Mermay's Den

Mihoshi20

Member
For the first time ever Mermay's Den is available for play by the general public. Developed in the beta version of NESmaker 3.1.0 - 3.1.4(Pi)(Empty), it made for a great learning experience not only on how to use NESmaker but the quirks of the NES hardware itself.

Help Mermay journey through the dark underwater depth of the ocean as she tries to make her way back home. Swim along sunken pirate ships, molten hot volcanic caves, and deadly seaweed jungles as you make your escape! Can you survive both the dangers of the depths and the creatures that lurk within?

Engine by the NESmaker team. Modified movement engine by MistSonata. Graphics and further ASM tweaks and changes by yours truly. Music and effects by the ever wonderful CutterCross.

Follow the development and screenshots here on the forums WIP section. www.nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=180

I hope you all have as much playing it as I did on the journey to make it.

View attachment Mermays_Den_010b_final.nes.zip
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Oh nice! Thank you Mihoshi.
Very glad to be able to play to your game (will download and keep it for tomorrow night --when I am alone at home--)
 

matthew954

New member
I'll be playing it tonight after work, I've been wanting to try it ever since Joe showed it at the live stream.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Now you all have the chance to play it until you're hearts content. It's not very long. But I have to say I really enjoy playing it. I may revisit it someday and make it a full game.
 

CutterCross

Active member
Just downloaded it and beat the whole game! Great job!
Although I noticed a weird issue where the last portion of the music repeats a couple times before looping to the beginning of the song.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
CutterCross said:
Just downloaded it and beat the whole game! Great job!
Although I noticed a weird issue where the last portion of the music repeats a couple times before looping to the beginning of the song.

Hmm, it's not really supposed to do that unless you die so I may have to check it out and let it sit idle and doing it when you die is a bit of a quick fix to stop it from being silent after you die.
 

SeaFoodAndButter

New member
Mihoshi20 said:
CutterCross said:
Just downloaded it and beat the whole game! Great job!
Although I noticed a weird issue where the last portion of the music repeats a couple times before looping to the beginning of the song.

Hmm, it's not really supposed to do that unless you die so I may have to check it out and let it sit idle and doing it when you die is a bit of a quick fix to stop it from being silent after you die.

Cool game! But, somehow I managed to soft lock the game in the first 20 secs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNMYFmAn_7E&feature=youtu.be
 

Mihoshi20

Member
SeaFoodAndButter said:
Mihoshi20 said:
CutterCross said:
Just downloaded it and beat the whole game! Great job!
Although I noticed a weird issue where the last portion of the music repeats a couple times before looping to the beginning of the song.

Hmm, it's not really supposed to do that unless you die so I may have to check it out and let it sit idle and doing it when you die is a bit of a quick fix to stop it from being silent after you die.

Cool game! But, somehow I managed to soft lock the game in the first 20 secs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNMYFmAn_7E&feature=youtu.be

LOL, well there's a fun little either collision alignment I didn't catch or something weird that happened to my games beta tester too where they got stuck in a spot like that and I tried over and over again to recreate it and couldn't so I ignored it. If you manage to do it again in the same spot let me know and I'll investigate.
 

neomage50

New member
Just played it for a video i'm making of homebrew games....and i had to reset the game twice. 1 time because i got stuck in the solid tile on one of the screens. and then again when it froze on me when i got the second treasure...and then after getting the third one i went up screen to be lost in purgatory. other then that i had a good time.
 

R Cohrs

New member
Put the game on my Everdrive and just gave it a test run.
Really like that music track! Got to the octopus and ended up flying off the screen to the left. Ended up in a weird garbage data land so swam over a fee screens and got stuck under the floor in treasure room 2.

Gave it another play and got 3 treasures but couldn't control the character well and hit the ceilings for instant death too many times. Will probably give it another shot later.

I like the concept. Reminds me of Pixels game Ikachan.
 

Kasumi

New member
I like the music and atmosphere, but I seem destined to not beat it. Edit6: Beat it! The swimming skull-fish are particularly cool.

I've attached an FCEUX movie (Mermays_Den_010b_final-0.zip) file of a bug in case Joe or anyone wants to debug it to see what's up.
Edit: Adding gif capture of movie to provide context to the file:
iM1TBQn.gif

Edit2: Hold right toward a screen transition, then hold left during the screen transition to make this happen. It can be done right at the beginning. (I promise it's not left AND right in the same frame, I disabled that for this.)

I guess I'll try to beat it while recording to see if anything else pops up.

Edit3: I've also attached a video of what probably happened to SeaFoodAndButter (Mermays_Den_010b_final-2.zip). Gif for context:
CvwfPOO.gif

Sorry for the dead space from frames 1900ish to 4200ish (38 seconds). I stopped to type something to a friend.

Edit4: One more movie (Mermays_Den_010b_final-4.zip). I grabbed this collectible and all input stopped working.
ygSCElG.png

I noticed that after dying the mermaid stopped animating, which may be related to this bug? I'll look at the input for the movie to see if I can come up with ways to reliably reproduce it.

To play these movies in FCEUX, File, Movie, play movie, click the file pulldown down to browse, select the file, then click OK.
 

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Mihoshi20

Member
Looks like a lot of people are actually running into the weird screen transition/warping bug that i discovered while testing and have been talking with Joe about.

I've actually posted these on the forum: www.nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=292
Though it didn't garner attention.

Though in that post I forgot to mention the animation issue Kasumi pointed out where sometimes after dying or even being hit the animations stop working. When being it just releasing and pressing the button again fixes the issue but on death the animation never corrects itself.
 

Kasumi

New member
Well, here's hoping the movie helps with nailing the animation bug (FCEUX has a debugger so Joe can see exactly what code the game is running), because it's a crash after getting the collectible. I made an attempt to look into it myself, but it's interesting in that the code seems to not be very stuck in any particular place. There's nothing the user can do with the controller to change anything on the screen from where then on, though.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Kasumi said:
Well, here's hoping the movie helps with nailing the animation bug (FCEUX has a debugger so Joe can see exactly what code the game is running), because it's a crash after getting the collectible. I made an attempt to look into it myself, but it's interesting in that the code seems to not be very stuck in any particular place. There's nothing the user can do with the controller to change anything on the screen from where then on, though.

The collectible issue is the most interesting as in all my playthrough testing of the game I'd never ran into this issue and neither did my play-tester. The others I had including a few other strange issues that just happened once. The animation stalling after death and strange random screen warping/transitioning which I theorized was based on the engine not knowing where to put the player when they're knocked back towards a screen edge but Joe theorizes is based on the momentum portion after you've reached the edge and start moving again. Those were the two most common issues.

Anyhow, the soft-lock on item pickup is for sure a new one as I'd never had that happen before either on FCEUX of actual hardware though bug reports are always appreciated no matter how rare an occurrence they are.
 

Rob Burrito

New member
Thanks for posting! the music is pretty good, especially for a demo. second playthrough everything worked well. first time a bad screen warp happened like some others have reported. even with the issues it's fun to have something this playable in a relatively short development time.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
Rob Burrito said:
Thanks for posting! the music is pretty good, especially for a demo. second playthrough everything worked well. first time a bad screen warp happened like some others have reported. even with the issues it's fun to have something this playable in a relatively short development time.

Glad you enjoyed the game! Yea though, the weird screen warping is a fairly recurring issue. Didn't happen to me as much when testing in FCEUX but happened far more often on actual hardware. Though I'm very happy it didn't happen to Joe when he was playing it on the livestream LOL.

I've noticed it seemed to happen the most when moving diagonally. Especially if you were moving and then suddenly change directions at the screen edge. Or at least that's what happened the most with me and also in Kasumi's playthrough.
 

FrankenGraphics

New member
Nice game! I love me a nice underwater theme.

Just a little bug report: It is possible to go through the wall somehow on the screen with the octopus and somehow get zapped some screen well outside the intended map. It happened to me on the far left near the floor. You can find your way back to the caves but you naturally can't get back into them because the wall blocks. I think it may have been something to do with the diagonal walls, or maybe accidental room switching back to the left, or a combination... it all happened so fast, haha.
 
what's weird is i ran into the same kinda collision bugs when playing on fceux and bizhawk on my pc,
BUT
i haven't ran into any yet running fceumm on my nes classic.

*shrug*

p.s. - any sort of artwork for this i could use for the game on the classic's menu?
 
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