The Quest for new Super Mario Bros. 1 spriterips

For those expecting another traditional update post, I don't have much to add besides what I brought up on Twitter over the past few days, and right now I'm still trying to find my footing in productivity again, if not in game development at this time (that'll get its own blog entry later) then certainly in the field of doing normal art. The last art I did of an Aozora's Adventure cast member was in September 2019, and since then there's only been a modern take on Super Justin earlier this year which I slacked on pretty hard since starting on it in February, in part since while it was a neat return to form, making two poses of the same character at the same time in addition to one that I initially abandoned outside of one community for being rather underdeveloped, both in looks and background, was exhausting to say the least. So I'm going to go back to Aozora for the time being to provide some new character renders to characters I haven't drawn since 2014, including one new face not in my style yet.

Anyways onto today's subject. For those of you that have seen a blog post of mine from back in March, I've long stopped contributing routinely to The Spriters' Resource website but didn't exactly rule out the site entirely and could potentially have come back with a surprise rip or two every now and then. And after some convincing from a bud of mine as well as some groups I'm a part of, I've decided to redo some of my oldest sheets that I've posted to the site and re-rip the entirety of Nintendo's original Super Mario Bros. and its two offshoots: The Lost Levels, and All Night Nippon. (why do those sound like episode names for a retro FPS?)

For reference, her are the original sheets:

Someone else would update the above sheet to have outlines, but the ones to follow weren't so lucky:

These sheets were done when I only had a very minimal grasp on how the four palettes were sorted, as well as the key differences between tiles and sprites, leading to a lot more overlap between the sheets than usual along with not much in the way of explaining how some of the more cryptic elements worked (how does Hammer Bro hammer throwing work, as an example). My only emulator at the time was the Mac version of Nestopia, and  while it got the job done and let you use a rewind feature right off the bat, it lacked any of the debugging, frame-by-frame advancing, map viewing, or sprite viewing capabilities of FCEUX and Mesen, resulting in several inaccuracies in the sheets.

The goal of this project is to take the original sheets I've ripped in the past, re-rip every sprite across all three versions of SMB1, and re-assemble them into new sheets, including the player characters, enemies, tilesets, objects, backgrounds, and text/text screens (title screen, game over, and the endings). Upgrades from the existing sheets would include:

• Colored backgrounds due to certain art programs not playing nice with transparency *cough *MSPaint*cough* alongside spaced-out sprites and the addition of bounding boxes to better show the exact size of each sprite/tile and make them easier to extract from the sheet.
• Different sheets for each version of SMB1, only including sprites and tiles used in that version. The only exception would be the large mushroom platforms- since they got removed and replaced with clouds in Lost Levels but received Lost Levels-styled updates in All Night Nippon, they'd be included in the Lost Levels tileset sheet for consistency with the other two variants of the tileset sheet.
• Detailed notes explaining certain functions in-depth that aren't able to be elaborated on visually, or explaining mechanics of the game and hardware. When appropriate, key differences between versions are also mentioned, such as cloud platform tiles in place of mushroom platform tiles in The Lost Levels.
• A full set of visual palettes for every sprite/tile.
• For the first time in a SMB1 sheet, two different emulator palettes: Nestopia and the visually similar Mesen for being the one Nintendo classifies as the official palette based on its use in the NES Mini and the NES Online service, and FCEUX for being a general fan favorite palette in the community.

Despite all that I'm doing to make the sheets as polished as can be, don't take this project as a hint that ripping sprites will return to being a full-blown hobby of mine as it was throughout most of the 2010's. It's more so that I will never have to touch any part of SMB1 when it comes to extracting its assets and putting them into sheets. And that's especially after making the game such a big part of the early 2010's whenever it be through the discovery of ROM hacks whenever they be the most prolific ones or the ones not commonly available to the public, or getting into Mari0 custom level, graphic, and tileset creation, and need I remind everyone that latter of those was what cemented my hobby of sprite-ripping when I struggled to keep up with producing artwork.

So take this little project as, for the time being, one final "hoo-rah" to the sprite-ripping hobby I've had for roughly eight or nine years from my final few years of high school to the late 2010's that were dominated by a big boom in conventions. I got way too many things I need to get to drafting, planning, and working on later this year and in the rest of the 2020's to better shape up my future and since creating these sprite sheets, despite the convenience they provide to the public, doesn't really further my desires to create games, artwork, and sprites of my own, it'll be difficult fitting in contributions to the Spriters' Resource unless I get it on the mind and have time to kill. No matter what happens though I'll always enjoy my experiences working with and getting to know the Spriters' Resource community, as well as the greater VG Resource community overall. If I ever do come back to sprite ripping for a brief period, you will be the first to know.