Pokey's Adventure is a Super Mario World hack I've been working on from late 2007 to early 2012. It is the second hack I started, after realizing that my very first one really wasn't good enough to be worth continuing. The premise of this hack is, of course, to play as Pokey — an idea I got when I first played around with the tile editor YY-CHR and see what I could replace Mario's graphics with. (I had actually tried out Rex's graphics before, but found they wouldn't fit.) Being my main hack for about five years, Pokey's Adventure has accompanied me through most of the years I spent on SMW Central — that is, until I decided to cancel it in May 2012.

Despite sticking with it for all this time, Pokey's Adventure never really got anywhere. I'm slow when it comes to hacking, so all I had really finished by the time I gave up was five levels. And to think I had seven worlds planned! It would probably have taken me another ten years to make something that looked reasonably finished. I kept thinking I'd pick up pace once the first world was done, but I never even got that far. Not only that, but it started to feel like the concept of Pokey's Adventure was moving farther and farther away from the game I wanted to make. I ultimately decided it was no use sticking to it any more.

For a more verbose version of the above, see the the cancellation thread at SMW Central. That is also where I first released the unfinished demo, which was basically the hack in the state where I left it — a general visual overhaul and five levels with an abrupt ending.

Why am I re-releasing this now? Basically, I'd like it to get just a little more attention than it did last time. This is why I'm not just uploading the bare IPS and announcing it in the ninth post of a thread like I did last time. I'm releasing it more properly this time, adding a readme, background information and providing bonus resources.

The unfinished demo (PA_UnfinishedDemo.ips) is what's left of Pokey's Adventure. It's exactly the way I left it (probably in early 2012 or so), so no end-of-demo polishing has been done.

Note that I restarted the hack from scratch in summer 2009, improving the visuals and, eventually, completely rebuilding the levels. The revamped version is what you're getting here — I'm afraid I've lost any copy of what the hack looked like before that, except for the first demo from 2008 which is still publicly available.

Aside from the graphics being changed and lots of ASM hacks being added, the demo contains five new levels (Pokey Village, The Adventure Starts, Not-So-Grand Canyon, Monty Mole's Domain, Cape Caverns). I got up to the world 2 castle before revamping, but over the last four years all I managed to make was these five. As I said, I haven't put a proper end to the hack after them — you'll find the world 1 castle is just Morton's Castle from SMW with an unwinnable boss battle (if you cheat your way out you won't get any farther on the map), and Switch Oasis, the secret level of world 1, is an early build of the first area of Cape Caverns.

Of course, in a hack starring Pokey, the objective has to be something that's important for a cactus. I decided this particular Pokey (aptly named "Pokey") had six little brothers, and that they would somehow be kidnapped, starting Pokey's journey to rescue them. In the 2008 demo, it was Bowser who kidnapped them, as he had just built up a new army and wanted Pokey to test it.

Somewhere along the way, though, I found that plot to be implausible, if not contradictory. Thus, during the revamp in 2009, I came up with a more intricate plot. Perhaps too intricate, in retrospect — I later realized I never wanted Pokey's Adventure to be that story-driven.

The new plot would have involved a fair amount of cutscenes, had I gotten far enough to create them (the plot unfolding would have taken place somewhere in world 2). I lost the text file in which I outlined the story, but here's how I remember planning it:

I kept the basic premise of rescuing Pokey's brothers, but replaced Bowser with a new villain so I wouldn't have to explain why he'd randomly let his army attack one of his minions.

The new antagonist I came up with was a gnome-like creature called Nevil (alluding to "new villain", but also "not evil"). Nevil had once wanted to join Bowser's army, but was deemed too weak and rejected by Bowser himself. Humiliated, Nevil sought revenge, wanting to build up an empire of his own and overthrow Bowser.

One day, after deciding to explore an old mine, Nevil found a magic artifact that granted him incredible powers. (I had planned for it to simply be a stone, but an amulet or something would have worked just as well.) Thrilled by his newfound abilities, Nevil transformed the entire continent he (and Pokey) lived on, capturing all its inhabitants and turning the mine into his new lair. Out of thin air he created himself an army of Koopas, Goombas and whatnot, to roam the land instead — just like Bowser's, except on Nevil's side. (They're basically clones without a soul, which made it morally acceptable for Pokey to kill them during his journey.)

The only ones who were spared from Nevil's wreaking havoc were the Pokey family, since they had been called by Bowser to fight against Mario in another corner of the world. Pokey's little brothers, however, were too young to fight, so they stayed at home, becoming captured by Nevil like everyone else. When the other Pokeys returned, they found that the entire landscape had changed, as if after a giant earthquake, and that all their friends had disappeared and replaced by what seemed like hostile clones. Pokey's brothers, of course, were missing as well. Pokey, being the fastest plant by far, thus set out to rescue them and find out what has happened to the continent — the adventure begins! (Well, would have begun.)

On his journey, Pokey met a yellow Koopa named Yor (one of Bowser's minions, hence on Pokey's side), who revealed the plot to him, having overheard two of Nevil's minions talking. Coming back to Yor's house after more levels had been beaten, Pokey found that Yor had met a couple more of Bowser's minions who survived the incident, and founded a club called "S.N.N." (Survivors of Nevil's Nastiness).

(Yor is Roy backwards, but I actually forgot if that had any significance.)

Unlocking the Star World unveils a bit of backstory, where a magical Toad would reveal to Pokey that he had created the magic artifact that granted Nevil his powers and sent it down to Earth just to see what would happen. (Of course, he had never meant to cause any harm, and regretted that someone like Nevil found it.)

And the end of the game, just before Nevil started attacking Bowser, Pokey made his way to Nevil's lair, somehow defeated him and rescued all his kidnapped brothers and friends. The ending cutscene would have involved a now powerless Nevil accidentally destroying the artifact while handing it over to Bowser as an apology gift.
the end~

I've never been great at thinking up plots, and I'm sure there are plenty of loopholes and inconsistencies in there too. I eventually realized that I had never wanted such an intricate plot — I would have needed dozens of cutscenes (which consume space, time, and lots of effort) to properly convey the message, while I actually just wanted to focus on the playing experience. The lack of a reasonable plot involving Pokey was one of the reasons I decided to cancel Pokey's Adventure.

Along with the unfinished demo, I'm releasing a couple of resources I made. Check the Bonus content section for more information.

I'm releasing this separately for your convenience and nothing else. As far as I'm concerned, you may take anything you want from Pokey's Adventure — even the resources I didn't explicitly publish. In practice, this will mostly mean ripping graphics, but whatever you're able to extract from this hack is yours for the taking.

Giving credit to me is not needed, but if you want to, go ahead.

I would still appreciate if you sent me a message on SMW Central or elsewhere, if only to let me know you're using something I've made. In the unlikely event that you want to use the character Nevil for your own story, I'd appreciate a message even more greatly.

Also, note that since I'm not submitting this to SMW Central's file sections, I can and will not guarantee that everything will work flawlessly. Send me a message if you believe you've found a serious bug in one of the resources I've included, and I may or may not fix it.

In a nutshell: I allow for virtually everything, but won't guarantee for anything.

What follows are four resources I made for Pokey's Adventure and decided to explicitly release. I'll be going over them in their respective sections.

As stated, you may take any other resources you manage to rip from this hack, not just these four. However, I cannot guarantee I'll fix any bugs you may find in them (including bugs in the following four).

You can find these resources in the folder named "bonus"; the subfolder naming should be even more self-explanatory.

These are the graphics seen in the very first level, "Pokey Village". The set includes desert hut graphics with windows, doors, interior graphics and decoration.

The huts were made to be used with the desert foreground made by Black Squirrel of mfgg.net. Feel free to see how they look in other environments, though.

To be inserted like any other ExGFX set.

This is a font specifically made to be used with RPG Hacker's VWF Dialog patch. Not many custom fonts have been made for his VWF message system, so each contribution counts, and I'll gladly make this one available to the public.

The characters were ripped from an existing font called "DP Comic", a pixellated yet cartoony font with a retro feel to it. Just to clarify, I didn't create that font myself — I simply thought it would fit the style of Pokey's Adventure well, and went on to convert it to the VWF dialog font format.

For detailed instructions on inserting, see RPG Hacker's readme of the VWF Dialog patch. You may need to rename the files if your hack uses more than one font.

An ExGFX set containing foreground and background graphics.

The foreground is the latest version of my Cave tileset — the ground texture now looks more seamless and uses eight colors instead of five. The background is not my own creation, but ripped from the SNES game Ardy Lightfoot.

To be inserted like any other ExGFX set.

This patch makes collecting Yoshi/Dragon coins play different sounds each time, depending on how many you already have. (Think of the red coins in the New Super Mario Bros. games, where the sound effect plays with a higher pitch the more red coins you have.)

There are six different sounds that can be played — five that play when you collect a Yoshi Coin and have five or less, and one that plays when you have more than five. Edit the SFX numbers at the top of the ASM file.

I also included a set of five sound effects that resemble those from Yoshi's Island/NSMB. If you want, you can insert these with an Addmusic of your choice and set the values in the .asm file to the numbers you inserted them as.

This patch is based on imamelia's Yoshi Coin Fix patch, which fixes a couple of bugs that were present in SMW. It happens to hijack the same spot as mine, so I decided to merge the two.

An xkas and an Asar version are included; I highly recommend the latter.