Former Dawn
Image: Something Nerdy Studios

Ever since we first saw Former Dawn back in 2022, we've pretty much been glued to the social media of its developer Something Nerdy Studios, eagerly awaiting every new update about the promising title.

Former Dawn, in case you've missed our other coverage of the game so far, is a groundbreaking NES title (that is also heading to PC) that uses a bespoke memory mapper called MXM-1 to push the NES beyond its limits, producing some frankly mind-boggling graphics never before seen on the console.

This includes some gloriously detailed and colourful character sprites and backgrounds, as well as a ridiculously impressive "Mode-7"-style map effect that has our jaw hitting the floor every time we see it.

It is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, with the campaign having so far hit $115,000 of its $160,000 goal with one week left. So it seemed only natural for us to finally reach out to Something Nerdy's CEO and founder Jared Hoag to try and discover a little bit more about the project and see if he could answer some of our most pressing questions. Hoag was able to tell us more about the technology powering Former Dawn, as well as what players can expect from it once it is released.

Time Extension: How did the Former Dawn originally come about? When did work on the project begin?

Hoag: The idea for the story was something I came up with around the end of 2010, but my initial plan was to publish it as a science fiction story — perhaps a novel. It stewed around in my head until the beginning of 2019 when I decided to form an indie game startup with my best friend (Dominic Muller).

We began by learning as much as we could about the NES hardware, 6502 Assembly programming, and possible ways to bring something novel to the table. At some point in that year, I made the final decision to use my sci-fi concept as the basis for our NES game, and the codename I chose was the Inversion Project. About a year later, Dominic came up with the name "Former Dawn", which is a triple entendre relating to the lore and backstory of the game.

Former Dawn
Image: Something Nerdy Studios

Although I had wanted to develop a custom memory mapper for the NES the entire time, we didn't get around to doing that until early 2020. The scope dramatically increased when that work began, so it's fair to say that work on what we call Former Dawn now really began at that point.

Time Extension: What are some of your main inspirations when it comes to the role-playing aspects of the game? Could you give us a quick overview of the project's story?

Hoag: My first RPG was either Dragon Warrior on the NES or 2400 A.D. on MS-DOS, but I'm not sure which.

Despite that, my biggest influences came from the SNES and PlayStation era of JRPGs — Final Fantasy IV-VI, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, and Breath of Fire III & IV. I also loved Betrayal at Krondor and Final Fantasy Tactics. There's kind of a schism in the role-playing world between fans of classical turn-based combat and fans of real-time action combat. For Former Dawn, I asked, "Why not both?"

It's always bothered me that the Zelda series has, since the very first game, held the crown for "not just weaponry" items. I adore gameplay that lets the player find various tools to do things in the world other than killing enemies. But at the same time, it's been important to me not to lose the turn-based aspect because it works best for boss fights (among other reasons). The sense of epic struggle can be there while also minimizing "grinding". We had to create two completely different combat engines for this, which we've already done. For the remainder of the project, fleshing out both of those engines with more options and items is a big part of what will make the game compelling as a final product.

Here's an overview of the story:

After a failed terraforming mission on the exoplanet Astraea light years from Earth, humanity dies out but leaves behind a child species(called the “Formers”) that forgets its own origin. You play a common hunter who rediscovers the truth and struggles against the faceless Organization which will stop at nothing to defeat you. Along the way, you recruit a motley crew of brave Formers who are willing to risk everything for Justice.

Despite the fantasy theming and art style, Former Dawn is a pure science fiction game. There are certainly elements that feel like magic but everything has a rational explanation, some wilder than others. For instance, Astraea is in a binary star system, but the stars revolve around it instead of the other way around. Therefore, there is no night on Astraea...

Time Extension: What can you tell us about Something Nerdy Studios? Who is involved in this project at this point in time?

Hoag: Something Nerdy Studios LLC became a legal entity in April of 2019 when Dominic and I filed the paperwork, but we had been operating informally for a few months before that. Since then we have recruited upwards of 20 people to perform the considerable array of tasks required for a project of this scale.

At the moment, the core team consists of me, Dominic, Hali Hoag (my lovely wife), Brent, Mário, Nicholas, and Gus. We want to get more people involved and ramp up the involvement of those already involved, but require more funding to do so; hence why we're on Kickstarter. Mainly, we want to continue paying our pixel artists full-time living wages for the duration of the project. Sunder is the most recent addition to the team and we would also love to be able to incorporate as much FMV as he can throw at us between now and the final release date.

Time Extension: We'd love to know a bit more about the MXM-1. When did you decide to use this custom memory mapper? Did you explore any other options beforehand?

Hoag: Well, from the very beginning of the project, I wanted to create a new memory mapper capable of mapping CD-ROM quantities of data into the NES's tiny native CPU and PPU address spaces.

I was inspired in this partly by the SegaCD and PC Engine CD-ROM² expansions, and partly because of my experience around 1993-1994 when I got my first CD-ROM expansion for my 386 PC. It was a mind-blowing upgrade of what that machine was capable of, despite the fact that the motherboard, RAM, and CPU were untouched. With computing, data size matters. A lot. There are some things you just cannot do if you don't have enough data, and I'd had a vision for a long time for the NES because I knew how excruciatingly limited the data sizes were on that system in its original commercial era.

But in the beginning, no one involved in the project knew how to create a custom mapper. There also just weren't any other interesting options available at the time. As far as we could gather, MMC5 was the most advanced mapper ever made for the NES but its ROM/RAM mapping capabilities were clearly not even in the same galaxy as what I wanted.

I intuitively knew it was possible to do what I wanted, but I had to keep the concept on the back burner while we fiddled around with existing mappers — mostly MMC3 — until Dominic got around to looking at the Verilog source code for it on the PowerPak and gaining confidence that he could do the R&D necessary to fulfill my vision. It was definitely the release of the EverDrive N8 Pro that gave us the confidence to pin all our hopes and dreams on Verilog and flashcards, because the development environment that the N8 Pro provides is lightyears beyond anything that had come before it.

Time Extension: What are some of the main capabilities of the MXM-1? Would any of this have been possible back in the day?

Hoag: The main features of MXM-1 can be broken down into 4 categories: memory mapping, expansion audio, quality-of-life, and CD-ROM emulation.

The memory mapping part of it is very similar to MMC5's but with more address lines available to get up to about 8-16 times as much direct memory access. We also took the idea of MMC5's 8x8 attributes mode and extended it to 8x1 attributes, which is the maximum that the NES's graphics hardware can support. The expansion audio we engineered is PCM-based and inspired by both the SNES and the Amiga, but a kind of refined yet still 8-bit version. The quality-of-life features include things like a robust scanline counter and a PPU glitch correction trick. Finally, the CD-ROM emulation is what it sounds like — we use the SD card reader on the cartridge and pretend like it's a CD-ROM drive, complete with period-correct bandwidth and latency restrictions.

Would any of this been possible back in the day? Absolutely! In fact, *all* of it was possible back in the day. That has been a hard requirement of the hardware engineering effort for MXM-1 since its inception, and we've never budged. Not only was this possible, it almost happened in reality in 1990. A CD-ROM expansion for the NES was developed by Codemasters but it was scrapped before hitting the market.

Time Extension: Are there any other tools or software you're using that have proved particularly helpful?

Hoag: So many it's hard to list them all. Off the top of my head, I would mention: ca65, cc65, Aseprite, Photoshop, FFmpeg, Audacity, Visual Studio, VS Code, Tiled, Furnace, and Quartus. But we've also had to develop a lot of our own tools including many desktop applications: Virtual Paletter, image_demaker, Camera Tilter, Parallaxer, and our very elaborate build system. The languages we used include 6502 Assembly, C, C++, Java, Crystal, Verilog, PHP, and bash (if you count that).

Time Extension: Finally, how can people support the project?

Hoag: Back us on Kickstarter! As of the time of writing, we've got a little over 1 week left on the campaign and need all the help we can get. People should keep in mind that even supporting us with one of the less expensive digital-only tiers is still helpful, even if they have to wait until later to sign up for a physical cartridge.

Spreading the Kickstarter URL to other people via social media or even just word-of-mouth is also incredibly helpful, and we appreciate everyone who has believed in us and supported us thus far.