MAR1D

This page is mostly for developers / hackers. If you just want to play the game, check out the main website. Or stick around, that's fine too.

Description

The original Super Mario Bros as you've never seen it. Step into Mario's shoes in this first person clone of the classic Mario game. True to the original, however, the game still takes place in a two dimensional world. You must view the world as mario does, as a one dimensional line.

Inspiration / Ideas

The book "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott Abbott did a really neat thing in trying to make intuitive the notion of living in a two dimensional world. But when we exist in a world, we act in that world, and the natural way to bring an unfamiliar space to our intuitions is with an active roll. To this end, I've created MAR1D, a video game that is played in two dimensional space, so we can not only understand, but feel what two dimensions is.

I have plans to make similar games that explore other geometries in the same way; though these games will probably not be done for a while.

Other notable similar exploits include:

• Flatland
• magictile
• A Slower Speed of Light
• Antichamber
• Hyperrogue
• 4D Toys (Though I've never personally played it)
• Hyperbolica (Someone seems to have actually made my dream game.)
• Manifold Garden
• Automatic 3Dification (automatic 1Dification would awesome!)
• A whole list of non-euclidean geometry games
• Send me any I'm missing! I love playing with these things :)

Playing the Game

Options

Options can be configured either through an in-game menu, which will save to a config file. That config file can also be edited directly. They can also be set through command line options (except on windows, where the in-game / config file will have to suffice)

The MAR1D executable takes a few command line arguments (note that all numerical arguments must be integers):

• -m## sets the music volume (0-128)
• -f## sets the sound effects volume (0-128).
• -w## sets the display area to a width of ## pixels.
• -s## sets the mouse sensitivity.
• -y inverts the mouse y axis. Not sure why this is necessary, but lots of games seem to include it.
• -x visual sfx (not recommended)
• -r pressing the run key toggles running. without this the key must be held down.
• -d debug mode

In addition, there are two environment variables which affect where MAR1D puts / looks for files.

• MAR1D_RECORDING_DIR where to put .png recordings of your playthrough. By default this is the current directory on Linux and Windows, and the current user's desktop when running the Mac OS X .app bundle.
• MAR1D_RESOURCE_DIR where to find the resource files. By default this is wherever they were installed.

Project Structure

$ tree -dL 1
.                  # the top level contains build files
├── accoutrements/ # files to install alongside the application (icon, .desktop, etc)
├── nix/           # nix build files
├── resources/     # runtime game resources (sounds, images, etc)
├── scripts/       # related scripts, not necessary for building or running
└── src/           # source files

Compiling

MAR1D uses the meson build system, with a nix wrapper around it.

Meson

You should be able to just compile directly with meson, but I don't actually know how to do that so you'll have to figure it out yourself. If you do, please send a pull request updating this section with instructions.

Nix

To compile on Linux or Mac OS X using the Nix package manager, it's as simple as nix-build nix. If you are using flakes, nix build works too.

Windows

To cross-compile for windows, nix-build nix/windows.nix or for flakes nix build .#windows, then transfer the contents of result/ to a windows computer, or cd result; wine ./MAR1D.exe (you must be in the same directory as MAR1D.exe).

Mac OS X Bundle

Mac OS X Nix cross-compilation is a little broken at the moment, so you have to be running Nix on Mac OS X for this one. But then it's as simple as running nix-build nix/darwin-app.nix, or with flakes nix build .#darwin-app. This will produce result/MAR1D.app that should work like any other application on Mac OS X.

AppImage

To compile an AppImage that can be transferred to other linux distros, you must be using flakes, and run nix build .#appimage. The result is at result/MAR1D-x86_64.AppImage.

Flatpak

You can also use flatpak to deploy across linux distros, which has the disadvantage of needing flatpak installed on the target platform, but has… presumably some advantages?

You guessed it, there's a nix expression for that. Just run nix-build nix/flatpak.nix or nix build .#flatpak with flakes. The flatpak is at result/MAR1D.flatpak

If you want to attend the circus that is using flatpak directly, these are commands that should do it for you. Install flatpak and flatpak-builder, and run the following:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk//20.08
flatpak install org.freedesktop.Platform//20.08

flatpak-builder --repo=flatpak-repo --state-dir=flatpak-state --force-clean flatpak-build com.mar1d.MAR1D.yml
flatpak build-bundle flatpak-repo/ MAR1D.flatpak com.mar1d.MAR1D --runtime-repo=https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

This will, among other things, create a MAR1D.flatpak file that can be used with flatpak install.

I also have a tidy script for this one in case you want to keep the state contained, but don't want to use Nix, you can run ./build-flatpak.sh

Dependencies

• meson (with ninja and pkgconfig)
• SDL2
• SDL2_mixer
• GLU
• libconfig

License

Licensed under AGPL v3.0, check COPYING for more details. If you have something you want to do with it that doesn't work under that license, let me know. Basically, if you're trying to make and share awesome things with it, I want to help you do that.

Credits

• Taeer Bar-Yam
  • Hey, that's me!
• Owen Lynch
  • Helping out with the coding when I get stuck
  • Telling me when I'm being an idiot
• Sophie Galowitz
  • A E S T H E T I C
• Yavni Bar-Yam
  • Photoshoping the menuscreen image
  • Coming up with the name "MAR1D"
• Maurice Guégan
  • Making Mari0, and inspiring me to hack on Mario
  • The audio files in MAR1D are from Mari0
  • Helping me out with the game logic for spawning enemies
• Friends and Family
  • Testing
  • Moral Support
  • Putting up with me getting sucked into coding for long stretches
• Edwin Abbott Abbott
  • Writing Flatland and inspiring this game
• Nintendo
  • Making Super Mario Bros, and inspiring game makers