I posted this on romhacking, but thought maybe some of you guys could help, too. Our next big development is offering truly personalized homebrew games to our customers:
 

*Customer goes on our website and uploads a pic of them or the person they're buying the game for - we create the sprite and "put them in the game"
*Customer chooses some basics - clothing type, hair type, color pallete, etc.
*Customer chooses their shell color
*Customer chooses their label design
*Possibly also gets a hand-drawn or computer-generated print of their sprite
 

Someone has been trying to help me learn TLP but I gotta be honest with myself, I suck. I want to try to do the sprite hacks myself but I'm not sure if I can learn.

My biggest problem is figuring out which tiles match up for each character animation. The game has two characters and maybe 5-6 animations each.

Two questions:

1) Would someone be willing to take my money to make some kind of easy-reference sprite chart showing me which tiles go together?

2) Would anyone be interested in doing the sprite hacks on a flat-fee basis every time we get an order? (plenty of lead time). What kind of ballpark prices are we looking at?

Thanks!

I'm definitely not talented enough to do the sprite hacking gig, however I know enough rom hacking to maybe give some insight.

Basically there are a few emulators that allow you to bring up a ROM's tiles. When you see the tiles, you can actually modify some on the fly, pixel by pixel, and see instant change on the screen, figuring out what piece correlates to what sprite. Each NES game references the sprite table differently, so every NES game could essentially be different in how they store the sprites. I'm sure someone here will definitely add on to what I am saying but that's the gist.

Now there was a YouTube video posted recently that showed how to import a BMP into the NES. He makes it simple and, with a little bit of pixel by pixel modification, you could offer people something pretty cool.

My scenario is silly, not yours. I changed electricity company with the result that I have no power since last Monday hence I can't access my own PC. And I'm already kind of behind schedule with another couple of  projects.


That said, if you can't finding someone solving the issue by when I've electricity back (hopefully soon) and it is just about connect some tiles to some values (hence I can help out with few hours of work making some kind of chart for you to edit the ROM yourself), I'll be happy to help you out (if I can) for the price of a pizza and a soda.

Send me a PM around next Wendesday if you didn't solve your issue yet, and you are interested in me to have a look at it.

I wish you to find a better solution by then.

Cheers!

Edit: minor corrections

Definitely get User to help ya! He's a master at sprites!

Or even better, just wait for someone returning from Japan.