Mermay's Den

Mihoshi20

Member
Just a simple little Mermaid adventure game I've been toying with the concept of where you fight or avoid sharks and seek out the treasures that open the pathway forward.

MermaysDen_05062018.png
 

JakeSpencer

New member
Nice! I like the shadowy illumination style of the scenery. It's also a great place to add real/imaginary elements of underwater luminescence like deep-sea jellyfish and sturgeon, etc. Keep up the good work.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
JakeSpencer said:
Nice! I like the shadowy illumination style of the scenery. It's also a great place to add real/imaginary elements of underwater luminescence like deep-sea jellyfish and sturgeon, etc. Keep up the good work.

Ooo, Jellyfish. I didn't even think of that and how could I not as they're one of my upmost fav aquatic creatures. Good call on that one. But yeah, trying to go for a minimalist approach with this one and really liked how the mansion part on the title screen to the glass ring went. I'm doing a bit of a coloring thing inspired by a lot atari 2600 games specifically haunted house where the background color changed depending on what floor you're on. With this it starts out ark in the deep depths and gets lighter as you move up towards the surface.
 

RadJunk

Administrator
Staff member
Great stuff....can't wait to see some gameplay. :)

If this all takes place *under water*, even though it's really a side-perspective game, I'd cleverly use the top down engine (that people are using now) and slow the acceleration way down (and only show left and right animations, or at least no up and down animations...but that way you have "swimming movement" in each direction and it feels sorta flowy.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
TheNew8bitHeroes said:
Great stuff....can't wait to see some gameplay. :)

If this all takes place *under water*, even though it's really a side-perspective game, I'd cleverly use the top down engine (that people are using now) and slow the acceleration way down (and only show left and right animations, or at least no up and down animations...but that way you have "swimming movement" in each direction and it feels sorta flowy.

Yips, that's the plan. To have it only take place entirely underwater using only facing right and left animations but still up and down motions within the current top down 'adventure' engine. The icey style acceleration gives it a floaty feel though I don't plan to go overboard with it as player control is key as some precision movement between baddies will be tricky in spots.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Just a small update. Decided to make some quick gameplay footage now that the demo is finished and also gave me a good chance to make good use of my idle since 2011 youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNG3edAgG0A

No sound or music yet so don't worry if you don't hear anything.
 
That looks great. You are probably planning more stuff like more animation to Mermany? Different colour/style of BG for levels/areas? And I don't know how it'd be done but if a couple small bubbles coming from Mermany randomly as they swim and float up a bit before disappearing would maybe look good.
With some good music and sfx I'm looking forward to playing.
I'm thinking cover art but Creature from the Black Lagoon is coming to mind.... Den.... Is the Den the whole area of the game, a place in the game, a goal to reach, or just a name?
Almost as much fun seeing other people's creations as making my own. :D
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Tengen Games North said:
That looks great. You are probably planning more stuff like more animation to Mermany? Different colour/style of BG for levels/areas? And I don't know how it'd be done but if a couple small bubbles coming from Mermany randomly as they swim and float up a bit before disappearing would maybe look good.
With some good music and sfx I'm looking forward to playing.
I'm thinking cover art but Creature from the Black Lagoon is coming to mind.... Den.... Is the Den the whole area of the game, a place in the game, a goal to reach, or just a name?
Almost as much fun seeing other people's creations as making my own. :D

Yeah, more refined animations and probably a complete design to the mermaid herself is planned. The idea is that you start off in a dark cavern that gets lighter as you move up towards the surface. As for the name, it's a play on the word Mermaiden and that you're traveling through caverns. It's going to be fun to tweak and evolve it over time with future NESMaker versions, polishing it up and adding features as they comes along. :D
 

RadJunk

Administrator
Staff member
This is stellar - i’d refine the movemenr code too (don’t worry, there will be all sorts of codes for you to pull in and edit) to prevent the sudden stop and really make it feel swimmy! Of course, it HAS to get as hard as the TMNT dam at some point, right? Haha
 

Mihoshi20

Member
TheNew8bitHeroes said:
This is stellar - i’d refine the movemenr code too (don’t worry, there will be all sorts of codes for you to pull in and edit) to prevent the sudden stop and really make it feel swimmy! Of course, it HAS to get as hard as the TMNT dam at some point, right? Haha

LOL, timers....bombs... electric seaweed... beeping life meters!!!!!!! Ahhh, the trauma has returned!!!!!!!!!!!! But man that death jingle and level music was really cool. Konami should just bring back Ultra Games, people would love them again.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
The_M_is_Real_2018.jpg

Well I just couldn't leave well enough alone and here's the results. Milestone 1 complete. Mermay's Den running on actual hardware. :geek:
 

Mihoshi20

Member
MistSonata said:
That's awesome! I need to figure out how to get mapper30 working on my N8

While doing research trying to see if someone made a mapper 30 definition for the powerpak I ran across a few articles mentioning one premade for the everdrive N8, I think one of them Joe even participated in talking about running troll burner on it. But as I recall you had to like side load it. I wish I could recall the link now but I didn't have an everdrive so it was a dead end for me and something I disregarded for now. But it's out there in the sea of the internet.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Very short vid of new revision running on real hardware.

Title Screen and some Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjLy8Bb9uKo

Full Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHDSIfCr-_U
 

Mihoshi20

Member
VsMermaysDen.jpg

Managed another fun little exercise today. Managed to get Mermay's Den running on the Nintendo Vs Unisystem/Red Tent... well, the MAME implementation at least. Colors are off due to differences in the Vs. Unisystem PPUs and not taking the time to convert them properly yet. Also only title screen for now as MAME bawked at anything over 128KB so I seriously had to trim it down to fit and rework to still have it boot, but fun to see running none the less. Even better to see it on the real hardware but that's beyond my current budget.
 

Craigery

Active member
Mihoshi20 said:
VsMermaysDen.jpg

Managed another fun little exercise today. Managed to get Mermay's Den running on the Nintendo Vs Unisystem/Red Tent... well, the MAME implementation at least. Colors are off due to differences in the Vs. Unisystem PPUs and not taking the time to convert them properly yet. Also only title screen for now as MAME bawked at anything over 128KB so I seriously had to trim it down to fit and rework to still have it boot, but fun to see running none the less. Even better to see it on the real hardware but that's beyond my current budget.



ZOMG! How hard would it be to flash this onto the chips for a red tent? I have a Super Mario/Dr Mario red tent and it would be amazing to throw my own game in there (in the future)
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Craigery said:
Mihoshi20 said:
VsMermaysDen.jpg

Managed another fun little exercise today. Managed to get Mermay's Den running on the Nintendo Vs Unisystem/Red Tent... well, the MAME implementation at least. Colors are off due to differences in the Vs. Unisystem PPUs and not taking the time to convert them properly yet. Also only title screen for now as MAME bawked at anything over 128KB so I seriously had to trim it down to fit and rework to still have it boot, but fun to see running none the less. Even better to see it on the real hardware but that's beyond my current budget.



ZOMG! How hard would it be to flash this onto the chips for a red tent? I have a Super Mario/Dr Mario red tent and it would be amazing to throw my own game in there (in the future)

Fairly easy actually, just need a eprom burner and a prepared rom. Sadly though currently you can't use just any rom set. You need at least a mapper 2 equivalent daughterdoard, so you need either the Vs. Castlevania or Vs. Topgun board for this to work.

Though with this method you can run basically ANY 128KB mapper 2 NES rom on a Vs. System/Red tent. Though you have to edit palette color and mod the rom to start the game via select/P1 Start instead of the start button but through experimenting I had megaman 1, Ducktales, NES castlevania, and wrestlemania running successfully.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
PC10MermaysDen.jpg

Also for completeNES, here is the Title Screen only version of Mermay's Den I prepared for the Vs. System running on MAME's implementation of the Playchoice 10. This one required the 128KB rom split in half into 2 64KB files to boot and run. Like with the Vs. System I imagine this is just the MAME team reproducing the exact hardware and that the real machine wouldn't be as picky but I won't know for sure without running it on authentic hardware.

Just goes to show the flexibility of NESMaker, one dev tool, three 'platforms' to chose from. Really just one hardware platform and three ways to develop for it.
 
Top Bottom