Hacking Resources/Graphics

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This article is aimed at helping creators (aspiring or otherwise) with the graphics side of things. More will be added here soon.

Tools

RHDC Cutout Alpha Fixer

As per its own description, "This tool fixes unwanted "outlines" on the edges of transparent pixels caused by the N64 attempting to blend with the colour data stored in completely transparent pixels (usually black). This tool sets the colour data of fully transparent pixels adjacent to visible pixels to match the surrounding colour(s) to prevent black borders around transparent pixels."

RHDC Texture Splitter

This tool is located on the same webpage as the Cutout Alpha Fixer, but is the third tool down. As per its own description, "Splits a large texture into multiple smaller textures and generates a model for you that can be imported into Blender (or your 3D modelling program of choice). UV mappings are automatically generated to ensure that there are no seams between textures."

FireAlpaca

A free drawing program supported on Windows and MacOS. Can do pretty much anything you would ever want a drawing program to do, including pixel art and animations. If you've ever heard anyone tell you to use GIMP Studio, ignore them, GIMP hasn't been good by present standards in years. If you are using FireAlpaca to create your hack logo and need any help, ElectricYV is both adept at using FireAlpaca, and always happy to lend a hand.

 

Game Fonts

When using a font made by a third party, it's always worth checking the licensing before downloading it. All of the fonts recommended on this page are free for personal use- meaning that as long as you're not using it for profit (such as designing a real company's logo or making an advert with it), that's totally okay. All of the links for fonts and their designers listed below will take you to a website called fontspace.com- it's a free website that makes it easy to know what the licensing is for each individual font. All of them are compatible will all operating systems.

I recommend downloading these fonts properly and adding them to your font library, but if you're keen to avoid downloading anything, you can also copy and paste the font samples as images. Do this by typing what you want it to say in the website's sample box, then right-clicking the image it creates. You can change the font size using the slider next to the input box, but anything that doesn't fit within the sample image's box may get cut off when copy-pasting the image, so long strings of words may require a fair few images.

The example pictures used below have the "anti-aliasing" rendering option disabled. When using these fonts as intended, they will scale perfectly to whatever resolution is specified.

Super Mario 286 Made by 538Fonts . The only Mario style font I know of with lowercase letters available. Very good coerage of characters, even includes accented characters and some lesser-used punctuation. Personal use is free.
Squirk Made by Chequered Ink. A very good font to use for a more formal, but still SM64, look. Personal use is free. Here is an example of this font being used.
Typeface Mario 64 Made by ripoof. The upper and lowercase letters are actually different from one another, which is great if you want to avoid using the same looking letters too often. Personal use free.
Glue Gun Made by Chequered Ink. Similar to Squirk, but more uniform. Though there's no lowercase letters, it has good support for special characters. Non-commercial freeware.
Super Mario Brothers Made by The Liquid Plumber. Lowercase letters here are hollow, which is pretty neat. Unfortunately doesn't support any special characters, including numbers. 100% Free.
Random 5 Made by Lyric Type, though the account is no longer active or accepting messages. Good upper and lowercase letters, as well as numbers, but no support for special characters. Licensed as freeware.
Polygon Party Made by Ultra Cool Fonts. Has a upper and lower case letters, but no other numbers or other characters. Licensed as freeware.
Non-SM64 (but still useful) Fonts
RO Spritendo Made by ripoof. This font is a good imitator of Nintendo's logo's font. Has distinct upper and lower cases, and good support for other characters. Licensed under the public domain, which is awesome.
SNES Font Made by Lyric Type, though the account is no longer active or accepting messages. This font imitates the SNES logo. No lower cases, but does have decent support for other characters. Licensed as non-commercial, so personal use is free.
Inky Thin Pixels Made by Chequered Ink. A good pixel font to use, as it's quite readable, has distinct upper and lowercase letters, and has good support for special characters. Freeware, non-commercial.

 

Creating Custom Textures

Due to the limitations of the N64, it's best to stick at least somewhat closely to its limitations. For textures, that means it's best to try and use no more than 2048 pixels- which is usually a 32x64 pixel canvas, although it can also be smaller if you wish. Luckily, these 2048 pixels can be arranged in any way you want. Most of the more detailed features in Super Mario 64 are comprised of multiple textures. A good example is the paintings themselves- Bob-omb Battlefield's iconic painting is two different textures measuring

To the right is an image demonstrating some of the canvas sizes you can use. Remember that coordinates and measurements are always arranged in X Y order. That means the first number will always correspond to the width, and the second number corresponds to the height. For 3D work, the third number will be depth, but for the sake of 2D textures, you don't need to worry about that.

Extra Advice for Creating Visuals

PNGs, not JPEGs

PNG image files have many advantages over JPEGs (also written as JPGs and jpegs), but in a game creation context, one of the more important features is the ability to have transparency. JPEGs cannot contain transparent pixels, and will instead automatically fill in transparent pixels to be white. Furthermore, the quality of JPEGS degrades much more easily, and they are less optimised for storage space.

Dark Levels

Creating a dark environment can very easily lead to having players stumble around blindly in a void of subtle textures. Here's some advice to help with texturing dark areas:

• You can make shades of grey appear artificially darker by adding a primary blue hue to them.
• When creating a dark level, try using a wide variety of subtle textures. For example, having one of your dark textures have a visible brick pattern over it will help the player to differentiate between it and the wooden texture of a door, whereas only using differing greys and blacks will almost certainly lead to confusion.
• Add colour hues to your dark textures depending on what area they are for. For example, adding a red hue to your dark textures will definitely help a volcanic area feel more authentic. (Do bear in mind that when using "dark orange", that is actually brown! Hence why it's better to go straight for red in fiery areas). It can also help immensely with contrasting areas- let's say your volcanic level has a secret cool area hidden in it. Adding a cyan/blue hue to your dark textures will help it to "feel" more cold than the rest of the level.

For pixel art, make sure you turn off "Anti-aliasing".

Anti-aliasing, in this context, is the modifier that is smoothening out pixels by adjusting colour and pixel positions. However, anti-aliasing does not work for creating pixel art, which requires pixel-perfect lines. Let's compare the two- in the example to the right.

I have drawn out four lines with a dark pen. The width of the brush was set to exactly 1, 2, 3, and 4 pixels, so it should be exactly that, right? However, we can only see this is the case in the top half of the lines. The top lines were drawn with anti-aliasing turned off, and the bottom lines were drawn with anti-aliasing turned on. Note the wildly different hues present in the bottom lines that have undergone anti-aliasing; these lines were drawn with the same hexadecimal colour and exactly 100% opacity.