Original Zelda design documents revealed online

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tepples
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Post by tepples »

tokumaru wrote:There's plenty of white space at both sides of the background patterns, so why not shift it to one of the sides so the white space can be used for the sprite patterns?
This is a background design sheet. The best layout of a sprite sheet depends heavily on whether you're using coarse CHR banks (CNROM, GNROM, MMC1), fine CHR banks (MMC3, FME-7), CHR RAM with few updates, or CHR RAM with constant updates. But if I did add a second pattern table, I'd have to shift the nametable and palette up one cell closer to the the title block.

JustBurn's sheet was in a "temp" folder. I might mirror it if I get a chance, but it does need a color printer. I was planning on making the color swatch card a separate page.
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

tepples wrote:This is a background design sheet.
Then get the sprite palette out of there! Then maybe you could increase the size of the squares a bit (I imagine they'd be pretty tiny when printed in A4 paper). I'd make the palette section wider than taller and place it below the name table (there would probably still be space for the sprite palette...), and use the right side for background patterns and attribute table.
The best layout of a sprite sheet depends heavily on whether you're using coarse CHR banks (CNROM, GNROM, MMC1), fine CHR banks (MMC3, FME-7), CHR RAM with few updates, or CHR RAM with constant updates.
Those things affect the background as well, even if not as much.
Nealon2005
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Just Burns BG sheets

Post by Nealon2005 »

Here is that link.

Justburn hooked it up on the NESdev IRC.

http://justburn.is-a-geek.com/temp/NES/PlanningSheets/

Have fun NES Devs

And Thanks Justburn!
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sonder
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Re: Just Burns BG sheets

Post by sonder »

Nealon2005 wrote:Here is that link.

Justburn hooked it up on the NESdev IRC.

http://justburn.is-a-geek.com/temp/NES/PlanningSheets/

Have fun NES Devs

And Thanks Justburn!
The link is broken :(

Anyone have these and can post them somewhere?
sonder
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qbradq
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by qbradq »

Word.
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infiniteneslives
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by infiniteneslives »

I printed some off a year ago. I scoured my PC for the files and can't find them. I wouldn't have deleted them, I'm guessing I printed them from school... Good news is I still have hard copies of the three sheets. They're black and white though, so you loose the pallette colors from the first page. The CHR and BG sheets are only B&W by design though so nothing is lost from them other than hard copy back to digital. If no one posts a link in the next day or so I can scan mine. They aren't drastically different from the ones Tepples made, although they do more closely resemble the Nintendo ones.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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infiniteneslives
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by infiniteneslives »

More than 'a day or so'. So I went ahead with it: zip folder download

I went though the trouble of attaching them in attempts to learn from history... I probably could have compressed them further, but didn't want to loose quality and I'm lazy. Perhaps someone else would like to remaster them?

They aren't perfect, nor are they .pdf but they're better than nothing. I'll be using these to print out more myself as well. So far I've used them mostly for layout/planning purposes and designing mapper architectures/interfacing visually. So they're plenty good as-is for that.
Attachments
NES graphics pg1.jpg
NES CHR planning pg2.jpg
NES BG planning pg3.jpg
Last edited by infiniteneslives on Tue Jul 23, 2013 12:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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koitsu
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by koitsu »

I can have someone turn the 2nd and 3rd JPEG into high-quality scalable (meaning vector) PDF without much difficulty; probably 20 minutes of work for the guy since he does this sort of thing professionally. The first JPEG is a slightly different story.

If anyone's interested let me know and I can ask him.

P.S. -- The "zip folder download" at Dropbox now returns a 404 as well. Can someone just upload the damn zip here? :-) If it's too big (i.e. forum won't allow it), let me know the file size and I can adjust phpBB to permit something larger.
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infiniteneslives
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by infiniteneslives »

Whoops, looks like I copied the link before I renamed the file... Fixed the link, should work now.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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Bregalad
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by Bregalad »

I can have someone turn the 2nd and 3rd JPEG into high-quality scalable (meaning vector) PDF without much difficulty; probably 20 minutes of work for the guy since he does this sort of thing professionally. The first JPEG is a slightly different story.

If anyone's interested let me know and I can ask him.
I'd be interested, but anyways it's not too hard to replicate sheets like this using OpenOffice Calc or similar software.

I'd also need a metatile and meta-metatile planning sheet for my current project.
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Bregalad
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by Bregalad »

OK I tried doing my own customized planning sheet with Open Office Calc.

What do you guys of it ? Could it be improved in some way ?
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bg_planning.ods
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Movax12
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by Movax12 »

How about this? Made some changes.
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Bregalad
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by Bregalad »

It's pretty good actually, but you removed the marks for the "safe screen area".

Also I didn't mention it but there is 3 sheets of different things, I made this mostly to draw my metatiles and metametatiles.
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Movax12
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by Movax12 »

Yeah, I ran out of time to complete the "safe screen area" and noticed after there were other sheets.

I'm not sure about the "attribute area" part. That layout may be more helpful as a reference when coding. Perhaps if that was removed, the line at 128 pixels could be moved to 120 pixels to split the Y coordinates in half.
tsone
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Re: Original Zelda design documents revealed online

Post by tsone »

Link to the article is dead and most of images are not visible. Here's a new link for those who are interested:
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/zelda/1/0

Section Bonus Stage 1: Ancient Documents from 1985 contains the documents and discussion.
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