Logos
Coilsnake allows you to edit various graphics displayed at the beginning of the game, including the Nintendo, HAL, Ape, Gas Station logos, the text overlays from the Attract Mode, the Sound Stone icon graphics, and new to CoilSnake 4, Ness and Jeff's death screens. They are all available in the Logos directory.
These logos are the first thing you see when the game is started up, so they're very valuable to a hacker who wants to insert their own style and design into their hack. Fortunately, although they appear very simplistic, Coilsnake allows for a fair bit of freedom when customizing them.
By default each one uses between 1 to 3 grey palettes. However, they actually support up to 5 unique palettes each, and they can be whatever colors you want! It's important to keep in mind though that these palettes are 2bpp, meaning each palette only has 4 colors in it. Accounting for the fact that the first color of each has to be the same, that means you get a total of 16 colors across the whole image. Remember though that each tile can only use 1 palette, you can't use 2 colors from 2 different palettes in the same 8x8 area. And to clarify, each of these logos use seperate palettes, so each one can have its own colors.
For a final bit of customization, you can edit how long these logos are displayed with this CCS script by Ari3s!
Infamous for depicting a scene that doesn't really happen in the game, the Gas Station logos nevertheless allow a lot of freedom for customizations. It uses a 256 color palette, meaning you have MAXIMUM freedom for colors, use whatever you want anywhere! However, you do have a limit to how many unique tiles it can use. The original game uses a total of 611 tiles and it's probably best not to go over that amount. (TODO find the actual hard limit)
Do note that only the first image, GasStation1.png is used for the actual arrangement of tiles! The other two images only exist for the flashing color palette, so you can't use a completely different image for the other two, only the colors are used. The first images color is used while fading in up to the first flash, the second image of course is used for the flash, and the third image is used in between each flash.
If you don't care for the Gas Station screen and want to remove it entirely from your hack, simply add this to any CCS file: ROM[0xC4DB33] = "[4C F9 DB]"
This will make the game skip straight from the HALKEN logo to the title screen. However, it will also make the title screen skip its animation and instantly appear in its final position. If you want to keep the animation, then also add this line as well: ROM[0xc3f3d0] = STZ_a(0x9f75)
TODO this whole section, though I'm not sure what exactly needs to be said. they each appear to use a single 2bpp palette.
TODO this section too, though a quick glance over looks like it's split into six 4bpp palettes.
These Death Screen are shown when you get a game over as either Ness or Jeff (no, there is no secret Paula or Poo death screen). You may notice that it includes all 4 sections of the spotlight, while in-game it only shows one at a time and fades between them. This is handled with a special yml file.
How this works is the yml file is split into 4 "areas". Each one controls which tiles are lit up during each phase of the animation. Here's a small snippet of the first Area:
2:
- [0, 0]
- [0, 1]
- [0, 2]
- [0, 3]
- [0, 4]
...
- [31, 29]
- [31, 30]
- [31, 31]
(I don't know why the first entry is number 2, but that's how it is. Every time I say "first" or "second", keep in mind then first is actually 2.)
These are coordinates referring to tiles. It'll be easier to see if you open the image in an image editor with a grid feature and set the grid to 8 by 8. Every tile listed under the first Area entry will be visible during the first phase, then every tile listed under the second Area entry will be visible during the second phase, and so on.
To help visualize this, here's what the areas laid out in the default game look like:
If you redesign your game over screen, you can choose which areas you want to be displayed during each phase by adding the coordinates for their tiles to the relevant phase. You cannot add more phases, at least, not really— beyond the default 4 phases (2 through 5), adding a fifth one (6:) makes it only display briefly at the end, a sixth one (7:) makes it visible the whole time, and adding a seventh one (8:) makes Coilsnake throw an error.
However, you can remove phases just fine! So you can have less, and in fact if you want the whole entire image to be visible all at once, simply delete each of the other numbers (the 3:, 4:, and 5:) so that all the tiles are under 2: and then the whole image can be seen.