Today's post is a little special :-)
Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of one of the most beloved Game Boy games ever: Donkey Kong!In order to celebrate it, I'm going to do let you see en exclusive little surprise we had prepared for our DX hack.This is something I had in mind for a year already: I wanted the first four levels to look as much as possible as the arcade. That required some additional code and, obviously, a totally new tileset.
Believe it or not, the original Game Boy's Mario sprite is quite faithful to the arcade! So we could just copy and paste the arcade sprites. However, it wasn't that easy sadly, because GB Mario has tens of new animation frames for the new tricks he couldn't do in the arcade, so Jorge had to redraw all of them.
On the other hand, DK is a little bigger in the arcade, it's impossible to replace it directly and it isn't worth to redraw it. Instead, Jorge removed the outline from him (the video does not show off this change).
And finally, Pauline, we did the first test yesterday of a copy paste. She looks good and fits into the GB sprite size. However, since DK is smaller, now she looks giant now compared to him, haha! So she is going to need another redrawn. Fortunately, she only has five frames in these stages, so it will be easy.
Anyway, at first, my intention was to keep this as a little surprise but I wanted to make the most of yesterday's anniversary, so here it is my way to thank you all for your contributions here in my Patreon. Enjoy the video!
But don't worry, because we are working to bring another much bigger surprise to the game, a neverseen feature in a DX hack. We won't tell what is it, not even in the trailers, we want players to find out as they play it.
Oh, a final thing. Yesterday happened something beautiful. Takaya Imamura, one of the original game's artists, posted a tweet to celebrate the anniversary. Someone replied and shared our last video of the hack... and he liked it!
I'm happy to see original authors support these kind of projects. He left Nintendo on 2021, so we are safe lolHave a nice weekend!