Development:Super Mario World (SNES)/Background Graphics and Tilemaps/Early Level Designs

This is a sub-page of Development:Super Mario World (SNES)/Background Graphics and Tilemaps.

Ghost House Tilesets

There's a particularly significant number of tilemaps within this dump of internal data devoted to Ghost Houses as well as the Sunken Ghost Ship, giving layouts of the blocks, structures, backgrounds, and even some levels.

gost-house-sel2-unit.SCR

An early mockup of a Ghost House level, with individual block designs to the right and multiblock mockups below it.

02 October 1989 13:20

X-gost-house-sel-2-sanple.SCR

Another level mockup that makes use of pipes, ? Blocks, brick blocks, and note blocks on top of the Ghost House tileset items. The level design here looks very crude, and may have been intended to give a sample of the tileset rather than be implemented as a final level.

05 December 1989 21:47

gost-house-sel2-unit-tate.SCR

A design that is similar to sel2-unit.SCR, but has more platforms that are vertically stacked and look to be vertically suspended.

18 December 1989 22:54

gost-house-danjon-BG.SCR

This tilemap features multiple vertically-restrictive tunnels reminiscent of the beginning of Forest Ghost House. Below the two sets of tunnels that is made out of the modern Ghost House tiles, there is a another tunnel with walls made out of the Super Mario Bros. 3 fortress tiles, though the background of the tunnel uses the Ghost House graphics (with a gray palette).

13 July 1990 10:13

gost-house-GOAL.SCR

This tilemap includes level layouts for both the entrance and exits to the Ghost Houses.

06 April 1990 08:48

Notably, this exit level is identical to a level that sits unused in the final ROM.

gost-house-sanple.SCR

A broken level design featuring an older-style background in the top-left quadrant, and foreground over top that background in the lower-right quadrant. However, the Ghost House graphics for the foreground are broken when given the final version's graphics.

13 November 1989 21:58

Bonus Rooms

Various tilemaps have "bonus" in the name, and reveal various ideas for bonus rooms in Super Mario World. The graphics file v-ram-bonus.CGX and the palette file bonus.COL can be used to render these rooms' tilemaps.

bonus.SCR

07 September 1989 14:37

The earliest tilemap file that exists showcasing two bonus room designs, both using the gray blocks used in Super Mario Bros 3.'s castle levels. The design on the left is reminiscent of the final bonus room, but only contains three rows of coin blocks instead of five and has doors instead of pipes. The design on the right has a vertical pipe presumably used to enter the room with three question blocks. There doesn't appear to be an easy way to exit the room, so perhaps the level would have ended at this point after hitting the question blocks.

bonus-back.SCR

09 September 1989 19:54

This tilemap contains four different bonus rooms laid out. The two rooms on the left side contain pipes that could be used to exit the level, and others contain a platform in the middle of the room. The background graphics for each design are distinct, but not apparently correctly renderable with the dedicated graphics files for bonus rooms. It is the first tilemap to use the final striped bonus room graphics; however, the corners on the bottom-left of the room are not correctly rendered, and the palette is slightly darker than in the final game.

bonus-1.SCR

bonus-1.SCR and X-bonus-1.SCR both appear to have identical layouts when it comes to the actual room layout itself.

20 October 1989 14:44

The left room simply contains a pipe on the top-left and bottom-right, with the rest empty. The room on the right has the same pipe configuration but nine question blocks in a square pattern, which is very similar to the bonus game that occurs in the final game upon collecting 100 bonus stars.

bonus-2.SCR

bonus-2.SCR and X-bonus-2.SCR contain room designs that are almost identical to those in the final game, with the latter having an issue on the bottom of the platforms that is corrected in the former.

bonus-2.SCR 31 July 1990 11:53	X-bonus-2.SCR 20 October 1989 14:45

The primary difference between these rooms and the final, besides the differences in graphics, is that the entrance pipe is set into the wall so that Mario enters flush with the left side of the room, instead of the pipe coming out of the wall. This room is also taller than in the final version, with a sixth row of question blocks included (the bottom row must have been removed for the final, as the first set of question blocks begins aligned to the left). The final exit pipe is unaltered from this version, however.

shiro-big-block.SCR

This tilemap lays out various blocks of different sizes made from the castle tileset, including various gaps.

11 August 1990 16:35

shiro-big-block-enkei.SCR is a variation of shiro-big-block, moving the whole tilemap up a few tiles, and adding a various assortment of six different tiles (undisplayable in the castle graphics set) inside the central gap.

17 June 1990 20:26

bg-ami.SCR

This tilemap shows various 16×16 tiles for the grab cage that shows up in levels like Iggy's Castle and Morton's Castle, animation frames for the rotating cage piece, and a sample layout for a level, showcasing rotating cage pieces and cage geometry.

09 April 1990 17:05

For some reason, an identical copy that does not use the same tiles as the original exists on the bottom of the tilemap.

shiro-sen-etc.SCR

This level is castle-themed and serves as a test for line guides. Interestingly, the line guides are ended with regular wood blocks instead of a special tile like in the final game. If this were imported into the final game, any object along the line guide would run off at the end. Also, the spikes on the right side of the ceiling are pointed upwards for some reason.

16 July 1990 14:09

hayashi.SCR

This forest level tilemap shows a combination of foliage, berries, tree trunks, and platforms.

07 June 1990 10:13

The foliage layout to the middle-right is the same layout as the foliage object in the final game, though none of the actual layouts in the image appear to use this layout.