the cutting room mirror

Marker Man Adventures

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Marker Man Adventures is a Drawn to Life inspired game where you play as a stickman looking for his lost dog. Like Drawn to Life, you draw shapes to navigate through the levels. Unlike Drawn to Life, it received scathing reviews.

Unused Levels#

This needs some investigation.
Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page.
Specifically: Investigate these more. (Why does demo_level.bgd crash, for example?)

barrel_test_level.bgd A level for testing barrels.

demo_level.bgd Apparently a demo level, but it crashes upon loading for unknown reasons.

linesgothroughthings.bgd Another test level, apparently for testing lines "going through things".

ramptestlevel.bgd A level for testing ramps.

testlevel_collisons.bgd A level for testing collisions.

testlevel_killerhouse.bgd A level for testing the killer house.

testlevel_leftsidebug.bgd Yet another test level, but it's unknown why the title says "leftsidebug".

testlevel_movingleft.bgd A level for testing moving left.

testlevel_trigger A level for testing triggers.

Leftover Development Text#

EaseCore#

In root/layouts/cutscene1/ is a file called Ease.log[[02/]. It contains a debugging log for a program called EaseCore.

[02/13/09 07:34:48]  
[02/13/09 07:34:48]  =============== EaseCore releasing all resources ===============
[02/13/09 07:34:48]  
[02/13/09 07:34:48]  Releasing ProfilerManager
[02/13/09 07:34:48]  ...ProfilerManager successfully released
[02/13/09 07:34:48]  
[02/13/09 07:34:48]  =============== EaseCore released ===============
[02/13/09 07:34:48]

Hidden Sound Credits#

Every background song in the game has its own creation date and sound credit, with the earliest date being 2009-02-09 and the latest being 2009-02-25. An example from offset 0x2E9C092 is shown below.

2009-02-09 IENG
GR Moore ISFT# Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio 9.0

TextureTool.Exe#

The ROM contains a program called TextureTool.exe, which appears to be a leftover developer utility. This tool was likely used during development to process and prepare textures for the Nintendo DS. It’s designed to work with PNG files and uses libpng and zlib libraries to compress and decompress textures.

Buildpath#

The .exe contains the following build path:

c:\work\PPC\Common\Tools\TextureTool\release\TextureTool.pdb

Assembly Identity#

The assembly identity of the .exe is also specified:

type="win32" name="Microsoft.VC80.CRT" version="8.0.50727.762" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b"

run.bat#

The file run.bat is not directly part of the executable but exists as a separate text file within the ROM. It provides an example of how TextureTool.exe was used.

TextureTool -f256 -iball.png -oball.png

pause

The command in the batch file specifies:

  • -f256: This likely sets the texture size or format (possibly the bit depth, such as 256 colors)
  • -i ball.png: The input texture file
  • -o ball.png: The output file after processing