A Plumber For All Seasons

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

What's this?

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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:

How to play

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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.

The game saves automatically any time you're on the overworld map. Everything important is saved, including exits, lives, coins, powerups, and star coin progress.

Behind the scenes

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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 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 button sequence you need to press when asked to confirm running the hack in an unsupported program.) 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

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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:

Known issues

Incompatibilities

Changelog

v2021-11-22

v2021-11-07

v2021-10-09

v2021-09-02

v2021-07-27

v2021-07-05

v2021-07-03

 

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy playing!

- WYE