top of page

Mario Mash-up

My two main responsibilities at 4J were:

- Creating art assets

- Writing developer tools for Photoshop scripts

​

Alongside texturing new terrain blocks in the 1.8.8 update, and creating skins for the Festive, Halloween and Greek skins pack, my main focus was working with Nintendo to deliver the Mario Mash-up Pack for Minecraft WiiU edition.

​

Overview

Studio

4J Studios

Role

Junior Artist

Platform

Console

Date

2015

Key Skills

Pixel Art

Tools Development

Client Brief

In a Toad inspired Minecraft landscape, Toadette and Waluigi explore the landscape whilst collecting diamonds.

Art Assets

I took great care in diving into the Mario universe to find suitable crossovers.

As a long term Mario fan, it was a delight to redesign the majority of the items, from concept through to final sprite.

 

Highlights included using Cheep Cheeps as the fish; the F.L.U.D.D for the bucket; part of the Wing Cap for the feather; and Yoshi Eggs for the spawn eggs.

​

Nintendo were a fantastic partner to work with, giving plenty of creative freedom to explore, and supportive documentation where they wanted refinements. 

  • Redstone and Transportation item menu screen
  • Materials menu screen
  • Food item menu screen
  • Tools, weapons, and armour menu screen
  • Tools, weapons, and armour scrolled down menu screen
  • Brewing items menu screen
  • Misc items menu screen
  • Misc items menu screen scrolled down
  • Turnaround of Mario in his bee armour
  • Turnaround of Mario in his tanooki armour
  • Turnaround of Mario in his frog armour
  • Turnaround of Mario in his cat armour
  • Turnaround of Mario in his penguin armour

Alongside items, I drew armour,

I took inspiration from titles such as Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Bros. 3.

And animated textures.

I also dabbled with some VFX, creating the lava and nether gate effects.

Animated lava flows in the Nether,
Bowser's face grows and shrinks in the Nether portal.

My favourite task was recreating iconic Super Mario 64 paintings in pixel form.

A collection of paintings and symbols from the mario universe in pixel art form including, star, shine, Tick Tock Clock, Bomb-omb Battlefield, ! boxes, and Peach's stain glass window.

Developer Tools

Exporting textures was a manual process, 

Slow, painful, and prone to error. Marketing art, animated textures, PC tests, and IP holder reviews all required textures to be saved in specific format.

I wrote several scripts,

In JavaScript, I wrote a number of Photoshop scripts, which handled the exporting of the texture assets from the PSDs by:

- Setting the correct texture size.

- Constructing the file name based on the pack and platform.

- Creating and storing the file in the correct file path.

Taking a multi-day process to a
few hours.

Mostly, the scripts were run over an artist's lunch hour, saving even more time.

A script prompt box displays over marketing art for Minecraft Star Wars in Photoshop.
A snipped of JavaScript code showing the beginnings of a texture exporter.
bottom of page