CV2 hack graphics

http://imgur.com/a/kUrra

These screens are from an unfinished Castlevania II romhack, with programming by optomon and art by Thaddeus from spectredev. I first learned about it from this thread: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=6004 but the only details remaining there some vague praise, a few mockups and a broken youtube link. After a few days of ~internet sleuthing~ I learned about the hack, and found and contacted optomon, who emailed me these images. They are posted here with his permission. Thaddeus took down all his accounts and disappeared from the internet.

These images are inspirational for me. I love how silhouettes are used to suggest depth, how colors bring out details like the rust on the walkways in the clock tower, and the amount of detail packed into cleverly re-used tiles like in the machinery, arches, stonework and Victorian buildings. Hope you guys like it too.

So let me tell you about how I learned one of those dudes basically totally disappeared from the internet, and took all the videos and stuff with him. Then let me tell you about how I managed to find some videos posted by a guy making music for the hack that had badly upscaled screenshots as the background to his videos. And let me tell you about how I saved them anyway because they were that good. (PS, at least some of those videos are now also gone from the net.)

You're pretty much my hero. (Besides the dude who made them of course.) I've always wanted 1:1 pixel versions of the art from this hack, but I hate contacting people out of the blue. The fact that you did it and got results everyone's willing to share is awesome. Seriously, thanks so much!

♥


Incidentally, have you had any success with undoing youtube's bicubic scaling? Right now I'm working to preserve another project where the only remaining images are in old youtube videos. Touching them up by hand in photoshop is time-consuming and not always successful.

Unfortunately I cannot help there. I didn't edit the result at all, just printscreened to have SOMETHING.

These are amazing... it's like some of the limitations imposed by the video hardware don't even exist!

Wow, real cool.

Those gears in the third picture make the NES' attribute layout limitation quite obvious. I never noticed it until someone mentioned it, but NES games seem to use a LOT of black, most likely to compensate for the 16*16 attribute limitation. These graphics make the limitations much more obvious, unfortunately.

I'm not knocking on anyone's talents, though, this looks really good. I like the use of colors, though some areas are overpowered by the black.

Some transitions are a little abrupt, like the gears or the red leaves in some of the bushes, but I don't think they'll look to bad after going through the usual blurring of NTSC. Other parts, on the other hand, like the grass and the rocks, appear to have many more colors than the NES usually allows.

Yes, black was used extensively in these graphics to blend the different palettes together, but since Castlevania is a dark game the black fits in really well. The same technique couldn't be used as extensively in a happy cute bright colors platformer.

That's the magic of contrasting and bright colors. Neon green is a good color, as is white. Contrasting dark colors with brighter ones will trick the brain into thinking there's more color there. Sometimes, effective color use is more important than sheer color number; Kirby's Adventure, while colorful, can have pretty monochromatic colors at times, and it doesn't help that most palettes are simply variants of "darker color/color/brighter color". Some stages which are predominantly one palette such as http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/media/19281/1/1.jpg look quite... bad.

Yoshi's New Island! (3DS)

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all of the graphics featuring the red clouded sky are amazing!

I'd like to find this Thaddeus person and give him a (paid) job doing just graphics.

These have to be the best background graphics I've ever seen for a NES game. Absolutely brilliant use of color theory, shape and lighting. It's like the NES equivalent of Secret of Mana 3 for the SNES. Where did Optomon find this guy?

They are/were both romhackers. http://www.romhacking.net/community/241/


I don't think he wants to be found... This is what I was told when I emailed the "spectre dev" team which Thadd Masters was associated with:

After that I stopped searching; I felt like I was justifying his paranoia. :p You now have all my leads if you still want to try yourself.

http://www.romhacking.net/community/241/

Is there anywhere else to find his work other than the above link? Did he make mockups that anyone saved?

IIRC he also contributed to Cadence of Agony, which was another Castlevania hack in an even less finished state. The IPS of that hack in its final state is available here: http://acmlm.kafuka.org/board/thread.php?id=5975

Other than that, not as far as I know. If you're interested in finding his other work, I'd start by contacting people who knew him: Sliver X (though he's no longer active, you can try to find contact info), spectre dev, this forum's very own Disch.



etc. Just be courteous.

I know im a little late to the party, but yea, id LOVE to play this Castlevania 2 hack. It looks simply amazing to me, and the music is top notch. I beleive across my internet travels i found and have the nsf for this hack. I can't remember how i even found it.

Edit** Yea i have the nsf for it.

Sorry for the necro bump...

I happened to see this on youtube while looking for optomon's awesome rendition of "Battle of the Holy". I did not upload this video and have no affiliation with whomever did. Just wanted to share to remind optomon and Thaddeus how appreciated their talents are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpS4XQ1_cHw

It's very cool to see their hack in action. The music, art, and style are simply incredible.

Very, very impressive use of pattern and attribute table layout/positioning to accomplish things like the high-quality forest backdrop. I actually had to pause the video several times and count colours + grid layouts to make sure it was authentic. For a romhack, this is technically very impressive (to me, anyway).

The artwork is technically impressive, no doubt, but even if you ignore NES limitations, it's still absolutely beautiful.

Is he going improve the sprites too? They kind've stick out like a sore thumb now. Maybe replace black on the sprites with a dark color.

There's that dark blue with a green hint that could help the bat, maybe. But then again, look at all that magic already happening! I wonder how much got made?

IMO, the problem with cv2 is not how the enemies where sprited (ok, some looked weird), but that they never posed a threat, ever. The best route to go would probably be to implement a way to shortcut backtracking (map system, portals, something) so it wouldn't feel tedius if the challenge was spiced up a notch.

I think the origininal cv2 reuses simon's sprite palette a lot in the background (something i don't take any notice of in the video example of this hack). In cv3 those colours where more complementary to the background, though only shared with some other sprites.

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Hi by the way, i'm Ellen and have lurked this forum for years. Just decided to join (and doodle assembly with very limited success).

wow, this was uploaded recently as well. I wonder if there is a playable demo floating around somewhere on the net? This hack looks amazing!

I believe the hack was cancelled a few years ago and never released in any form. I remember some screenshots of the forest going around on this forum in the past.

EDIT: It was this thread: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=6004. However I now see that it was actually a link to a YouTube video (not the same one as above) that has been taken offline.

EDIT#2: Ehh, only now noticed the 2014 posts in this thread, which said pretty much the same thing.

Oh wow, mad props for resurrecting this two-year-old thread; this artwork is beyond incredible!

I describe the game I'm working on as a Castlevania II clone, and this artwork is truly inspiring.
Honestly I wish I could just take it and use it, but even if I had legal permission to do so, it would look so out of place compared to the rest of my art it would never work out.

I would go in to debt to pay this man to make my art for me.