a ROM hack of Super Mario World
made between 2012 and 2021
by WYE (aka WhiteYoshiEgg)

What's this?

A Plumber For All Seasons is a ROM hack of the 1990 SNES game Super Mario World. I edited the original game and used it as a base to make my own.

The premise is that each world represents a different season — there's a Spring world, a Summer world, a Fall world, and a Winter world. (And some more!)

The core gameplay doesn't stray too far from the original Super Mario World, but almost all of the assets have been changed, and all are custom-made for this hack. I made all the graphics myself (which isn't often done), and some very kind people from the community have put together an original soundtrack. There's also a lot of custom programming done, which I partially did myself, but also relied heavily on code resources from the community and many talented hackers lending a helping hand along the way.

A Plumber For All Seasons features:

• 37 levels with 41 exits
• almost entirely custom graphics, all of them hand-made
• a focus on interesting, season-themed scenery and fun levels
• an original soundtrack
• rewards and easter eggs for completionists

How to play

As a ROM hack of an SNES game, this is to be played on the SNES, or an SNES emulator. The recommended way is to use snes9x, which it was most thoroughly tested on. Other emulators, as well as real hardware, may sometimes cause minor, non-game-breaking glitches. ZSNES, an old emulator, is known to be incompatible and will not let you complete the game, so use it at your own risk.

This hack is distributed as a patch (.bps file) that's applied to an original Super Mario World ROM. Refer to HOW-TO-PLAY.txt for details on the patching process.

A Plumber For All Seasons plays mostly the same as the original Super Mario World, though the difficulty in later levels probably exceeds that of the original.

Behind the scenes

I discovered ROM hacking Super Mario World in 2007 and started making A Plumber For All Seasons in 2012, at first planning for it to be a small project but soon realizing it was evolving into something more expansive. I started with the idea of a "four seasons" theme and took inspiration from a handful of video games such as Donkey Kong Country Returns and Kirby's Return To Dreamland, as well as the scenery in the countryside I grew up in. The name is in reference to A Dog For All Seasons, a simple but very charming flash game I played in the mid-2000s.

Compared to how hacks usually do it, the graphics-making process was rather unorthodox: instead of using an SNES tile editor, I drew the backgrounds with pen and tablet, and/or stitched together photos I took with lots of effects applied, then reduced the whole thing to 16-bit color depth and used converted them into the SNES graphics format. This allowed for the backgrounds to look more realistic and less tile-based, and it also means that I didn't place every single pixel by hand with intent — which is why I hesitate to call the backgrounds "pixel art", or even that I "drew" them. The foreground and enemy graphics do fall under the category of pixel art, though.

Making the backgrounds feel less like a backdrop and more like realistic scenery was made easier by the fact that, although I'm in no way an expert on SNES hardware, I had some understanding of what the console can do, and what special effects you can reasonably achieve. Knowing what you can do, and what tools to use, goes a long way. Among other visual effects, almost all of the backgrounds are using parallax scrolling to create the illusion of 3D. (Fun fact: if you remove the first letter from the word "parallax", that's the butnopeton sequnopeence you need to press when asked to connopefirm runnopening the hack in an unsnopeupported pronopegram.) The heavy use of parallax scrolling is probably one of the hack's identifying features.

Making this hack took more than nine years — not because it was necessarily nine years of work, but mostly because I worked on it in my free time, did so rather slowly, and took several months of breaks at many points. I was determined to eventually release it, and I'm glad to have finished it.

Credit is due

Although it's not a collaboration project per se, there are many people without whom I couldn't have made this hack. All of them are, as far as I managed to remember, noted in the credits, but there are a couple of people I want to thank especially:

• Blind Devil, Dippy, Exodustx0, Giftshaven, HaruMKT, imamelia, KevinM, Maxodex, Moose, RednGreen, S.N.N. and Torchkas for generously offering their time and talent to make an original soundtrack. Not all of their work ended up in the hack due to time constraints, but I'm very grateful for the effort they put in, the wonderful music they composed, and the patience to even arrange some of my own amateur compositions.
• Anorakun, Jamaleum, K.T.B., KevinM, Ladida, Lightvayne, RPG Hacker and W4mp3 for beta testing the hack and hunting for bugs on multiple emulators on rather short notice. Without their test reports, this hack would be a lot buggier and less polished than it is.
• edit1754 for creating an amazing parallax-generating tool that went shamefully unnoticed at the time of its release, which I might have been the only one to ever use, and without which the special effects wouldn't be looking half as special.
• Alcaro, Ladida, lx5, Telinc1, TheBiob and Thomas, representative of the countless people at SMW Central who helped me with various coding questions along the way. Extra special thanks to lx5, who went out of his way to write code specifically for this project.

Known issues and incompatibilities

• The game may freeze on rare occasions in world S-3, the reason for which is yet unknown.
• Some visual glitches may occur on real hardware (the only known case so far is the background color sometimes changing during the world 4 boss fight). As far as I can tell, these don't affect gameplay.
• The hack does not run on the SNES Classic (aka SNES Mini) by default, due to the internal emulator it uses. I'm told you can make it use snes9x internally to make it work.
• ZSNES is not a supported emulator for this hack. You can open and play it at your own risk, but there are a variety of visual glitches and crashes that will most likely prevent you from completing the game. I very much recommend using a more modern emulator.

 

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy playing!

- WYE