HDNes - Castlevania II: Simon's Quest

Hope you don't mind, I changed the subject since I'm only focusing on the Castlevanias.

This seemed like the best place to put this thread. I didn't want to flood the HDNes thread with my stuff, so I'm just starting my own to help keep me motivated, and possibly help share some of my techniques/answer some questions.

Some background- About 2 years ago I was thinking that something like this would be possible in an emulator because of the natural limits of the NES hardware. I was aware of HiSMS, but there weren't any games that I could think of that I would want to really sink into. After some time of searching, I put the thought from my head. Of course it came back, and so I decided to just do some mock-ups at 4x the scale just to see if I could get it out of my system.

Zelda was first. I just took the first screen and broke it all down into the seperate 8x8 tiles and planned on how they would all work together (the rock walls re-used several tiles, so I had to go back and forth several times to get the transitions right) I didn't have any pre-conceived idea on where I wanted to take the look of things, but just took each element at a time.



After that I wanted to try one of my favorite games, Mega Man 3 (Castlevania II would have to wait). I took the starting screen to Spark Man's stage and started to break that down as well.



I stopped working on it about 4 months ago until I came across HDNes.

So now I'm back to working on Mega Man III. First stop is getting a full dump to work from. I'm going to continue the look that I started, and using original concept art to base the enemy and hero sprites from.



More to come soon.

Oh, wow! That Zelda mock-up is beautiful!
The way you managed the cliffs at that resolution, is certainly impressive!
I love how you can see all of the little fabric details on Link's clothes.

What you've done for Megaman looks nice so far! I'll wait until you have more, done before commenting about it. You need a tile dump of Megaman III? I wonder how compressed that game is... >.>

Any plans to do Zelda II? That's my favourite in the series, despite the hate it often receives.

Amazing work, congratulations!!

Thanks guys. Only a short update for today since I've been getting files organized for enemies in MM3 as well as working on Castlevania II. For CV2 there was so much re-use of the same assets, just with different palettes. With this, each palette represents an opportunity to completely redesign an area.

So, even though the Chapel uses outdoor town pieces, they can be very different from the outdoor tiles.
So, I've worked on the chapel some, as well as started to piece together Simon's animations and prep them for paint over.

Excellent work. It's exciting to see HDNes used to it's full potential. If you need help dumping or assembling sheets let me know. I've been doing it for a good long while now. I can also work out the hex codes for music replacement if you need that as well.

I love how your HD graphics stay true and very close to what the original NES graphics were representing! Makes it feel refreshing while still tickling those memories from long ago, rather than foreignating them.

very nice

I think I've decided to drop doing 4x or even 2x sprites at this point. It had been taking me far too long just because of the additional work to make sure these images tile nicely with each other (as nice as they can with how they get used).
So I've dropped myself down to 1x, but using a 64 color palette that was made by @AndroidArts.

And with that, here's my progress on Castlevania 2. The starting town and mansion I tried to keep relatively similar to their 8bit counterparts, but all the other towns and mansions are more freed up as they use completely different tiles. So Rover Mansion was made more like a Sunken City since you get to it from Yuba Lake.

Attaching more images from the other Mansions.

Braham Mansion is home to Death, so skulls, chains and skulls.

Laruba Mansion is home to Carmilla, so it's a little more fancy. I'm not sure if I'm liking the gold blocks yet.

That's pretty cool, it almost looks like Rondo of Blood.

I like a lot your choice of making a 1x hack using many colors instead of going HD.
It's almost like a Castlevania 2 for Sega Master System. Keep on this excellent work!

Tomaitheous has made some NES-to-Turbografx conversions for which this art style would be perfect. If you were so inclined...

https://pcedev.wordpress.com/downloads-and-links/