Dream Threshold’s “Blog”

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Comp / Decomp Country

2025-02-02

A Unique Take on ROM Hacking (Maybe)

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 I started this app to help me understand how to hack DKC. Over the last few months, I have been adding in features as I learn about how the game works- focusing on the graphics compression.

 The app can compress and decompress SNES 4 BPP tilesets using DKC's custom compression scheme. It provides an interactive 3D model of bitplanes and the resulting indexed color matrix. And it lets users download palettes, tiles, and level maps (with limitations).

 Being a web app, and being node-based, I feel it has potential for a lot of unique user interfaces. Not quite sure where it will lead, but I have many features in mind beyond just compression. Making a note of it here because it might turn into something new in the future, and I might spin the ideas off into a separate project.

 The GitHub repo can be found here.

Behind the Scenes - “Floorboards” Game

2024-09-30

Game Boy Camera’s Feet of Clay

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 All assets in this game were made with model(l)ing clay. Some were captured using the GB Camera.

 Complete with questionable background and lighting! After that, had to massage the pixels to reduce the number of unique tiles, mirror them, clean up, etc.

 For comparison, the tasty clay “wooden planks”, in color (different layout):


 Overall, lessons learned with the GB Camera...

Pros
  • Great automatic dithering
  • 2bpp, ≤128x112px: ready for GB games
  • Manual brightness & contrast controls
  • Fun :)
  • Auto-adjusting exposure

Cons
  • Really sensitive to IR light
  • Results often too “busy” to be clear/crisp/identifiable in a game
  • Harder to do post-processing, compared to full-color, hi-res photos
  • Auto-adjusting exposure...

 It came down mostly to lighting. I’m sure I could get a better workflow with more trial and error. But for this project, I thought, “aww heck, I just wanna complete this thing in time”.

 So the remaining assets were photographed with my phone, which then required using techniques in

to squish them down into GB conditions. They started out more like this:

 Now, you might be thinking that I had more in mind for the game, which I might return to later. And you’d be right.

 But I wanted to finish something with GB Studio, and re-create this dream that’s been in my head for a while, so this was a good opportunity. Larger projects are planned - still much more to learn about the limitations and possibilites of GB graphics, and more!

 The game itself can be found here on itch.io. Thanks!

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2024-09-30

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