Greetings everyone. About a month ago I released my first PS1 project, a little shooter game (https://retrogametalk.com/threads/so-i-made-a-little-ps1-game-demo.8172/) and in that first post I said:
"
...
My [future game] ideas so far:
...
Mahjong solitaire - I'm leaning towards this since I've been playing a lot of Shanghai II on Genesis lately and I like these games in general. I'm thinking some soothing music and a nice presentation could make this pretty slick.
"
Well here I am with just that, a Mahjong Solitaire game I call:
Moogle Mahjong!
A Mahjong Solitaire game with a Final Fantasy theming. As a big fan of both things this was a lot of fun to make and play, but if you don't like Mahjong solitaire already, this probably won't do anything for you.
As before, check the readme for all of the details and list of assets used, but some excerpts:
"
The Final Fantasy theming came to me in bursts, as first this was just going to be a simple game in the vein of 'Shanghai II" for the Genesis/Megadrive, a game I absolutely love.
...
I decided to go for three distinct "themes" of FF: NES era, SNES era and PS1 era, and made the cursor choices to match.
To this end it was straight-forward to copy over all the NES/SNES graphics I needed for tiles (36 unique tiles X 4 sets = 144 total tiles).
The PS1 "era" was a bit trickier since there were no simple sprites to use. In the end I ended up using memory card graphics from FF7 and 9 (FF8 featured PocketStation memory graphics that didn't look appropirate here so weren't used), alongside graphics from FF Tactics (Different magic types) and inventory graphics from FF9.
Early on I really debated whether or not to use CD Audio for the main track (Tetra Master) or a sample. Both have merits, namely file size and convenience of looping, but in the end I chose the CD Audio for the main tracks. This obviously freed-up a bunch of Sound RAM enabling me to add plenty of other sfx, but at the expense of having a huge total file size. Oh well.
I debated whether or not to include additional songs to play, but ultimately decided against it since considering the source material, there would've been no shortage of amazing tracks to include, and in the end I didn't want to end up including an entire FF OST with this game, so I chose to keep the one song only.
I also debated allowing the user to play their own music instead, but chose not to since if someone's going to go that route anyways then they may as well just play their own music in the background and have complete control that way.
As far as code goes, the 'shuffle' routine is the only real sore spot for me in this game; between 20-50 remaining tiles shuffling is an absolute nightmare, sometimes taking around 15-20 seconds to complete. I'm not proud of this by any means, but I'm not really sure what I could do to improve it at this point either. Hopefully years later I'll look back at this and fix it with ease, but that day is not today my friends.
I'm also aware of a couple of bugs, related to tile-selection, but they're all minor so I didn't go through and hammer them out.
Some notes:
This game is designed around the full 320x240 resolution, however I made sure to keep all tiles and important text within the "safe area" but if you see sprites or text cut off, make sure the option "Crop Mode" (in Duckstation) is set to "Off." Otherwise things will be cut off.
Total asset size: 407811 bytes (hex=63903) ~ 408 kB.
I had the main game loop finished in about three weeks, and spent the remaining time polishing things up and adding effects and the intro.
Regarding the intro:
I spent just under a week on the intro. Hope you enjoy it as much as me. The moogle coloring is random, with some slight error-checking to prevent blinding colors or flat black.
The speeds are random, and I made some be "lollygaggers" as I call them. Just like in real life some people just have no concept of time...
I chose "Turtle" style for the layout as I personally feel this is the best. I've tried all the varients offered in Shanghai II and I really think 'turtle' is the best, featuring the least amounts of shuffles to achieve a victory. This is probably personal preference and could be updated in the future, but that's why I chose to stick with turtle.
Some things this DOESN'T feature that other Mahjong games do:
Undo Last Move - Could be implemented, but I'm lazy and have worked on this enough
Find a Move - See above
...
I added a bunch of extra blank spaces around nearly all of the text in this game, to make it easier for any ROM hackers out there who may want an easy translation project.
I may now be a certifiable Mahjong Solitaire expert, since I must have played it a thousand times during the course of making this game.
Some strategy: Always aim for demolishing the higher layers, unless you have the ability to chip away at the sides. The 'head' and 'tail' of the turtle can become real stumbling blocks later in the game if you don't clear them out first.
My general strategy goes: Always aim for destroying the uppermost tile (tile 144) before anything else, as you severely limit potential moves while this tile lives.
Next you want to focus on the next lower level (tiles 140-143), but if you have an opening to remove the head or tail, consider those moves instead.
After this, focus on any moves you see fit, but always be mindful of removing higher layers first, since a game that has duplicate tiles stacked on top of eachother will always be impossible to complete (if there are no other duplicates, obviously).
As far as emulators go this was optimized for Duckstation as apparently that's the "most accurate" PS1 emulator. After making this game I have my own thoughts on emulators and accuracy but suffice to say that I only designed this game around real hardware and Duckstation; any other emulators I just stopped trying to code around.
Some final things to remember: I am not a pixel artist (or any kind of artist). I am not an audio engineer. I am not a musician.
So if the graphics look like crap and the sound mixing sucks and my choice of music is awful, then my next one will be better! (-Ed Wood)
"
Also, I wasn't able to test this out on real hardware as my PS1 has a dead disc drive, and this game kinda relies heavily on music. Once I get the drive replaced I will definitely load this up, and if anyone wants to try it out I would really appreciate the feedback.
Also also, if some aspiring artist wants to make a PS1 game cover for this that would be awesome!
I'm really proud of this so definitely let me know what you guys think and be sure to let me know if you discover any bugs I'm not aware of yet.
One last super duper secret, just for you guys:
(screenshots upscaled to 720p in Duckstation - the screenshots seem a bit darker then in-game, no idea what's up with that...)
Enjoy!
I've tried to upload this three times now and the upload dies everytime. The size is about 480 MB. Is that above some limit?
In the meantime, here's a 1 week link (literally first result when I searched for "free file uploading"):
"
...
My [future game] ideas so far:
...
Mahjong solitaire - I'm leaning towards this since I've been playing a lot of Shanghai II on Genesis lately and I like these games in general. I'm thinking some soothing music and a nice presentation could make this pretty slick.
"
Well here I am with just that, a Mahjong Solitaire game I call:
Moogle Mahjong!
A Mahjong Solitaire game with a Final Fantasy theming. As a big fan of both things this was a lot of fun to make and play, but if you don't like Mahjong solitaire already, this probably won't do anything for you.
As before, check the readme for all of the details and list of assets used, but some excerpts:
"
The Final Fantasy theming came to me in bursts, as first this was just going to be a simple game in the vein of 'Shanghai II" for the Genesis/Megadrive, a game I absolutely love.
...
I decided to go for three distinct "themes" of FF: NES era, SNES era and PS1 era, and made the cursor choices to match.
To this end it was straight-forward to copy over all the NES/SNES graphics I needed for tiles (36 unique tiles X 4 sets = 144 total tiles).
The PS1 "era" was a bit trickier since there were no simple sprites to use. In the end I ended up using memory card graphics from FF7 and 9 (FF8 featured PocketStation memory graphics that didn't look appropirate here so weren't used), alongside graphics from FF Tactics (Different magic types) and inventory graphics from FF9.
Early on I really debated whether or not to use CD Audio for the main track (Tetra Master) or a sample. Both have merits, namely file size and convenience of looping, but in the end I chose the CD Audio for the main tracks. This obviously freed-up a bunch of Sound RAM enabling me to add plenty of other sfx, but at the expense of having a huge total file size. Oh well.
I debated whether or not to include additional songs to play, but ultimately decided against it since considering the source material, there would've been no shortage of amazing tracks to include, and in the end I didn't want to end up including an entire FF OST with this game, so I chose to keep the one song only.
I also debated allowing the user to play their own music instead, but chose not to since if someone's going to go that route anyways then they may as well just play their own music in the background and have complete control that way.
As far as code goes, the 'shuffle' routine is the only real sore spot for me in this game; between 20-50 remaining tiles shuffling is an absolute nightmare, sometimes taking around 15-20 seconds to complete. I'm not proud of this by any means, but I'm not really sure what I could do to improve it at this point either. Hopefully years later I'll look back at this and fix it with ease, but that day is not today my friends.
I'm also aware of a couple of bugs, related to tile-selection, but they're all minor so I didn't go through and hammer them out.
Some notes:
This game is designed around the full 320x240 resolution, however I made sure to keep all tiles and important text within the "safe area" but if you see sprites or text cut off, make sure the option "Crop Mode" (in Duckstation) is set to "Off." Otherwise things will be cut off.
Total asset size: 407811 bytes (hex=63903) ~ 408 kB.
I had the main game loop finished in about three weeks, and spent the remaining time polishing things up and adding effects and the intro.
Regarding the intro:
I spent just under a week on the intro. Hope you enjoy it as much as me. The moogle coloring is random, with some slight error-checking to prevent blinding colors or flat black.
The speeds are random, and I made some be "lollygaggers" as I call them. Just like in real life some people just have no concept of time...
I chose "Turtle" style for the layout as I personally feel this is the best. I've tried all the varients offered in Shanghai II and I really think 'turtle' is the best, featuring the least amounts of shuffles to achieve a victory. This is probably personal preference and could be updated in the future, but that's why I chose to stick with turtle.
Some things this DOESN'T feature that other Mahjong games do:
Undo Last Move - Could be implemented, but I'm lazy and have worked on this enough
Find a Move - See above
...
I added a bunch of extra blank spaces around nearly all of the text in this game, to make it easier for any ROM hackers out there who may want an easy translation project.
I may now be a certifiable Mahjong Solitaire expert, since I must have played it a thousand times during the course of making this game.
Some strategy: Always aim for demolishing the higher layers, unless you have the ability to chip away at the sides. The 'head' and 'tail' of the turtle can become real stumbling blocks later in the game if you don't clear them out first.
My general strategy goes: Always aim for destroying the uppermost tile (tile 144) before anything else, as you severely limit potential moves while this tile lives.
Next you want to focus on the next lower level (tiles 140-143), but if you have an opening to remove the head or tail, consider those moves instead.
After this, focus on any moves you see fit, but always be mindful of removing higher layers first, since a game that has duplicate tiles stacked on top of eachother will always be impossible to complete (if there are no other duplicates, obviously).
As far as emulators go this was optimized for Duckstation as apparently that's the "most accurate" PS1 emulator. After making this game I have my own thoughts on emulators and accuracy but suffice to say that I only designed this game around real hardware and Duckstation; any other emulators I just stopped trying to code around.
Some final things to remember: I am not a pixel artist (or any kind of artist). I am not an audio engineer. I am not a musician.
So if the graphics look like crap and the sound mixing sucks and my choice of music is awful, then my next one will be better! (-Ed Wood)
"
Also, I wasn't able to test this out on real hardware as my PS1 has a dead disc drive, and this game kinda relies heavily on music. Once I get the drive replaced I will definitely load this up, and if anyone wants to try it out I would really appreciate the feedback.
Also also, if some aspiring artist wants to make a PS1 game cover for this that would be awesome!
I'm really proud of this so definitely let me know what you guys think and be sure to let me know if you discover any bugs I'm not aware of yet.
One last super duper secret, just for you guys:
On the credits screen, hold L1+L2+R1+R2 and press circle to scroll through some of my FF-related thoughts...
(screenshots upscaled to 720p in Duckstation - the screenshots seem a bit darker then in-game, no idea what's up with that...)
Enjoy!
Post automatically merged:
I've tried to upload this three times now and the upload dies everytime. The size is about 480 MB. Is that above some limit?
In the meantime, here's a 1 week link (literally first result when I searched for "free file uploading"):
Last edited:
