Jer's Showreel (New: KSS Mic, Copy, & Crash)

[Jermungandr]

[Jermungandr]

Ice Ability

Fire Ability

Plasma Ability

Finally got around to finishing these sheets. I kinda put them off for a while because these ones were such a pain to compile what with their multitude of palettes and all; and then I just kind of ... forgot about them for a good while.

I gotta say, I'm surprised nobody else has bothered to update these sheets in the nearly 15 years they've been on this site. I mean, did you see this crap:



In my defense, I'm pretty sure the Plasma sheet is the very first sheet I ever submitted to TSR. But good lord their standards must have been low at the time because I can't believe I got away with this incomplete garbage.

Anyways, I'm planning on updating the rest of the ability sheets really soon. Afterwards I'll see about updating the Helpers and then the bosses. Right now I'm willing to take suggestions on which ability I should update next. Your remaining choices are:

Cook
Crash
Copy
Hammer
Mike
Parasol
Sleep
Wing

[Ton]

Great work!

Holy crap, 15 years? Already? That makes me sad.

I'm gonna say Cook or Hammer. A couple of my favorite abilities. Can't wait to see the rest!

[eureka]

Hammer and Parasol Are the ones I suggest. Get the more "complicated" sheets, out of the way, I believe I ripped both of those for another site that stores sprites (using a debug cheat to view the sprite cells in-game), Hammer was probably the hardest one, tbh.

[Dazz]

Now I feel old... But great work man, even your lowest quality trumps some other people's work. It's admirable.

[Jermungandr]

Cook Ability

Hammer Ability

Doing these in the order requested, here is Cook and Hammer to start. I noticed a couple of interesting things when acquiring these sprites.

The first thing is that the gold pot used in the Cook ability is actually divided up into two separate sprites, as you can see on the very bottom of this sheet. For some reason when the pot is first falling into the scene, the bottom half of the pot is placed on a much higher layer than the top of the pot. It goes [Pot Bottom]->[Stove Top]->[Pot Top]. But for the rest of the animation it's a much more logical [Pot Top]->[Pot Bottom]->[Stove Top]. I don't know why it was necessary to do it this way. It's weird. I don't think making the entire pot one single object would have changed anything.

Then with Hammer, one interesting thing I noticed is that when you are doing the Hammer Swing (the spinning move Kirby does while dashing), when the spin begins to slow down it actually doubles the frames of animation to make it look a bit smoother. And it's not that they were going so fast you just couldn't see them all before, half the frames are straight up not there when he's spinning at full speed.

But what makes this even more interesting is that when the additional frames are added they are actually played in the WRONG ORDER. Look at the sheet I just posted here and scroll down to the "Hammer Swing (slowdown)" animation. If you are a careful observer, you might notice that frames 5, 6, and 7 appear to be out of order. The hammer should be extended at the maximum at frame 6, but instead it actually extends on 5 and 7 instead. This ends up making the animation look a little shakey when you view it slowed down. This is not a mistake on my part, this is actually how it plays out in the game.

[Ton]

Hah, that's really funny about the hammer. I wonder if each ability had its own little quirks?
Also, once these are all done can we delete my old "power icons" sheet? Also, if we're requesting, I'm gonna suggest Copy.

[Garamonde]

Mic Kirby! Because I don't want everyone asking for everything else first!

[Jermungandr]

Parasol Ability

This one I think was the most time consuming one to do yet. Most abilities have some randomness to their VFX, so it was only necessary to include the parts that made up the effects. The Parasol ability, however, has some really specific VFX animations. The Hammer ability does too, but its were way less tedious.

Anyways, curious things about this ability. If you look in the box at the bottom of the sheet, you can see the stars that this ability utilizes in its VFX consist of four frames. All four frames of these stars are used properly during the "Parasol Dive" move. However, for some reason when you are performing the dash attack (Parasol Drill), the frames don't play in the correct order. Instead of going 1->2->3->4, it goes 1->2->3->2. This means if you slow it down, instead of looking like they're spinning, the stars instead look like they're rocking back and forth. Luckily this isn't really noticeable at full speed.

On a side note, I've also updated the Plasma, Fire, Ice, and Master sheets with some frames that I missed before. Not anything particularly noteworthy though.

Now I have a question for you guys. A while ago I was gonna do the Crash ability, but I ran into a bit of a paradox. When I pull the image used for the overlay effect through vSNES, it comes out looking like this:




Now I don't know exactly how this works when its being used in the game, but the colors don't look right to me. The stars look way too dark compared to what is seen in-game, even with the partial transparency taken into consideration. So I'm not sure how to go about getting the correct colors? Should I just post it in the sheet as-is? I could use some advice here.

I'm also not sure what to do about the explosion bubble that the background overlays on, because it's not really sprites it's like a Mode effect or something. I'm not sure how that should be presented in a sheet or just left out.

[Ton]

Hmm. I seem to remember the stars being darker and the effect just overlaid on the screen. Am I wrong?

[Davy Jones]

This one? Looks fine to me, transparency can fool you easily about the true looks of a special effect.

[Jermungandr]

I dunno, it seems awful dark to me. The way the stars appear in-game makes it look like overlaying them on background makes it lighter than it was before. I don't think that would be the case unless the stars themselves are light in color.

[Davy Jones]

The light-blue turns into white and the dark-blue stars turn into light-blue ones. Everything is correct here, the effect is brightened ingame. If you made multiple quicksaves during the execution of the ability and still see no change in vSNES, then this is your palette.

[Jermungandr]

Well okay, if that's the case then I'll just use it as is.

The thing is, I don't know why but vSNES doesn't always get the colors right with this game. The white parts on Kirby's sprites in particular are always wrong; it shows them as either a dark pink or a teal color, which makes me not fully trust it.

[Ton]

Hmm. The Crash revision looks like the Kirby sprites are layered on top of each other instead of separate.