Squirrel Domino: Dr. Mario clone

I've been writing a clone of Dr.Mario for NES to be a minigame in Nova the Squirrel but it probably deserves to be released on its own too. Maybe included in the compo as a rather late addition? It's got multiplayer, hard drops, ghost pieces, and really just a very simple style. It was incredibly easy to write a clone because the game's so simple and I had it mostly working in about two days, and unlike Tetris it should be 100% legal since Nintendo actually patented the game rules and the patent expired.


Updated screenshot showing off a more updated screenshot, with a ghost piece, next piece, and slightly fixed colors, as I was told $16 helped make it more playable to color blind players than $26.


I want to actually figure out some neat optional twists to add on top of the standard game, and in this case I'm messing around with Puzzle League style swapping.

Nice little mini game.

Good work

Here's an NROM version of the Dr.Mario clone on its own, if anyone wanted that. I have it where I can just drop the source code in and it'll supply the rest of the stuff it needed from Nova the Squirrel itself.

Edit: I fixed a slight issue where you couldn't rotate a a pill before dropping it, I think

Very nice indeed, it really feels like Dr Mario!

I had no idea Nintendo patented it. I wonder how much you can copy it before it's copyright infringement though. Avoiding Nintendo's characters of course, I guess it should be OK to keep the pills and viruses theme?

The game feels really nice. The white background might be a bit intense for longer sessions on the tv though! Maybe you can include an 0f or 0c splash colour option?

re: pokun. You'd probably want to call the file something else, too! (Capsules.nes, by the title on the screen)

Thank you, I played the original game a bit now and then to check on things and make sure things were really close, though one difference here is that things do fall much faster than in the original. I still don't know if I want to change that or not. I do like the faster falling.

Here's a link to their patent. It's kind of handy because it has diagrams about how to implement the game logic, though I ignored them really since I didn't need them. I'm not too interested in copying anything aside from the gameplay itself, which should be completely unprotected.


Yeah I was thinking of having a few different "themes", I suppose? This one, a "neon" theme with a black background where the RGB colors stand out, and a high-contrast one that's color blind friendly with slightly different pill shapes, and so on.

And yeah naming the file was sort of waiting on picking a good definitive name for this instead of just a placeholder. Though maybe "Capsules" is good enough since "Vitamins" was good enough for tepples. "Dr.Nova" was a pretty obvious name buuuut that sounds potentially infringing. :p

Great little game!
I was going to suggest Dr. Nova, but maybe Phd Nova or D.sc. Nova...
Or something different like Squirrel Vitamins, Nova's Chemistry, Nova's Pills or maybe Nova's Lab.
Have you tought something about the history?
Not that this will change how good this game is getting...
Thanks for sharing this awesome work!!

Anything that appears in the patent drawings appears to be fair game. Per Kellogg v. Nabisco and Dastar v. Fox, a longer-term intellectual property right can't be used to extend the effective term of protection of a shorter-term intellectual property right. But to be safe, I'd recommend adopting distinct shapes sooner rather than later. It not only helps color-blind players but also helps avoid nuisance lawsuits that test the limits of Kellogg and Dastar against a squishy opponent.

One thing not covered in the patent is audio. The sound effects in Concentration Room are as good as any; pick the ones in pino-a53.pently that say "falling blocks".

Items eaten by squirrels that have distinct, yet simple, shapes could provide some distinction. Off hand, acorn, seed (sunflower-ish), and berry could be achieved at the resolution.

If you wanted to push it thematically, the playfield could be an abstract representation of Nova's digestive tract and the blocks that need to be cleared could be blockages.

So the virus theme doesn't fall under copyright because it's described in an expired patent? I thought copyright was artistic expressions and patent was mechanics and rules?
I naively think that the virus theme is general enough to be used as long as it's not used in a way that it's an obvious rip off of the Dr Mario setup.


By the way, the Famicom/NES version (but not the Game Boy version) of Dr Mario has the "Non-Newtonian Elimination" bug which makes the game freeze if you make too large combos. I guess this version doesn't have that.

Non-Newtonian Elimination discussions:
https://www.speedrun.com/drmariones/guide/qoohi
https://www.twingalaxies.com/danielw/wa ... -love-nnes
https://www.twingalaxies.com/blackflag8 ... -and-stuff

Someone with both pixel art talent and knowledge of this sort of food could probably do better, but here's my attempt, unless I missed something.



I'd avoid the virus theme in order to minimize the possibility of suit in the first place.

My implementation should be pretty robust especially since everything's so simple. Additional matches don't add anything to keep track of or process at all, aside from the garbage sending which just won't accept anything after four.


Okay you're building the case even higher for a theme option. I do like the original minimalistic graphics though so those are staying as an option at the very least (maybe the default?), since they're just very readable. I guess at the very least it'd be Minimal Light, Minimal Dark, Themed, and High Contrast?

I was thinking a lot more abstract, more like what one would expect from the icons used on a deck of playing cards. I wouldn't even rotate the graphics for connections, etc.

Yeah, the filename "drmario.nes" not only suggests that the file is something else, but it is also trademark infringement.

Sure, I'll use different filenames. I expanded the menu a bit and now there's the ability to choose the gravity speed (currently labeled "Fall" since I'm not sure how else to say that concisely) so you can make it as slow as in the original game or much much faster. There's also themes (including a theme with a $0f background for less eye strain!) and a music selection that currently does nothing.


I'm playing with drawing different tiles for a "contrast" theme, though I'm unsure what background color it should have. The fourth theme slot is where I'll probably put in something with more character but is currently unchanged.

"Squirrel" theme now has trees, acorns and berries. Do they look okay?

There's also now music by maple, and I made it so that after you land a piece with a soft drop you need to press Down again to start another soft drop, and can't just keep holding it.

Next I want to put in sound effects, a better randomizer based on least-recently-used, maybe some more polish (not a huge priority) and also make more gimmick modes to play with.

The high-contrast theme uses $0C as the background color now; not sure how much I like that. Maybe it should be $0F but I kind of like having one that isn't black or white.

Sound effects! I also added another gimmick named "Doubles" where all of the pieces you get are two of the same color.

Obvious things left to do:

• Better randomizer
• Some effect when doing hard drops?

Added another song (by the same composer) that may be final or not, a mode where pills don't fall unless you hold Down, fixed a bug, and moved the randomizer over to use a 16-of-27 LRU instead of just being fully random

edit:
I'm really unsure what background color I want for the Contrast theme. $0C is nice for a change of pace but at the same time I think it looks kind of off? I could be better off with $30 or $0f but then who knows which one... probably just stick to dark colors for less eye strain.

How about getting rid of terms like pills and capsules? Most of the game concept is a generic tic-tac-toe or collect-4-in-a-row variarion, somewhat mixed with action elements from tetris. I don't know why Nintendo came up with the pharma scenario, but with the nuts and trees, your game doesn't really match up with that theme anymore.
Maybe you can get along without a story, or think of a different story, something like squirrels gathering food for winter, perhaps with some plausible reason for needing to feed/fill/clear/erase the preset items (the ones that are viruses in drmario).

I don't think a puzzle game needs a story, definitely not an NROM-128 one. Right now the squirrel theme still isn't the default, but perhaps it should be! I should probably also just give all tilesets the full treatment in being able to choose a white or black background, too.

While the in-game instructions use pictures, the text-only instructions (for a menu or whatever) should probably use the word "domino" to describe the pieces you're placing.

Isn't domino referring to a certain kind of tile game though? I have never heard of, for example, mahjong tiles being referred to as dominoes.
I think a generic term like "tiles" or "panels" would work.

If it's a mini-game for your squirrel game, a squirrel theme is definitely the best, and you may actually not need any other theme or a story.

If it's a stand-alone game, a story or selectable themes won't hurt IMHO.

You could theme it as a squirrel stashing nuts inside a tree. A bit like wario's woods, I suppose.

I like that a lot, far better than my gullet suggestion.

I was taking the term from the concept of polyominos, the same place "tetromino" came from. It's still primarily supposed to be a minigame though I suppose it wouldn't hurt to put more polish on, especially since I'll enter it in the compo. I really want my main game's cart to be my best work overall.


I think importantly that would also help to populate the rest of the screen. I think I can do that without impacting the somewhat-tight bank I'm trying to fit the game into in Nova the Squirrel too.

So domino is just a two-square tile. Then I guess it IS a generic term already.

Tried drawing a tree with a small amount of tiles and it didn't look too great; I'm not too good at big pixel art either. Singleplayer mode now has a tentative background with pawprints instead. I tried a background using sprites and it was a bit too distracting and I'm hoping this isn't.

Also changed the name of the game to Squirrel Domino.


I added a mode where the pieces are not very firmly connected and any match will cause anything that's not supported by gravity to come falling down. It's helpful when you want to drop some tiles down into a narrow pit.

Very beautiful, would like me that the squirrel move the head that is all what does that we think that mario walks.

Celebrating when the things go out well and angry when all this badly.

I changed the background color for the white theme a little to be two greens instead of green and blue. I also added a smear when doing a hard drop. This is probably the last version before the compo deadline since I can't think of anything else I want to add, and definitely not anything else that I'd have time for. Source is also included under GPL version 3.

Edit: small change to how hard drops look for horizontal pieces

The "Style" option you can only set one mode at once, even though multiples at the same time should not be mutually exclusive generally.

Here's a small update that makes it so that when you successfully finish a single-player game, it will start again with four more viruses to clear. You're still welcome to exit out of it with select+start or just holding Up though.

Not going to bother making a separate zip of the source for such a small change, but you can nab puzzlegame.s from Nova the Squirrel and replace the one in the previous zip.