murray-the-munchkin-nes

Murray the Munchkin NES

A native NES reimagining of a small graphical adventure originally written in QBasic in the early 1990s. The game is being developed from scratch in 6502 assembly as a compact, nonviolent adventure through Munchkinville, the Rusty Keg, and the nearby lake.

This repository currently contains a playable two-room prototype with custom sprite artwork and an original FamiStudio arrangement of the theme imagined for the QBasic game.

Requirements

• ca65 and ld65, supplied by cc65
• GNU Make
• An NES emulator

On macOS, install the toolchain with:

brew install cc65

Build

Build and validate the ROM with:

make smoke

The resulting ROM is written to build/murray-the-munchkin.nes. To rebuild from scratch:

make clean
make smoke

The project targets NROM-128 (mapper 0), with 16 KiB of PRG-ROM and 8 KiB of CHR-ROM.

Controls

• Start: begin the game, pause, or resume
• D-pad: move Murray smoothly in four directions
• A: close dialogue

Bump into a resident to speak with them. Walk through the eastern opening in Munchkinville to reach East Road and the lakeside, then use its western opening to return.

Current features

• Title screen and continuous overworld music
• Two data-driven rooms built from 16-by-16 metatiles
• Smooth movement with front-, back-, left-, and right-facing walk cycles
• Palette-swapped residents with a separate idle animation
• Feet-based collision for bushes, trunks, buildings, and water, allowing Murray’s upper body to overlap obstacle edges for top-down depth
• Sparse two-variant grass texture inspired by early console RPG fields
• Opaque golden-tan paths with restrained alternating brown speckles
• Foreground canopy overlays that place Murray behind leaves without making textured grass or adjacent bushes clip through him
• Solid rippling lake water, wooden dock planks, and a jagged shoreline
• Bump-to-talk dialogue
• A short pulse-channel boop when dialogue begins
• Pause and resume, including synchronized music pause
• Stable FamiStudio playback during full room redraws

Project layout

• src/murray.s: game state, rooms, collision, dialogue, sprites, and CHR data
• src/murray_audio.s: minimal FamiStudio engine configuration
• music/Murray the Munchkin Theme v1.fms: editable FamiStudio project
• music/murray-the-munchkin-theme.s: CA65 music export used by the build
• music/murray-sfx.s: compact FamiStudio data for in-game sound effects
• music/reference/: optional local FamiStudio preview ROMs, ignored by Git
• assets/sprites/: editable 16-by-16 player and NPC reference artwork; directional GIF variants are kept locally once their pixels are encoded into the assembly CHR data
• assets/reference/: optional local book-cover and historical sprite references, ignored by Git because they are not required as build assets
• vendor/FamiStudio450-SoundEngine/: minimal vendored FamiStudio 4.5 CA65 engine and NTSC note tables
• nes.cfg: cc65 linker layout
• Makefile: build, smoke-test, and clean targets

Editing artwork and music

Character artwork is edited in Aseprite as 16-by-16 images with transparency and no antialiasing. The NES game currently encodes the exported pixel patterns directly in src/murray.s.

Music is edited in the .fms project and exported from FamiStudio as CA65 assembly, replacing music/murray-the-munchkin-theme.s. The current export requires FAMISTUDIO_USE_DUTYCYCLE_EFFECT, which is enabled in src/murray_audio.s. If later exports report additional required flags, the audio configuration must be updated to match.

Near-term roadmap

• Polish room layouts and character interactions
• The Rusty Keg tavern interior and its own music
• Lake and dock expansion with a giant octopus encounter
• Additional transition, pause, and discovery sound effects
• A small quest-state system and a complete ending

The deliberately limited scope is intended to produce a finished, shareable adventure before expanding the world or adding editor tooling.

Third-party code

The FamiStudio sound engine is vendored under vendor/FamiStudio450-SoundEngine/. Its upstream copyright and distribution terms are preserved in the engine source.