Hi,

I know how busy folks are, but I wanted to talk a little bit about one of my Favorite games on the SNES, Harvest Moon.



UPDATE: Yes this is still alive, been busy with college of course, but with summer break coming up, I have more time to work. I'll post some stuff here from time to time for feedback requests. Be sure to let me know what you think.

UPDATE07MAY2015: Got a lot of work done this week on Jacks sprites. Check the thread for details. Started work on redoing the dialog throughout the game. Also begin looking at how to move and modify the location of things in the game.

UPDATE09MAY2015: More sprites redone, and a little preview video of them in game.




Feedback would be appreciated.

UPDATE16MAY2015: Between fits of wondering when Ill be able to play the Witcher 3, I continue my first runthough of the dialog. Correcting the most glaring and obvious mis-translations, adding clarity, and fixing grammar errors as I find them. Such as Lightening versus Lightning. BAD Weather Forcast dialog, BAD!

Not sure on the difficulty, but that would be amazing! If you do go forward with this and it picks up steam, my wife would also thank you for including a 'cute' mode where you play as a girl. Two of her favorite games of all time are Harvest Moon and Maniac Mansion.

Im just at this point, unsure how to even edit the tile sets and sprites etc. Im not even sure what tools to use... I have a few successful windows games I worked on so Im sure once I get some direction I'll do fine.

If this edits go well I was considering making maybe a "Cute" version of the game, where you play as a Girl, and swapping all the marriage folks to guys...

I would look into using Tile Layer Pro for drawing new sprites. As far as everything else, might be a little tricky.

I'll check out Tile Layer Pro, thanks for the tip. I wonder how you can figure out the palettes?

Eventually there will be some sort of hacking tool released for the game I'm sure. I'm sorta surprised one hasn't been released yet, to be honest.

There is currently a Harvest Moon editor, called HME. It can handle graphics edits, since Harvest Moon apparently uses special compression for it's tiles.

Yeah I found that. I've been tinkering with it, in addition to messing with coding for the NES.

How difficult it is to do and how C/C++ knowledge could apply: imagine you have a PC program written in C/C++ by someone else, compiled, no source code available, and you want to do those changes.

You know for some reason, when I initially thought about doing this, I had my head wrapped around the idea that the source code would be available... I dont know why I thought it would be that way... after going through Bunnyboy and Khans stuff for the NES, I feel like I actually got a much better grasp on how things work on the NES and SNES. Assembly isnt nearly as hard as I thought it would be... only 52 functions huh? Some habits I have to break are programing in object structure, and things like how global variables and the like work. Also, remembering all those registry values where things are stored, in HEX is odd for me.

Most of my projects in college revolved around programing mods for Quake C, and most of my recent experience has been developing a Roguelike for the PC/Linux.

I have done a little digging, I can change map tiles around, create new tiles... create new character sprites, and edit dialog, so in "theory" my goal should be doable..

I could in fact make a "Harvest Moon SNES for girls" or updated graphics style Harvest Moon.

Then I thought, since I was messing with all the NES Nerdy Night and Khan stuff, what about;

Harvest Moon demake on the NES. Probably way over my head at this point, but doable some day..

Sounds like a cool idea. My wife wold definitely be into the "cute" version as well. I'd be down for buying a copy that had cleaned up language and whatnot. Best of luck to you.

I already started messing with redoing the sprites in a more Gameboy Advanced style. (Sorta like friends of mineral town). Once I have something more concrete to show Ill post it. (A big change is how the eyes are done, as you know, in the SNES everyone has creepy "Beedy" eyes)

Just an update. I AM still working on a Harvest Moon hack/re-release for SNES. I finished my spring courses for college, and now Ill have a whole 16 weeks of time to try and get some work done.

I am also looking at releasing a reproduction version of this using infinite nes lives' new component boards/shells. Mostly the time consuming part is going through and redoing sprites, but other then being incredibly time consuming, Ive finally got a process down, so I can start working on this in force.

Kind of bothers me that Earthbound gets all this special treatment but Harvest Moon for the SNES is pretty much ignored, even though IMO its one of the best SNES games out there.

Hey I know it's one of my favorites.

Harvest Moon fans unite!

Which reminds me... the new "Jack", yes, he is going blonde. Or at least as blonde as an SNES pallete will allow.. The big thing as I said is the eyes. No more bug eyes. Also, his "cap" will probably be more like the friends of mineral town variant, with the darker brown bill on it.

You know I'm not normally a repro-kind of gal. But I could certainly get my wallet behind an affordable Harvestmoon improvement.

He looks a little cross eyed - have you tried maybe giving him the square style eyes?

Im still working with it. Even in your example, you just dont have a lot of room with pixel wise to avoid the "cross eyed" look. BUT what is interesting is they give them a eye color in final fantasy, which I hadnt thought of.

It looks like in Final Fantasy they get away with it by giving a wider face with 2 pixels between the eyes.. I could try it out. Ill post a few attempts here. Jack(The main guy) is the hardest change, because he has about a million sprites with tons of animation. Everyone else is easy.

This is a shot in game. Side shot anyway. Im still working on the front parts...




This is the original. Im trying to be subtle to be honest.

For comparison, the original, same shot.



As you can see, he is kinda cross-eyed to begin with.

In the new one, We change the hair color, adjust face shading and eyes a bit, and hat bill color, and most importantly, give him some brass buckles for those coveralls.

90% of Jacks frames done. (God lord this game had a lot of animation) and special surprise because I needed a break from Jack, the new an improved, lovely as always Ann. Jack also has blue eyes, which is what the box art shows. I gave Ann dark blue eyes. All art I can find of here has this eye color. I also redid a bit of her body style and animation. Not finished with her yet, but she came out nicely for a first draft.

Small update, all of Jack's sprites and animations are "done" minus a few tweaks and things I am trying to track down. Since I'm trying to just modify the original sprite to provide more detail this inst a super hard process, but it was tedious with 100s of sprites I had to change for Jack alone. Thank god the rest of the characters in the game have very minimal animation.

Ive also started beginning the process of going through all the games text and cleaning it up, making it not sound like a bad English subtitled movie from the 90s.

And Ive started working on a lot of the other games characters. More sprite detail, better animation where I see it needs improvement.

OH and I fixed original bugs and mistakes with the original sprites, which I found several places that were messed up. These are small things folks might have never noticed in the original game, but I found a lot of them. Jack missing a hand in one frame, or someone missing an ear.

Did a lot of testing with re-working the map this week. Its going to be a problem. I can move things around, but a lot of the events and things "expect" stuff to essentially be located at a specific location, which causes some serious problems if you move something that an NPC needs to go to, or things like the house being upgrade/events like the Well opening up.

Its a difficult problem, Im not sure how to solve.

Small video update showing some progress. As I said, all of Jacks sprites have had a first pass done. Some major changes, some minor. Still a few bits here and there where Im adjusting things.

You also can see some of the other sprites alterations in the video.