I want to tell you a story.

It is a story about a boy who played StarTropics at the age 6 years old. He got through the game, and he loved it. Deeply.

It was an amazing, full gaming experience that transported you into the tropical islands and made you feel, like you are on an epic quest to save your uncle. That boy played that game again and again, from start to finish, until he remembered every secret in the game.

That boy grew up and went to study Computer Science because he loved to make video games. He thought that if he learned how to to program computers that would help him to make his own video games.  It did.

That boy became a man who works as a senior test automation consultant with management responsibilities.  That man started to collect old NES games to recapture his childhood. Scavenging flee markets, going through game shops, buying games from Amazon, Ebay and Huuto.net. 

Now it is summer 2022. The man get the idea to crown his game collection and his love for the NES - to make his own NES game.

After finding about NESMaker, everything became clear. This is want I want to do. Create my own NES game. Just like it was in 1991. That's the year I was born in. A physical game cartridge with my game inside it, with a full cardboard box, with art, with a manual and a map. That was the north start I set for myself.

Also, Fate intervened. If I had looked up the NESMaker Discord community (which is a wonderfully friendly and helpful community), I would have never know about the NESMaker Byte-Off III game development contest that just started at the exactly the same time. That made my motivation clear. To make the best NES game in a month, honouring the genre classics.

After starting my NES development journey, it was fun, really fun. I remember studying assembler language in a course at the Tampere University of Technology but now having to have forgotten everything about it. My daily work consists of working with modern high-level programming languages where my main ability is to think abstractly. That is not the case with NES programming. What I've learned through my one month long journey, is still just scratching the surface of the depth that goes into NES game development. 

NESMaker is a wonderful tool that made it possible for me to grind out my game as fast as possible. I had to learn again about branches, about switching memory banks, about being careful with the amount memory I use, in my graphics or in my code. One of the most frustrating things in development was, when one of my memory banks was full, not during run time, but during development, you just can't simply add a line of code because NES cartridge size limitations, you have the be more clever about your game design decisions.

So, what is the game about, what or who is Mauri Mursu? How did he come to the picture? Well, to tell you that, we have to go back in time. Mauri Mursu is an animated character I invented in 2013 for my Youtube Channel:

It was supposed to be an animated satire of an ignorant walrus named Mauri, who had naive view of the World (Video in Finnish). Mauri might be a bit naive and pompous but that's what makes him lovable. It's always fun to laugh at someone who doesn't understand how ignorant they are. I made a couple of animated Mauri shorts and then satisfied, left it at that, to maybe return some time in the future.

And then that future came - That's when Fate intervened a second time. In July 2022, one topic became the center of the Finnish National news, a walrus had landed on a beach in Hamina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stena_(walrus)

That's when I knew that's what I had to do. To make a game with a walrus, my walrus, Mauri Mursu. That would be so fun. So, I dusted the old MauriMursu.psd files and started to redesign Mauri in a new 8-bit look. That's when my mind started building the story and the environment. Mauri lives in Walrus Islands. There could be 5x5 grid of available rooms to explore. There could be the classic game levels or environments, for ice levels, jungle levels, fire levels, cave levels, beach levels and more.  The game should have NPC's with rich stories that intertwine and tease what's the history of the World and hint at the next destination. They should have uniques sprites and characters, each with a unique name. Some of them would give you item fetch quests or quests to clear out monsters. There should be six different weapions, first being a beach ball. And there should be an ice weapon. And a fire ball. And there should be a secret alien starship and an easter egg hidden in the game. Make it so that the player can have the joy of discovery. All these different things and ideas concentrated into Mauri Mursu's Hangover, a StarTropics and Zelda inspired adventure, where Mauri is trying to cure his last nights hangover and find the six missing bottles he lost that night.

Graphics were one thing that I especially enjoyed doing. I've done pixel art for many years, but working with a small palette of 4 or usually 3 colours (as 1 is for the alpha channel or lines) and the small resolution of 8x8 pixels made it a fun challenge. How to combine 8x8 tiles to create a full character, how to color them in blocks, so that one character can have a variable pallette, how to use the same tiles with just a different pallette to represent different things like turning blue water into red lava. It is just a constant journey of discovery.

One of my biggest days of joy, came when I was able to run the first working version of the game with my own 30-year old Nintendo with a EverDrive game cartridge. EverDrive Cartridges make it possible to copy your .nes rom to MiniSD card and then insert that into the EverDriver cartridge and that cartridge to the machine and you play our own roms on original hardware.

This was something I had dreamed since I was that little boy, face glued to the CTR screen, trying to discern the three different RGB colors from the pixels. It was the electricity you felt, when you hair started to give you shocks and moved towards the glass. Back then, it seemed magic. Now, playing my own creation on that very same machine, with modern OLED television, it still, felt like magic.

And nothing of this would have been possible without the incredible help and support of the NESMaker Discord community. I was there asking basic noob questions every day, just trying to get a sense of how everything worked. People went above and beyond to teach me the basics of NES architecture, NESMaker tips and architecture, what's the difference between mappers and much, much more. So, here I just want to name some developer heroes: conffa, AndySavonia, VidNyte, dale_coop, CutterCross, DeadKir and to so many others, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

All I can say is that, I'm very pleased to how the end game turned out, so much better than I could have every dreamed of! It was just like my dream years ago, now fully materialized in my hands. But isn't that what game development is all about? About creating your vision into a working game?

I want to show you guys the neoretro trailer I made for the game with a voice over provided by our japanse friend ryu! 

Thanks for everyone who plays the game! 

If you want to support our game development journey, please consider donating and get access to the game box art, cover art, manual, map and soundtrack. Thanks.