Kirby's Adventure Study
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: Pixel Art
Forum Name: WIP (Work In Progress)
Forum Discription: Get crits and comments on your pixel WIPs and other art too!
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26622
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 9:21am
Topic: Kirby's Adventure Study
Posted By: CuriousBeefJerky
Subject: Kirby's Adventure Study
Date Posted: 21 May 2019 at 12:07am
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Hi! I've been working on a study for the NES game "Kirby's Adventure", and Kirby art style in general. I'm not trying to replicate the tiles exactly, but more the feel and look of Kirby games(cheerful, round, soft, lighthearted, etc), and am looking for feedback or ways to improve these. Anywho, on with the art. So these don't get lost at the bottom, I'll start with a few enemies in the Kirby style:     These are just some attempts at similar creatures in a similar style, but I dunno what really to say otherwise, so onto the tilesets. (feedback on these welcome though) I chose 5 various tilesets from the game to try getting a feel for the game, so first I'll start with the references: Beach = https://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/kirbyadv/sheet/2607/ Desert = https://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/kirbyadv/sheet/2608/ Cliffs = https://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/kirbyadv/sheet/2637/ Building = https://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/kirbyadv/sheet/2585/ Space = https://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/kirbyadv/sheet/86474/ And here are the tilesets: Beach:  Desert:  Cliffs:  Building:  Space:  And the tiles themselves in case anyone is interested i guess.  These probably are too similar to the original game to be original themselves, but I mostly just made these to study how these tilesets worked, and don't intend to use these for anything. As a study though, Kirby's Adventure is a great subject, especially for things like clouds, water, and backgrounds in general since it seems to do a different style for every background. I enjoy the happy feel of the game too, so I'm trying to study how to replicate that feeling. These are "mostly" following NES rules, but I bent the rules in a few small places, and am using a custom sort of NES style palette I've been working on (might have a post on that once I've tweaked it more. Opinions on the colors are welcome too to help that though). Any feedback or criticism to fix things, better match the style, or just generally improve these would be welcome. Thank you for taking the time if you made it this far down!  |
Replies:
Posted By: NancyGold
Date Posted: 22 May 2019 at 4:37am
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NES artists could not afford wasting precious memory on waterfall animation, so they used color cycling. Color cycling in general can be used to produce very complex animations at no performance cost. |
Posted By: CuriousBeefJerky
Date Posted: 22 May 2019 at 9:37am
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@snv Thank you for the reply. While I do need to study color cycling more, Kirby's Adventure came out in '93, three years after the release of the SNES, and as such the developers were very experienced in pushing the hardware as far as it could go.  The above animations are taken from one of the tilesets from this game (https://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/kirbyadv/sheet/2637/). Kirby's Adventure in general was one of the most well animated games on the NES, and one of the reasons I chose to study it. When recreating the aesthetic of the NES now, we aren't limited by the NES hardware, so I believe in picking and choosing from the best of what it "could" do in order to grasp the feeling and memories of the NES, rather than using limitations just for the sake of limits. For more on this, I recommend this article by Yacht Club on how they broke the rules of the NES for Shovel Knight, while maintaining the aesthetics of the 8-bit era. https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20140625/219383/Breaking_the_NES_for_Shovel_Knight.php Thank you for taking the time to check this out and post a reply though.
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