I'm very curious to see where this one goes
A couple nights ago I was playing Super Mario Maker 2, and while I find it to be a very enjoyable sandbox game, well worth the price, I couldn't help but nitpick certain areas where I felt the customization was lacking, as well as certain things which I wish worked differently. I decided to try to take it upon myself to try to build my own sandbox on the PC. Sounds ambitious, but I've actually done quite a bit of the groundwork already.
Segue quickly back to 2012. During my second year in China, I began working on a project called Sonic Triad, a hacking tool built in Game Maker 8.1 which edited certain assets in a disassembly to assist users in ROM hacking Sonic the Hedgehog. It came along quite nicely, with fully implemented editors for color palettes, sprite art, and level layouts before I ultimately needed to shelf it due to real life getting in the way. At the same time, I'd developed a platformer engine that uses tiles purely for ground collision. That is actually a little more difficult than it sounds, especially since these were well before the days of GM Studio 2, which can do all of that work for you.
Thankfully, I managed to find all of my old source code for those projects, and put it to work. This time, however, I'm using a real pixel shader, courtesy of PixelatedPope on the Game Maker Discord server. I've used it many times before, and it certainly beats the haphazardly constructed pseudo shader I developed previously that required 64 simultaneous surfaces and image blending just to simulate four palette lines. That Frankenstein's monster of a system just wouldn't work well for larger projects like this one.
It took a day to throw everything together, and now it works perfectly, as you can see in this screengrab.
The next step is to make an image importer. For now, said importer will be limited to images with only 15 colors. It will pull the colors from that image and make a palette line. It'll then convert the sprite to greyscale to match the "header line" of the palette (not shown above. THAT line is hidden, unable to be edited) Should be done in about a day's time.
Segue quickly back to 2012. During my second year in China, I began working on a project called Sonic Triad, a hacking tool built in Game Maker 8.1 which edited certain assets in a disassembly to assist users in ROM hacking Sonic the Hedgehog. It came along quite nicely, with fully implemented editors for color palettes, sprite art, and level layouts before I ultimately needed to shelf it due to real life getting in the way. At the same time, I'd developed a platformer engine that uses tiles purely for ground collision. That is actually a little more difficult than it sounds, especially since these were well before the days of GM Studio 2, which can do all of that work for you.
Thankfully, I managed to find all of my old source code for those projects, and put it to work. This time, however, I'm using a real pixel shader, courtesy of PixelatedPope on the Game Maker Discord server. I've used it many times before, and it certainly beats the haphazardly constructed pseudo shader I developed previously that required 64 simultaneous surfaces and image blending just to simulate four palette lines. That Frankenstein's monster of a system just wouldn't work well for larger projects like this one.
It took a day to throw everything together, and now it works perfectly, as you can see in this screengrab.
The next step is to make an image importer. For now, said importer will be limited to images with only 15 colors. It will pull the colors from that image and make a palette line. It'll then convert the sprite to greyscale to match the "header line" of the palette (not shown above. THAT line is hidden, unable to be edited) Should be done in about a day's time.
Comments
Post a Comment