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What if development for the NES never stopped? How would an 8-bit game feel and play if developed today? We imagined the gameplay would benefit from modern design lessons, and the tech would receive subtle but substantial upgrades. This was possible to an extent on the NES, where technology was built into the cartridges.
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Widescreen 16:9 display (or 5:3 on the 3DS)
Part of our modern upgrade was extending the viewable screen space, avoiding the black bars you would see in an NES virtual console game. This meant displaying our game at the 16:9 resolution native to most modern displays. While we did change our aspect resolution, we didn’t change the resolution in terms of making Shovel Knight a pixel-dense HD game.
Instead, each Shovel Knight pixel is really 4.5x4.5 pixels at 1080p, giving a virtual resolution of 400×240. An NES outputs at 256×240, giving us the same viewable vertical resolution. Our background tiles (like most NES games) are 16×16 in size, and we have the same number of vertical tiles as an NES game. Keeping the vertical and tile size dimensions were important to us in order to match the gameplay feel of NES titles. The only difference is additional horizontal space, which we thought was a great addition, allowing extra room in level design for puzzles, objects, and breathing room.
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Background parallax
Background parallax scrolling is the ability to shift different layers or parts of the screen at different rates, giving 2D layers the appearance of 3D movement. Imagine watching out the side window of the car on a highway: the mountains far away don't appear to move at all, while the posts whiz by very quickly. The beginning of our first trailer gives a taste of the effect. This advanced effect is much more typical of the SNES. It was possible on the NES, but only with a lot of trickery. Programmers had a couple of options:
Make sure no parts of the background intersected and scroll them in only one direction: Non-intersection in Shatterhand
Create an animated tile of a background scrolling at a different rate: Animated Tiles in Metal Storm
Non-intersection in the background and sprites in the foreground in Batman
Early on with Shovel Knight, we decided to amp up the parallax scrolling, creating an average of 5-6 layers of backgrounds to scroll by. This felt like the next technological step the NES would make so it didn't feel out of place to us. More importantly, adding the effect made the gameplay layer more readable. There was another great benefit to having so many layers: we could really take advantage of the 3DS’ eye-popping stereoscopic effects!
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Number of Colors Per Sprite
Sprites on the NES were limited to 4 colors (or 3 colors + transparency) as you can see with the sprite characters in The Legend of Zelda screenshot on the right.
Some developers created more colorful sprites using another trick. Characters like Mega Man were constructed out of two sprites, one for his body (blue, light blue, and black) and one for his face (beige, white, and black), and the sprites were overlaid. This is why Mega Man’s face will flicker separately from his body sometimes. For Shovel Knight, we decided to treat most sprites like Mega Man, and give them 4-5 colors to work with in addition to transparency.
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Big Sprites
The sprite hardware on the NES was not optimal for drawing very large moving objects, due to the limitations it imposed (after all, even a few small ones could cause flickering). To get around this limitation, clever developers displayed big art as animated background tile layers. That is the reason why, whenever you fight a large enemy on the NES, they are usually on a black screen with no background art. The boss is the background.
We thought that the black background with the huge boss always gave NES games a distinctive and epic feel, where the focus was just on you and your enemy, so we decided it was important to keep. However, lacking sprite limitations, we didn't need to mess with background layers or other workarounds to make a large sprite possible. We simply used our animated sprite code, were careful with the designs, and made sure the sprite was on a black (or very dark) background.
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Sound Limitations
The music is probably the most authentically NES part of Shovel Knight, although it might seem more lush and full than you'd expect for a NES game. That’s because it is written to use a special memory mapper / sound chip called the VRC6, which was used in several Konami games toward the end of the NES era. This chip allows for advanced graphical techniques, but most famously adds 3 additional sound channels, giving the music much more richness and depth. However, external sound chips such as the VRC6 only worked on the Japanese Famicom, as the Western NES lacked the necessary cartridge connections, so it's an unfamiliar sound to most western gamers. Compare the music in the US version of Castlevania III with the Japanese release, Akumajou Densetsu; the difference is striking.
Another limitation of the NES was that sound effects would often cause one of the audio channels to drop out. The NES shared the same 5 basic channels for both music and sounds, so the SFX would temporarily steal one or more of the music channels in order to be played. This effect is not present in Shovel Knight - the sound effects are simply layered on top of the music, which is completely inauthentic, but much nicer to listen to.
