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DudleySoft

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Kid Kirby - a real blast from the past for me.

By DudleySoft 1 Comments

I was actually a programmer on Kid Kirby and I think it's only fair to give a bit more information about the game.

Kid Kirby - a unique platform game.

  • The game starred Kirby as a baby, told from the perspective of an older Kirby re-telling the story.
  • The game was probably the most unique platform game in the world, or would have been had it ever come out.
  • It was the worlds only 100% mouse controlled platform game, yes you read that correctly, 100% mouse controlled.
  • You didn't actually control Kirby directly, instead you gave him a hand, literally. You played a disembodied hand (you can actually see one in the sprite sheet).
  • You grabbed hold of Kirby and pulled back, aiming balls would show you Kirby's trajectory. When you let got Kirby would go flying off (pinging as we called it) in the opposite direction.
  • While he was in the air you could slap him upwards (upto 3 times) or slam him downwards, or you could activate the currently selected powerup (such as paper airplane or rock), the goal was to collect stars and make it to the hoop at the end of each level.
  • The game was to be bundled with a mouse since the game was rather difficult to play using the standard SNES pad.
  • The main game consisted of 120 levels, about 60 of which formed the main body of the game, the others were secret levels accessed via a hidden door (inside a bell IIRC) on one of the levels, it also had a two player split screen race mode where two players raced each other to the exit.
  • It's been a while since I worked on it so some details of the story are sketchy at best, but I believe the gist was that the wand had been stolen from the dream fountain and Kirby had to go (with your help) and get it back, beyond that I can't remember much in the way of story.
  • One thing I do remember is that for some reason we decided that if you got everything on a level you would get 1% game completion, if you completed all 120 levels you would actually have completed 120% of the game (on purpose)

Other things:

The sprite sheet you see here were actually old placeholder graphics for the game, the proper graphics were cleaned up, larger (24x24) and the proper Kirby colour, unfortunately the SNES only dealt with 8x8 or 16x16 sprites and the sprite sheets for the improved sprites wouldn't have made a very good image since the tiles are all mixed up, the actual sprite was 24x24 normally, but could grow conciderably larger when you pulled Kirby back to full power, making the standard SNES sprite sheet even less viewable.

All the graphics for the game were rendered on SGi workstations (lucky artists, I had a horrible IBM Blue Lightning PC at work), and then hand retouched afterwards, this was quite a task  given the number of directions you could pull kirby back in and the number of power variations you could use, it didn't show every direction/power combination but it was still a lot of frames just for kirby.

This game was actually in development at the same time as Grand Theft Auto, strange as it may seem, I was pulled off of GTA (i was originally working on the cancelled Sega Saturn version) and moved back to Kid Kirby, which at the time seemed like a bit of a come-down and was part of the reason I left DMA Design in the first place.

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DudleySoft

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Edited By DudleySoft

I was actually a programmer on Kid Kirby and I think it's only fair to give a bit more information about the game.

Kid Kirby - a unique platform game.

  • The game starred Kirby as a baby, told from the perspective of an older Kirby re-telling the story.
  • The game was probably the most unique platform game in the world, or would have been had it ever come out.
  • It was the worlds only 100% mouse controlled platform game, yes you read that correctly, 100% mouse controlled.
  • You didn't actually control Kirby directly, instead you gave him a hand, literally. You played a disembodied hand (you can actually see one in the sprite sheet).
  • You grabbed hold of Kirby and pulled back, aiming balls would show you Kirby's trajectory. When you let got Kirby would go flying off (pinging as we called it) in the opposite direction.
  • While he was in the air you could slap him upwards (upto 3 times) or slam him downwards, or you could activate the currently selected powerup (such as paper airplane or rock), the goal was to collect stars and make it to the hoop at the end of each level.
  • The game was to be bundled with a mouse since the game was rather difficult to play using the standard SNES pad.
  • The main game consisted of 120 levels, about 60 of which formed the main body of the game, the others were secret levels accessed via a hidden door (inside a bell IIRC) on one of the levels, it also had a two player split screen race mode where two players raced each other to the exit.
  • It's been a while since I worked on it so some details of the story are sketchy at best, but I believe the gist was that the wand had been stolen from the dream fountain and Kirby had to go (with your help) and get it back, beyond that I can't remember much in the way of story.
  • One thing I do remember is that for some reason we decided that if you got everything on a level you would get 1% game completion, if you completed all 120 levels you would actually have completed 120% of the game (on purpose)

Other things:

The sprite sheet you see here were actually old placeholder graphics for the game, the proper graphics were cleaned up, larger (24x24) and the proper Kirby colour, unfortunately the SNES only dealt with 8x8 or 16x16 sprites and the sprite sheets for the improved sprites wouldn't have made a very good image since the tiles are all mixed up, the actual sprite was 24x24 normally, but could grow conciderably larger when you pulled Kirby back to full power, making the standard SNES sprite sheet even less viewable.

All the graphics for the game were rendered on SGi workstations (lucky artists, I had a horrible IBM Blue Lightning PC at work), and then hand retouched afterwards, this was quite a task  given the number of directions you could pull kirby back in and the number of power variations you could use, it didn't show every direction/power combination but it was still a lot of frames just for kirby.

This game was actually in development at the same time as Grand Theft Auto, strange as it may seem, I was pulled off of GTA (i was originally working on the cancelled Sega Saturn version) and moved back to Kid Kirby, which at the time seemed like a bit of a come-down and was part of the reason I left DMA Design in the first place.