Week Two comes to a close for this WCW ROM hack project.
I raised my weekly workflow goal from ten to twelve attires and ended up surpassing it, completing nineteen in total. To offer a quick preview of the progress, I uploaded a YouTube Short highlighting several of the new designs.
These preview videos display the default color settings for each attire, all of which can be customized in-game. Also, I am using one character (Dake Ken) as the model for the attires. Skin colors and body shapes will vary in final forms.
The first major challenge this week involved recreating Steve Austin’s early 1990s patterned trunks. Hand-drawing these designs can be tedious, and at first I considered simplifying the process by copying the pattern and applying a 256-color palette. That method would have allowed players to freely adjust colors, including skin tone. However, two concerns came to mind. First, it could create confusion if a darker-skinned wrestler, such as Scorpio, appeared with bright white thighs. Second, it conflicted with my guiding philosophy of honoring the original AKI design principles. The AKI artists never used that approach, and I wanted to preserve that same level of intent and authenticity in my work.
Working within the limits of a 16-color palette, I was pleased with how the attires turned out. I enjoyed Austin’s variety, so I created a few additional variants, including the base Hollywood Blondes design. After that, I moved on to Paul Orndorff and Paul Roma for “Pretty Wonderful.” Like Windham and Rhodes, their basic attires required careful palette planning to ensure variety while staying true to the originals. Finally, I completed Z-Man for the first half of the week, and I’m especially happy with how his neon-style design translates in-game.
On Thursday, I reinstated my Discord server and set up text channels for reference images. Using drag-and-drop, I was able to organize references for the remaining wrestlers on my 81-man roster. I don’t think I’m ready to make the server public yet. Perhaps when Version 1.0 is released, it could serve as a space for players to report bugs or other issues.
I aimed to create at least four attire references for most wrestlers, or at minimum, palette variants to fill the costume slots. I’m not looking forward to drawing eight Steiner singlets, though. I don’t think I’ve ever met another modder who actually enjoys creating singlets.
I decided to circle back to Vader and work on him for a future matchup with Cactus Jack. I felt that the default “fat” body size in Revenge wouldn’t do him justice, so I imported shapes from Virtual Pro Wrestling 2’s Body Shape 8, which is the same as WM2000’s Shape 7. This will replace a “Manager” body shape group, which currently contains wrestlers like Onoo and Hart, and will now be used for Vader, Bigelow, Abdullah the Butcher, and Dusty Rhodes.
I wrapped up the week by finishing the 2 Cold Scorpio and Marcus Bagwell split tights. Along with singlets, split-design tights are not my favorite. They require a lot of file switching, copy-pasting, trial and error, and careful organization within the code. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the name text perfectly aligned due to sizing limitations, so I had to use an alternate approach. Even so, they turned out pretty awesome.
My favorite attire this week was Brian Pillman’s Bengal tiger print trunks. Just typing that out, I can almost hear Jim Ross saying, “played for the Cincinnati Bengals…” while calling Pillman’s moves. It’s such a simple texture, yet it perfectly exemplifies the distinctive “AKI style” of design.
I also now have a stable coding system for all new textures in the game. Rather than jumping around memory, I started with Texture 1 and worked through a linear progression. This makes it easier to track everything and structure the code for importing into the ROM. So far, I have completed 39 of the 147 maximum attire slots, which leaves plenty of room to continue. If needed, I can expand with extra coding, but for now, I’m focusing on one attire at a time.
See you next week.