Attempted Recreation of "Alpha" Screenshots

[Reld]

This probably isn't as interesting to anyone else as it is to me, but I figured I'd share anyway just in case.



It turns out most of the graphics in this "alpha" screenshot are present in the final game, although slightly modified in places, so I tried my best to recreate it. The leaves are used in a few places. I swiped them from Denadoro Mountain and altered the palette. The sky/distant mountains were taken from Denadoro as well, but I tweaked the palette a little and altered some of the mountain peaks to match the screenshot. The ground tiles are from Death Peak, and they use the same palette as Death Peak's ground tiles in the final.

The Heckran sprite in the screenshot is considerably different from the final, but I didn't want to mess with it so I just pasted in the final one. Same goes for the flames.

I did modify all three of the character sprites.

Chrono's sprite seems to be almost identical to the final, except that I had to move the blade of his sword a little.

Frog's sprite is a little different from the final. His feet don't stick out quite as much, and his tongue isn't as big.

Marle's sprite I had to cobble together from two different poses. That exact pose doesn't seem to exist in the finished game. I also changed her hand so that she has a finger extended.

The menu background is basically just the default from the final without the HDMA gradient and with a custom blue palette. I did add some highlighting on the right edge tiles though. Looking at it again now I think the right edge tiles might have just been mirrors of the left edge at this point in development, which would mean mine are slightly wrong.

A few of the Japanese text characters appeared different as well, so I modified them a little. Specifically ざ ン パ ル and ス.

[Toreadore]

Well, that's pretty damn impressive. I would just assume someone took an HD screenshot of the original if you hadn't said it was a recreation. Of course, I have a bad habit of not always looking closely

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

I assume you did this in Photoshop or another picture editing program (and not via hacking; ie Temporal Flux).

Either way, this is impressive! I think all this is great front page material!

[Reld]

I assume you did this in Photoshop or another picture editing program (and not via hacking; ie Temporal Flux).

You would be correct. I haven't really looked into it much, but I think you'd have to create custom graphics packs to get all of those background tiles on the same screen, even if you didn't care about including my edits. And you'd definitely need a custom palette for at least the leaves. There's nothing about the structure of the map that couldn't be done in TF though.

Speaking of which, here's a fun fact: one of the leaf tiles in the right set of leaves is actually two tiles on top of each other. One with no transparency on the bottom layer, and one with transparency on the top layer. It took me forver searching for that "one tile" before I figured it out.

[Reld]

I changed the thread title because I've done another one of these and I don't really think they deserve separate threads.

This time it's this unknown 2300 location, with a bonus not-so-spikey Crono sprite.



This tileset is interesting. At first glance it looks pretty much like any other future location from the final game, but there are a bunch of differences. The door and the little hatches with the ladders sticking out are smaller. The hatches also have steps leading up to them, suggesting maybe they were actual functioning exits, and there's a closed-lid version. The vertical girders/rafters are narrower. Those two square grates on the floor near Crono are completely new. I'm probably forgetting stuff. Maybe the most interesting difference is that this early version of the future tileset isn't as broken.

Here's a gif that flashes back and forth between the busted up final tiles and the "fixed" ones I made to match the screenshot (where applicable).



Makes me wonder if the future scenario was once a little less dystopian.

Overall this one required a lot more actual drawing, and is therefore surely a lot less accurate. It was fun to do though. I love prototype stuff like this.

[Kodokami]

Wow, this is amazing. Great work!

What I find really interesting is that in your translation, is says "This dungeon is reminiscent of the interior of a spaceship. Could it be the end of time?"

Could it be an actual spaceship that was cut? Is it a prototype, mecha-facility End of Time, à la Chronopolis?? Was the End of Time a spaceship???

[Reld]

Yeah, I thought that was interesting too. My Japanese knowledge is extremely limited, so I was using a combination of Google Translate and DeepL machine translation.  I'm pretty sure they both gave me the phrase "end of time". It seems like an odd question to me. Why would the fact that it looks like a spaceship mean it's the end of time? The exact Japanese phrasing used doesn't seem to match the location we know as "The End of Time" though, so I don't know if there's a connection there. I think they might have been going for something like "this is obviously the far-flung future, surely we won't be going any farther!" maybe? Like it's the end meaning it's as far in the future as we'll go? I don't know.

[Reld]

I tried doing another one. This one is mostly just a mix of the 1000AD house tiles with the less-broken 2300AD tiles from the last one.



I did have to steal a few tiles from the 600AD house tiles, like the red soup and the pitcher on the large table. There are a few new things, like the larger picture frames and the little wrenches on the floor. Some things were modified, like making the mouths of the pots below the big window a little smaller, and reducing the thickness of the side trim on the wood columns between the windows.

I didn't do much to the character sprites. It's especially noticeable for Crono whose stance is totally wrong. I did give Marle pink hair though.

Looking at it again now I can see a few things I missed, like a groove around the edges of the small table that I think should be removed, but overall I'm pretty happy with it.


I did notice something kind of strange about the layer 3 tiles for the light coming through the big window.



In the prerelease ROM there are little lit up bits for the light hitting the curtains, but they're placed a few tiles too high. You can see them as little spikes protruding into the black (dark brown) empty part around the edges of the map. Instead of fixing them for the final game they seem to have just removed them completely. Probably not news around these parts, but it was new to me. For this mockup I just moved them down to where they should be.

EDIT: I guess it's not really the light hitting the curtains. It's more like light hitting the inner walls of the window alcove or whatever you call it.

[ZeaLitY]

Amazing stuff. I'll get it on the alpha page.

[Reld]

EDIT: I've replaced the mockup image I originally posted with a new one. If you still want to see the old one, here's a link. I had originally done the sprite using Queen Zeal's NPC palette from the final game. I knew the Prerelease version had different graphics, but I had mistakenly thought the palette was the same. It's not. So I redid the boss sprite with the Prerelease palette, and due to some of the value changes ended up making a bunch of little tweaks. I had also noticed a white pixel missing from Frog's eye, so this gave me a chance to fix that too. Everything else is the same as the first one I posted.

ORIGINAL POST:
Back with another mockup. This time it's the boss version of Queen Zeal that didn't make it into the final game. I'm really happy with this one.



What's different: Obviously I had to draw the sprite for Queen Zeal, since that isn't in the game at all. I had to bring the moon down a bit and change the arc of the horizon just a tad. The player sprites all needed to be tweaked a little. Ayla's outfit is slightly different, especially the tail/scarf part. Crono's hair is a bit fluffier on top and he's missing the white bandana tail on the back of his head. Frog has some mild edits to his arm, and for some reason the whole blade of his sword is missing. You can still see two white pixels from it coming out of the hilt.

The scrolling earth background was interesting. The version in the final game looks a bit scrambled in my opinion. I couldn't get it to match up with what's in this screenshot, so I took a look at how the tile graphics themselves are stored. Turns out they're in two big chunks that when placed side by side look like this:



From there I was able to figure out what the scrolling background would have looked like when this shot was made.



The blue circle around Queen Zeal is showing the earth graphics with an additive blending mode overlaid on top of the sky and black omen graphics. That's why the earth itself doesn't get brightened by the circle, and why you can see clouds around Queen Zeal's head.

Finally, here's the sprite by itself in case anyone wants it, followed by the Prerelease NPC sprite and the final NPC sprite for comparison:



You can see that the boss sprite outfit kind of matches the Prerelease NPC outfit.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

These are great. You need to do one annually, which seems about on par with your current production output. Always a pleasant surprise to see these!

[Reld]

Thanks! I pretty much just do it when I get the urge. I have a few others that I've started but have been left sitting unfinished for various reasons. I should really finish a few of those up and post them.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

I definitely encourage you to finish them at some point - these are so cool! Nice little gifts to for the community. No rush, of course; I like that you work on them when you feel like it, and they're always a pleasant surprise.