Mirklings
Controls for Windows/Web:
- Shooting - Mouse and left mouse button
- Start/Pause/Select/Skip dumb jokes - Enter
- Close the game from the title screen/Return to title screen - Escape
- Basically, the mouse replaces your light gun.
Controls for Dreamcast:
- Shooting - Light Gun and trigger
- Start/Pause/Select/Skip dumb jokes - Start
- Return to Dreamcast menu from title screen - B
- Return to title screen - A+B+X+Y+Start (Standard Dreamcast combo)
All is fair in love and Mirklings!
Shoot your way through hordes of small squishy enemies with nothing but 40k tons
of TNT! If you don't, all the people you hold dear will die (they will also die if you don't play Mirklings).
With a shocking twist ending, Mirklings is shaping up to be the greatest artistic game of the year! (BAFTA pending).
(In case it didn't shine through, it's just tongue-in-cheek humour. Mirklings is one of my silly monthly games, so please don't go in expecting something grand, ok?)
Additional notes:
- Source code is on github: https://github.com/CaptainDrea...
- The Dreamcast version has approximately 10 times less Mirklings than the Windows version. The web version has approximately 5 times less Mirklings than the Windows version.
- Background music is from here: https://opengameart.org/conten....
- Web version coming later.
- You can follow me on twitter, if you're into that: https://twitter.com/CaptDreamc...
Thanks for playing!
Download
Install instructions
Windows:
Extract the folder and open Mirklings.exe.
Dreamcast:
Burn the .cdi file to a CD-R using Padus Discjuggler 6.0 (https://www.afterdawn.com/software/cd_dvd/burning/padus_disc_juggler.cfm). CD-RWs will not work. Burn at slow speeds, if possible. Put the CD-R in your Dreamcast. If it shows -Mirklings executable- during the Sega logo screen, you did everything correctly.
Comments
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I was really excited when i came across this. A new (for me) lightgun game for Dreamcast!
Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Running from a GDEmu I get this weird graphical weirdness instead of the game (see video). Any ideas why this might be?
I get the same graphical weirdness when I use a burned CD on an unmodded dreamcast. So the gdemu isn't the issue here 🤔
I also tried in an emulator, Libretro Flycast on Raspberry Pi 5, and it runs, but the gun behaves oddly - it doesn't track as it should and is inconsistent. Sometimes its stuck in one part of the screen, sometimes it only uses 50% of the screen on one side only... its unfortunately unplayable. 😢
Seemed to play perfectly fine in the web page though.
I also replied on github, but yeah, that's unexpected. I remember it working for me 8 years ago (although the actual laser gun accuracy wasn't great, probably due to me using KallistiOS' light gun stuff wrong).
With flycast actually working with my game, I'll try if I can figure out what exactly was off about the lightgun code. Unfortunately can't give an ETA for that right now, getting Mirklings up and running again is probably a bit of a compatibility nightmare with the newer engine, but I'll have to actually check it out first. Thanks a lot for taking the time to share your findings here and on github!
wtf
Does this actually work on dreamcast?
Game made me lol. Lots of Mirklings streamed down the right hand side though and I barely needed to defend against them.
Yeah it works on Dreamcast, though you need both a light gun and a CRT monitor, which kills about 99.99999% of humanity's population as my player base.
The web version crashes or freezes around 10k mirklins, or stage 7.
Sorry that it crashed, and doubly sorry that it crashed mid-game! Mirklings was my first web port and I'm still trying to figure things out.
My best guess is that the game ran out of memory. Since emscripten is not that hot at handling dynamic memory alloc, I decided to go with the name-an-upper-memory-limit-at-compile-time strategy. I'll reupload it with a larger memory pool. Once again, really sorry!