" and "Kawa" can be swapped, in case someone is more likely to read it as "Umikawa Harase"

They're hastily made, all of them, so tell me which idea you like the most and I'll spruce up that one and make a proper logo out of it.

I was thinking the ground would be better served copying the floating geometry patterns of the early games, since shoveling through water would be a bit heh

My concern with a checkered tiles is that it might be hard to see enemies within all the detail checkers would bring. But I'm sure I could make something work.

I actually came across this screenshot from the Sharp X1 version of Dig Dug:



Great palette for a sea-themed game! And it's perfect that it's from the Sharp version, considering Kiyoshi Sakai had a fondness for developing games on Sharp computers. So maybe rather than water, it could simply be blue soil like this? Or maybe some kind of blue marble...
I was also thinking I could replace Kawase's shoveling sprites with swimming/waddling sprites... That could be fun!

I'll do the score items next, and then whatever logo you think would be the best fit for the hack.

[imgibbon]

Such wonderful spritework as always! Always a treat to see what you've come up with ^_^

To the left are some carrots, since I couldn't get the fish looking good in such a small sprite.

Maybe a fish head would work? hehheh

As for the logo, will need to see if each letter has individual tiles in the assets or if they're reusing the D and G between Dig and Dug respectively, as that will complicate things...

[imgibbon]

I've been swamped with work lately, but I am totally still slowly working on this

[Combi~ringer]

No worries about work! You take all the time you need.
It's always so neat to see sprites I made put into a game.


1x

Here's some items for Kawase to collect. There were so many cool things I could've added that I honestly had trouble picking what to use.I may add in more if any of these didn't come out right.

In the meantime, I'll do the life backpack... and then I'll play around with ground tiles. Let me know how the logo is stored in the game so I can know how to tackle that.

Also, do you (or anyone else, if anyone would like to pitch in) have the Steam versions of any of the UK games? Apparently no one online has ripped the font, and it would be easiest to get it straight from the PC versions' files, if possible. If not, I'll just rip it myself from the SNES game.

[imgibbon]

So after some testing it does indeed reuse the D and the G for both DiG and DUG, so that makes things a little trickier.

And I do have the games on Steam! Not sure where I'd need to look to grab the font though, but if you can point me in the right direction I can make an attempt for you

[Combi~ringer]

Hrm, that is tough about the title screen...



This hack reuses two letters (A and M) twice each like Dig Dug, but they're in different positions and have different widths than the D and G. Maybe it would be worth giving it a look in yychr or a hex editor?
It doesn't seem as if any other hacks or translations of Dig Dug available on rh.net have made changes to the D and G, so this Yamame hack is the only precedent for that.

If that doesn't work, maybe I could vertically fit the kanji in the space of I and U...

Not sure where I'd need to look to grab the font though, but if you can point me in the right direction I can make an attempt for you

Try searching for bmp, gif, or png files in the Program Files (x86) -> Steam -> steamapps -> common -> (game name) folders. I doubt they would have the font nicely laid out like that, but if it's there, we're in luck.

[imgibbon]

Yeah they seem to have done a bit more than purely just tile editing, and have actually moved some stuff around. If I can figure out how to do that it'll really open things up for us heh.