I mean, it can be powerful when used right (I mean, I'm using it to make a top-down shooter as we speak), but it's also very easy to use and as such it may become a noob magnet in a similar way RPG Maker and Unity are. Aren't you afraid that it will just bring for the most time lazy, low-effort "games" (quotes used for a reason) for the most time? Sure, we probably get few gems, just like there are great Unity, RPG Maker or Clickteam Fusion games, but...
I really don't know what to think about the tool. On the one hand I can finally work on a NES game (my ASM coding skills in terms of interfacing with hardware are virtually non-existent), but on the other I fear that it will lead to attack of the clones: Low effort games using basic modules with little to no changes - default graphics, default enemies, only level layout being different.
I used to make these lazy noob stuff when I was a kid. Now I'm better in making stuff. People gotta start from babysteps before they can truly make good stuff. You know what the Angry Video Game Nerd said? You gotta take a hard shit before you can take a soft shit. So yeah, I'm not afraid that there will be bad games. The one thing I'm afraid is that these bad games will shadow the good games and the real projects and that real programmers will arrogantly harrass the young who are learning instead of teaching them and helping them. This could cause a total collapse of the community through the drama of the internet. I don't want that to exist here.
There were concerns about this ever since the project was announced. I don't think that generic/bad games take anything away from the good ones though.
There was a thread were some praise and concerns, mixed, were voiced on here.
Some things i wrote in one form or the other in that thread and some new things that i've thought since then.
1)It's great that so many caught an interested in the campaign. A community needs to grow to thrive.
2)But also - With lowered stakes comes a fair share low effort results. Which is okay too, i'll get to my concerns later. Since making an NES game has been considered hard, it has mainly attracted two groups at first: those who are happy to just get some result showing on the screen, and those who try to make the effort count. See super bat puncher, lizard, haunted halloween, etc etc. Usually, i think the former group is actually a little more productive, because they can grow organically from there. If you're like me (a self-critical perfectionist ad nasuem who hides a lot of the stuff in my drawer), it may take a very long time before a first title is out, and that is a riskier project (you might just give up halfway).
3)The more games that come out, the more i think some sort of journalistic effort to review and signal boost hi-quality games (made with NESmaker or otherwise) is going to be needed. Not to shade beginner efforts but to hoist nice things. Or a NESmaker compo to reward extraordinary efforts.
4)One thing that's different is that when you've written something that makes something happen on the screen for the first time, the experience is 100% your experience (in so far you did not just carbon copy a tutorial), and it's going to be quirky in your very personal way. That's one thing i appreciate a lot with homebrews, whether i think they're excellent, great, good, average or meh. The first thing that one pops out of NESmaker is, bluntly put, not as likely to have that personal charm. Finding an identity is going to be the real challenge of using NESmaker.
5)What NESmaker also does differently here from the former group i mentioned is that you can shake and bake a game and sell it on a physical medium, even if there currently is only one source of PCB:s it supports, the means to production have been decentralized with the hardware kit. I think that this is cool, but also can also become (maybe, it's just speculation) threat to the venture of kickstarting games. That market is on thin ice and needs to build on trust and serious, well planned campaigns. Hopefully it won't get swamped. On the other hand, why even consider kickstarter? Etsy would seem a more natural marketplace for a bit of DIY punk spirit. Do a thing, take a photo, write a text, and you have a store, make items as you have the time, put them on sale, rather stresslessly. Kickstarter takes time to set up and many seem to experience the campagin and the time after as a stressful event in their lives. It is a big effort in it self. So that might act as a natural filter for less serious ventures.
6) going further on speculations, i also think we might see more fangames popping up, with varying acceptance from the rights holders. It was NES fans, after all, who backed it. I noticed someone on nesmaker forums set out to make some sort of sonic the hedgehog spinoff already (good thing sega seems largely positively inclined), and someone else has adopted the name "tengen north".
7) NESmaker seems to have attracted a bunch of people with creative skills and professions. So i'm sure there'll come out a great deal of games with unique and wonderful assets, too.
I'm not sure of anything.
I sometimes wonder if spending so much time understanding the details of NES hardware and constantly rewriting and refining code is taking away from time that could be used to better design a game.
Maybe I'm a lousy game maker, and I use "it took me so long to rewrite the music code" as an excuse for not putting enough effort into game design.
Yes, it is out of beta. I got my code a while ago but i haven't had the time to check it out yet, other than the tutorial videos.
Dougeff: but a lot of the design is precisely in how to allocate hardware resources! For example, NESgamemaker makes the decision to divide the sprite palettes into two groups: monster objects, and other objects. Monster objects get 2 subpalettes, the other objects get 2. "Monster" really signifies anything that can be swapped out depending on what screen the player is on, while the other objects signify anything that is supposed to stay the same throughout the game.
I think that is a pretty good example of a vital and character-inbuing design decision that is going to affect all games made under the adventure module unless you go in and edit the code to the point where the GUI stops representing/controlling what is actually going on with your game
So while NESmaker may free you from some technical worries and focus on game design, it also has decided a bunch of design decisions for you, because it has to. I don't think there's any other way to go about it with a user friendly engine for the NES, since everything is so driven by very specific hardware.
So, i think that for it to work practically, a lot of the design choices are closer to the realm of software. You're very free to modify what is going to happen when some actor bumps into a certain tile type, what that tile type is supposed to be, etc etc.
Regarding the "Tengen North" brand:
Tengen was the home entertainment brand of Atari Games. Williams bought Atari Games and later spun it off along with Williams' video game assets as Midway. Warner Bros. ended up buying Midway. And WB is no longer using the Tengen name at least in the USA if the following registrations on TSDR are to be believed:
Tengen®Live trademark of Hangzhou Kaite Electrical (which has
a website)
"Battery jump starters; Converters for electric plugs; Electric control panels; Electric switches; Electric wires and cables; Electrical distribution boxes; Electrical plugs and sockets; Electrical switches; Electrolysers; Junction boxes; Plug-in connectors; Remote control starters for vehicles"
Tengen®Live trademark of Zhejiang Tengen Electric (which has
a website with the same wordmark as the registration, both of which differ from the NES era wordmark used by Atari Games)
"Converters, electric; circuit breakers; relays, electric; sockets, plugs and other contacts electric connections; mutual inductor; motor-starter; conductors (lightning -); coils, electric; protectors (voltage surge -); fuses"
Tengen World Cup '92®Abandoned (i.e. dead) trademark of Tengen Inc. [now Warner Bros. Interactive]
"coin operated and other play-for-pay video games, kits, and parts therefor; printed circuit boards, computer hardware, computer programs, computer chips, ROMS and peripheral devices, all for video games; non-coin operated and other non-play-for-pay video games, kits and parts therefor"
Tengen®Invalidated (i.e. dead) trademark of Time Warner Interactive [now Warner Bros. Interactive]
"NON-COIN OPERATED VIDEO GAMES, INCLUDING VIDEO GAMES ON RECORDING MEDIA, SUCH AS DISCS OR TAPES, FOR USE IN COMPUTERS, HOME VIDEO GAME EQUIPMENT, OR OTHER NON-COIN OPERATED APPARATUS CAPABLE OF PLAYING VIDEO GAMES"
Regarding NESmaker:
People worry that NESmaker will lead to proliferation of what Steam operator Valve has called
"fake games" and reviewers have called
"asset flips". Do these cause a problem unique to NES format that doesn't exist in PC format? Is Cowering still trying to exhaustively catalog publicly released (PD) ROMs?
darkhog wrote:
Aren't you afraid that it will just bring for the most time lazy, low-effort "games" (quotes used for a reason) for the most time?
[...]
I fear that it will lead to attack of the clones: Low effort games using basic modules with little to no changes - default graphics, default enemies, only level layout being different.
I still hope that those noobs will not have the patience to actually create a full game, so their games will only consist of a bunch of screens.
I slightly fear that people now might automatically assume that you created your game with NESMaker simply because it becomes their default assumption, especially when you do the same genre as the game NESMaker came from:
I'm working on a top-down fantasy action adventure and I already see idiots saying stuff like: "Oh, like "Mystic Searches". So, you were using NESMaker to create this, right?"
I hope that people will be clever enough to recognize that a game with horizontal and vertical scrolling as well as a battery safe is obviously not an NESMaker program.
(Let's see how long it'll take the creators of NESMaker to include scrolling, though.)
Maybe the community should create an official counter label to the "Made with NESMaker" label, stating "Not made with NESMaker".
(Maybe with certain sub categories: "Written in pure Assembly", "Written in C, with Assembly parts" etc.)
Although I wouldn't want to taint my game's box or even the game itself with the name of a product for amateurs that I did
not use, but it might be good to put this on the website where you sell or present the game.
The good thing is: I assume that none of these noob games will ever appear on cartridge while my game pretty much is guaranteed to come out complete in box, with a high quality shell, label, manual and box.
That's the good thing with NES games: Unlike Steam, your game doesn't have to be digital-only. If you really created something of worth, a publisher might be interested to sell it on physical media.
Besides, Tengen North (whoever that guy is and who knows why he actually took an existing brand name) seems to have no idea of what NES games are and aren't capable of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-aXKeDPaGE&t=49sThe number of colors of the two characters already exceed the four NES sprite palettes.
When I downloaded NESmaker, it crashed. I have Windows 7 32-bit.
DRW wrote:
I still hope that those noobs will not have the patience to actually create a full game, so their games will only consist of a bunch of screens.
That will in fact happen but it also happens with others programming in assembly.
DRW wrote:
I slightly fear that people now might automatically assume that you created your game with NESMaker simply because it becomes their default assumption, especially when you do the same genre as the game NESMaker came from:
I'm working on a top-down fantasy action adventure and I already see idiots saying stuff like: "Oh, like "Mystic Searches". So, you were using NESMaker to create this, right?"
It's not that people are idiots,it's because they don't have the same knowledge as you(there can be many reasons for this,not interested in programming,don't have the required time to learn,only interested in playing games ect..",it's not that difficult to correct them.
DRW wrote:
Maybe the community should create an official counter label to the "Made with NESMaker" label, stating "Not made with NESMaker".
(Maybe with certain sub categories: "Written in pure Assembly", "Written in C, with Assembly parts" etc.)
Although I wouldn't want to taint my game's box or even the game itself with the name of a product for amateurs that I did not use, but it might be good to put this on the website where you sell or present the game.
Official Counter Label?
My view of NES Maker has been somewhat flippant, meaning my initial opinion is different from my present-day opinion.
Initially, I had the same concerns as the OP and what's in the subject line. Not so much "about noobs", but more along the lines of "is this tool really going to amount to some fun NES homebrew titles?" Since it hadn't come out yet, I didn't want to judge it, or the results of its use, prematurely. But in a way, I suppose I already had.
After talking to a couple colleagues (who tend to share similar "critical" views of things (software, PLs, frameworks, pretty much everything in tech these days)), I was surprised to hear that they were generally in support of such a program. The view they presented was that it would make a good "starter" tool for getting people interested in "NES stuff", and even if the games put out were wonky and stupid, at least people were doing something they had a passion for. Their point (and hope) was more or less this: say a hundred people make some "sub-par" titles with this tool -- if even 5 of those people say "well that was fun I guess, but I REALLY want to learn this system" and begin down the path of making their own NES title from scratch (using assemblers, learning the arch, reading the wiki, putting time into code + debugging, etc.), then it's worth it.
That viewpoint, once presented, made me really think. In the end, I ended up changing my viewpoint to mimic theirs. In other words, I'm hoping NES Maker acts as a positive "stepping stone" for more new homebrew folks to get involved with the NES, and hopefully work together to make something cool (read: a good quality game) in the future.
koitsu wrote:
Their point (and hope) was more or less this: say a hundred people make some "sub-par" titles with this tool -- if even 5 of those people say "well that was fun I guess, but I REALLY want to learn this system" and begin down the path of making their own NES title from scratch (using assemblers, learning the arch, reading the wiki, putting time into code + debugging, etc.), then it's worth it.
+1
From what I've heard of NESmaker, it doesn't sound like lazy people will be successful at it.
OmegaMax wrote:
It's not that people are idiots,it's because they don't have the same knowledge as you
People once considered "Haunted Halloween" to be a "River City Ransom" hack.
The gameplay is totally different: One is a side scroller, one is a beat'em up where you can move in four directions.
The idea that it was a hack was purely assumed on the basis that the main character has a similar visual style.
And this
is stupid. You don't need much technical knowledge to know that graphics can be replaced easier than game physics.
So, the "hacker" was able to create a completely new game feeling from the ROM, but he wasn't able to change the graphics enough, so that the sprite doesn't resemble "River City Ransom" anymore?
That
is pretty stupid.
And in the same way, I fear that people might say: "Oh, you're doing a top-down fantasy action RPG? You do this with NESMaker, right?", even though they wouldn't have said the same if I had made a futuristic science fiction floating in space RPG.
I think a lot of people out in the wild simply don't know that it is actually technically possible to program new games for the NES, and maybe for historical reasons - you weren't exposed to bedroom coders and their games back when the console was commercially active, like you'd see with zx spectrum, commodore64 (or abc80/800 here locally) which was all about programmer tips in magazines, computer clubs, sharing casettes/tapes with your latest achievement on them, and trying to get a publisher accept your software, and games you buy sometimes being very clearly made by people about your age or a little older, and maybe local people too. With NES it was always a big corporate gray magic box thing and the names in the credits would appear as professionals with areas of expertise way beyond your reach. Even the game medium itself is mystifying. I held a little homeparty for the release of the nesdev compo version of Project Blue. Even though i explained how you put a game on a cartridge and in sweeping terms how program and assets where made, they still felt it was unbelievable and a little magical.
On the mindmap of these people, they might've encountered hacks/mods though. So it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people automatically assume that new games must, magically somehow, be hacks.
That's of course a misconception we should try to dispel whenever given the opportunity.
It'd also follow that'd when a person who currently believes that "new nes games can't be done" and becomes aware of NESmaker, then comes to the next conclusion: "new games can done with NESmaker". Whish is ..true, but the person is still unaware of the fact that new nes games are being made from the ground up. I still think putting out the root cause (at least i perceive it to be the root cause) of the misconception might be the practical way to go: Dispel unawareness of the nature of how nes games are made - and that they are made.
There already are lazy noobs
*ducks*
I mean, on the C64 do we fear being overrun by SEUCK, or Garry's Game Maker games. No.
We put them over on the side in the own little playpen and just ignore them.
However on the C64 side we have the luxury of doing so, we have so many other releases that when one looks at the releases, those games can just be shunted aside and nobody would notice.
The Risk with the NES is you are going to have
NES
MAKER
MAKER
MAKER
MAKER
MAKER
MAKER
NES
MAKER
MAKER
MAKER
MAKER
To which the outside perception becomes Maker quality. This could be harmful. To be fair, the outside perception is already poor. In that in order to sell a not maker game, you have to then prove your game is not a maker game and hence should not be free like all the maker games are probably going to be. Then what happens when the Maker people want to start to sell a Maker game? ( there was a case of a not SUECK game being called a SUECK game recently in C64 land if you want to test your fireproofs ).
If it brings in more people who then start to move from Maker to C and then to ASM it will be good overall, but I doubt it will happen.
But it might bring more eyes to the scene and make "new NES" games seen as a thing, allowing us to hit larger audiences.
What I'm more worried about - and this is insanely subjective and biased, I admit that. What I'm worried about is that it will subtract from the integrity and wonder typically applied to the production of video games for retro consoles.
One of the things that fascinates me about making games for the NES is that in the eyes of a lot of people (or more importantly: in my own perspective from around 3 years ago) it's kind of black magic. Like, the fact that you can get something running on even that old a system, is amazing. 3 years ago I had no idea how people were able to change the language of an old game without having access to the source code, and two years later I recreated the entirety of Donkey Kong on the NES. It wasn't even hard to do, but overcoming something that was previously unfathomable to me has been an incredible learning experience.
The idea of new games coming out for a classic system is something extremely exciting to me. I love buying homebrews when they are released on cartridges, and enjoy seeing what people have been able to build for one of my favourite consoles! Especially solid finished games like Lizard, Streemerz and Battle Kid 2 are the reason I dig this hobby in the first place! They don't have to be technically impressive. The fact that they are playable is what matters to me.
Now, I'm not really worried about games being "too easy to make". Rather, I absolutely enjoy the prospect of many more people joining the community and getting into the concept of NES homebrew.
But in a worst case scenario, you'd all of a sudden have 50 new games coming out, mostly being lazy mass produced crap, and would detract from the value of any actual great games coming out. Sure, said game would still be great, but I would hate for people to look at any new NES game coming out and just react with "oh, another one of those". Right now people have a good chance of getting small projects backed by Kickstarter. But if you have 100 new projects flooding the market, that will be a lot harder.
In a best case scenario, NESmaker will result in some incredible and highly enjoyable games that never would have been possible if the creators had to overcome the barriers of understanding 6502 and the NES hardware before creating them. I can totally get behind that.
Just to make things even more subjective though... I'm worried about coming out with a game, and people assuming I "just" made it in NESmaker. In reality it shouldn't really matter how I made it though, so I hate feeling like this.
Quote:
hat I'm worried about is that it will subtract from the integrity and wonder typically applied to the production of video games for retro consoles.
If my homeparty was anything to go by, you can rest assured. It was impossible to insist that writing a copy to a cartridge is not all that much different than burning a CD, because look - "it runs on the NES! OMG!!! Is this black magic?" haha. Note that they were impressed from the moment it went from an emulator to the actual pal unit in our living room, so i think it had little to do with the software itself.
But will they be the same in a year when Nesmaker games are everywhere? (they probably won't be, but let's entertain the thought)
Yeah... i really do hope that if asset flips catches on, the same mentality that motivates making asset flips in the first place is also going to naturally prohibit them from launching KS campaigns. It takes a lot of time to prepare, run and manage a campaign (and its aftermath), and it's time these people aren't willing to invest.
If you on the other hand made a punk rock equivalent of a game with a sense of pride, it seems reasonable to sell them on/at etsy, game convensions and directly to friends and skip the hassle of KS altogether.
On KS, we ocassionally see the occasional scam project or someone just being very naïve. Some book or board game that obviously never will make it to the finish line, someone who promises to release a NES game tie-in as a stretch goal that never will happen, and so on. They're typically easy to filter out: First time campaigner with few or no relevant projectsthey've backed themselves. The campaigns typically look like they were more or less improvised. If you stay a while on the page, maybe you'll catch the sense that the math just doesn't add up. And then you stay clear off that campaign.
The sad news is that because these exist, everyone else with serious, well-prepared products must go the extra mile to display that they are indeed serious. So they need to spend a lot of their time building a very professional campaign and be good at communication. That is a problem for people who might be genius at making the product they want to campaign, but don't have the marketing skills to match.
So I feel like I should put this in perspective of the larger game dev crowd as well. Take GameMaker or Unity for example. A lot of devs don't want to recognize them as a "real" gamedev tools. Sure, by lowering the barrier to entry there are a lot of mediocre games made, but there are also some really fantastic (critically acclaimed, award winning) games made with them. In the hands of the right person, they are very powerful tools. Lately there has been a wave of backlash against games made with them. Really nothing original, it's the new "BASIC".
In my local gamedev community, just about everybody uses Unity. Regardless of why they use Unity, saying that Unity games don't count effectively means saying that their games don't count. That bothers me, because some of their games are really quite good. Sure, they might contain some telltale Unity fingerprints, but they are still fun. In the end, you get more games made by people that aren't primarily programmers, and that's a good thing. Personally I wish people would try making simple engines for simple games instead of writing twice as much code to get Unity to do something simple it wasn't made to do, but that remains but a wish. :p
All the FUD in this thread seems like much of the same. "People will think less of my shader code because Unity has a GUI shader editor now." vs "People will think less of my 6502 assembly code because NES Maker lets you make games without it." I guess it depends on who you want to be appreciated by. Regular Joe on the street doesn't have any idea how NES games are made (much less what assembly language is). A couple weeks ago the game I'm contracting on (made in Unity of course :p) was at a local game convention.
I made a NES demake of it as a weird joke because people would be confused. I got exactly the reaction I wanted from some people. Comments ranged from: "Was this originally an NES game?", "Did you export that from Unity somehow?!", "I thought you weren't allowed to make NES games anymore.", "It's still possible to make NES games?", "That's awesome!", "Don't you have to write those in assembly?" I don't think the average gamer has *any* idea whatsoever what making NES homebrew entails. Take it how you will, but much less than 10% of the people that played the real game even tried my NES version, and these were people that love video games enough to pay to attend a convention for them. If it helps, I'm terribly impressed with what people on this forum have made, and having done assembly programming myself can better appreciate the achievement.
The NES isn't getting any newer or more appealing to program for to younger devs. Why risk letting the community dry up if you could use this to tap into a large pool of new and possibly talented members?
In direct response to OP: No, I think it's great that NES Maker exists and I will be glad to see more noobs coming this way.
slembcke wrote:
Personally I wish people would try making simple engines for simple games instead of writing twice as much code to get Unity to do something simple it wasn't made to do, but that remains but a wish. :p
Is it still "twice as much code" once you realize you'd end up having to make engines for all nine platforms that support Unity? Currently, these include Windows desktop, Windows UWP, macOS, iOS, X11/Linux, Android, and all three current consoles.
rainwarrior wrote:
In direct response to OP: No, I think it's great that NES Maker exists and I will be glad to see more noobs coming this way.
Yeah, I agree, though I'm not exactly a long-time member here. There are a few local people I've tried to convince that they should try NES dev, but the thought of programming in C (forget assembly) makes them really apprehensive. I sort of like the idea that you used to need Nintendo's blessing to make a NES game, but now anybody could do it. Wouldn't it be frustrating if Nintendo got to choose who can and can't make homebrew for the NES.
tepples wrote:
slembcke wrote:
Personally I wish people would try making simple engines for simple games instead of writing twice as much code to get Unity to do something simple it wasn't made to do, but that remains but a wish. :p
Is it still "twice as much code" once you realize you'd end up having to make engines for all nine platforms that support Unity? Currently, these include Windows desktop, Windows UWP, macOS, iOS, X11/Linux, Android, and all three current consoles.
Obviously it depends on the project. Most games created (not necessarily released) are single platform, and small in scale. Having worked on about a dozen highly cross-platform Unity projects I'm not really sold on it being an awesome cross-platform tool that somehow magically works. It's a lot like Java in that regard, some stuff sort of magically works, but a lot of the parts that should don't. Mostly I just mean that it's frustrating when you know somebody is struggling with something simple due to tool they are using making something that should be easy, difficult. I realize that's not exactly fair given the benefit of hindsight bias. Until you know the best, simplest, fastest, or (fill in the blank) way to do something, you'll always be doing it "some other way".
Quote:
Really nothing original, it's the new "BASIC".
But even back in the day, games made in BASIC were sold by publishers and no kid was any wiser. It was just another game. Maybe it took a turn when game studios gravitated towards c and then c++ and qBasic became a field seemingly purely for hobbyism. Yet i've had some really fun times and still have fond memories with .bas games from my childhood.
I don't play too many computer games these days and i'm getting old so i might not be the typical consumer, but i wouldn't be able to tell a unity game from a custom one. I *might* be able to sometimes detect GameMaker games occasionally, because that's something i've used a bit to learn the ropes myself. But i'm sure i could be fooled a lot there too.
That makes me think that even if the band of options is more narrow on the NES, just maybe only people who've been working on NES projects for some time might be able to spot a NESmaker game from whenever its genepool surfaces. For what difference it even makes towards attitudes.
Anyway - i'm pretty happy with the prospect of nesmaker on a personal level. For wholly ground-up games, i've kind of come to the conclusion that if i want to get to results i like, i need to team up with people so i can spend my time doing something i'm already decent at (graphis, music), and someone can do the things they're good at (coding), share the design burden/delight, and then eventually, games will come out. NESmaker on the other hand just might let me try out some ideas that line up decently with the modules and get something out the door, eh, "quickly", on my own, and learn something valuable from the process. I'm pretty sure the same goes for many other artists out there.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
But even back in the day, games made in BASIC were sold by publishers and no kid was any wiser. It was just another game.
That's definitely not my experience. Basic interpreters were pretty slow on 8 bit machines compared to assembly. It was usually pretty obvious which games were using it even for text games. Infocom games were praised for their "lightning fast, assembly language based parsers". (Play one today, it is not snappy, lol)
FrankenGraphics wrote:
That makes me think that even if the band of options is more narrow on the NES, just maybe only people who've been working on NES projects for some time might be able to spot a NESmaker game from whenever its genepool surfaces. For what difference it even makes towards attitudes.
Is the implication that it's bad that only experience NES programmers will be able to tell if they are made with NES Maker or not?
Put another way: I really like model aircraft (planes, traditional helis, quadcopters, all of them!). A lot of longtime modelers are worried that drones have made it too easy to get into flying, and that these new people are going to ruin the hobby (give it a bad rep, cause new regulations to be passed, etc). Instead of trying to get these new people to join existing communities that have experience to share, safety rules, and safe locations to fly, they are trying to distance themselves from them. "MY airplanes are built based on real airplanes, so it's *way* different than a drone." Well... nobody else sees it that way. I have a nice scale model biplane that several random people passing by have commented "That's a really nice looking drone." If somebody does something dumb with their drone (like trying to assassinate the Venezuelan president) it will reflect badly on me flying my airplanes too. The perception that they are linked in somebody else's mind is out of my control, but how I welcome/train/help new people entering the hobby is not. I might as well do what I can to make things better than worrying about what I can't change.
Quote:
Is the implication that it's bad that only experience NES programmers will be able to tell if they are made with NES Maker or not?
I guess that'd depend whether you worry if your game is going to be called a nesmaker game when it isn't or not, and what practical effect that actually might have for the success (or reputation) for your game... which is kind of hard to tell beforehand, i think. I guess we'll see. But what i really meant simply to state that i'm not so sure if people (nes gamers) will care all that much. If it's fun, it's fun. If it is interesting, it is interesting.
What i think is still missing from this discussion is that the more people who produce games, the more they create social outreach for getting it known that nes games are still made to this day. The more outreach, the more the interest grows.
Every trader knows this: if you want to sell, you go to town. Banding together breeds commerce. Commerce breeds incentive to keep producing. On a market fair, both you and your competitor is the reason people show up.
Talking about it as if it was a commercial activity actually feels a bit silly since NES development is largely an at-loss activity and friendly hobby, but that's just the thing. We need a bigger market to thrive, even when the market is an attention economy.
Your model aircraft analogy is rather striking. I should probably go over to nesmakers and offer a welcoming casserole, because last visit i got soured up by someone calling GGsound "lackluster" for not supporting expansion sound and all the effects in the world, haha. tbh it still irritates me a little. I guess i have too little to complain about in my regular life.
slembcke wrote:
Is the implication that it's bad that only experience NES programmers will be able to tell if they are made with NES Maker or not?
Whether it was made with NES maker
should only matter to NES programmers who are trying to understand how it was done.
For everyone else all that matters is whether it's a good game or not. The engine used is an unimportant implementation detail.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Quote:
Really nothing original, it's the new "BASIC".
But even back in the day, games made in BASIC were sold by publishers and no kid was any wiser.
Case in point: MECC's
The Oregon Trail was in BASIC.
tepples wrote:
MECC's The Oregon Trail was in BASIC.
The original Oregon Trail was indeed written in BASIC, on a
CDC Cyber. The source code is
available. I once
ported this to
applesoft basic to try it out. This was a text-only game.
The popular Apple II version by MECC I'm not sure about. I wouldn't really assume it was written in BASIC, but it doesn't seem implausible either.
(BASIC was certainly used for commercially viable software over the years, though. I am not questioning that, but I don't really have any specific examples of
8-bit titles that did in hand. I know of many on Atari ST.)
There were also many Apple II games which were at least partially in BASIC. Often you'd find a BASIC "management core" combined with actual assembly/machine language binaries which were
BLOAD'ed into place. One of the most famous, to me anyway, was
Eamon. Another, which was also commercial and multi-platform, was
Temple of Apshai.
Circling back to the NES though -- or more precisely, the Famicom -- had
its own BASIC as well, which also included a keyboard peripheral. I remember finding several pages in Japanese where people were working on their own games using Famicom BASIC. There are some
here. Reverse-engineering of the cartridge and its related ROM subroutines and RAM memory layout is
here.
Like NES Maker, I can't judge people using this as a stepping stone. I started the same way with computing programming: in Applesoft BASIC. I understand the points people make about such tools/things "lowering the standards bar" and the social effects of such a tool, and they're fine opinions to hold. I've
already stated my own.
I think the MSX had a number of commercial BASIC games.
If one wants to talk about top tier BASIC games, Sid Meier's Pirates!
The thing with Unity and Gamemaker and Construct 2... is if one make a "nes" level game on my PC with those tools, so something Quad Core, over 2Ghz, and a GTX anything, the layers of inefficiency are transparent. It doesn't impact the game in anyway. Although when I have a game made in them, it would be nice if those choose something better... I'm looking at you Hotline Miami and LUFTRAUSERS ( for the irony points the PC version is 30fps, the Commodore 64 version is 50fps because you know they used ASM
)
But on a NES, having a bunch of generic stuff pull and prodded, should be somewhat obvious or very limiting if its not. 10 seconds into a SUECK and you know its a SUECK, there is no amount of custom title screen and music that is going to hide it.
I hope it's more flexible than SMW is.
Maybe it will be the NES version of "Backbone", which seems capable but is rather looked down upon..
I've said this before, but I think it will be very similar to the introduction of batariBasic in the Atari 2600 homebrew scene. With batariBasic:
1. Atari 2600 homebrew is a lot more accessible to a lot more people.
2. There's a lot of shovelware homebrew.
3. Some amazing games have been released with bB.
4. Good games (no matter how they were made) still get noticed and appreciated.
5. Yes, people occasionally think your non-bB game was made using bB. The only thing impacted by that is your own pride.
6. The community is still thriving.
gauauu wrote:
The only thing impacted by that is your own pride.
I feel like there is a quote about artists being appreciated, but not in the way they desired. In this case, it's not just that the game is fun, but also the player recognize the work that went into it. I would put that in perspective with my comments above about the recent game convention. People thought it was really neat that a NES game was made, but they have _no_ idea what went into making it happen.
Quote:
Maybe it will be the NES version of "Backbone", which seems capable but is rather looked down upon..
What's Backbone?
Quote:
on the C64 do we fear being overrun by SEUCK, or Garry's Game Maker games. No.
We put them over on the side in the own little playpen and just ignore them.
I feel like most NESmaker games are going to be easy to spot, short non-scrolling RPGs with generic or reused graphics, and will be put in a lesser category of NES homebrews. And mostly ignored. Sadly.
Hopefully, some of them will shine, and take longer than 15 minutes to complete.
Yeah, as a person who uses NM, I fear it will get the same fate and label as RPG Maker - there are great RPG Maker games, Skyborn and To the Moon being just two commercial examples, but people still shy away for RM games without even trying them because of many "mah first gaem evar!!!11!" projects, which is sad. And because people have little knowledge of what exactly it takes to make a NES game, it may reflect badly on the rest of community.
Yes, I want it to be not true, but with other examples from other gamedev branches and tools (RPG Maker, Game Maker, Clickteam Fusion, even Unity which is a "real" engine and of course retro tools like SUECK, STOS, AMOS and so on), I'm afraid it will make anyone who uses NES Maker look like a noob with nothing to offer, even if he/she makes a great game. Because there will be many "mah first gaem evar!!!11!" projects made with NM, that's unavoidable with how the software bills itself.
Nesmaker doesn't support scrolling?
Not yet, but the devs are planning to add necessary code in future.
darkhog wrote:
Because there will be many "mah first gaem evar!!!11!" projects made with NM, that's unavoidable with how the software bills itself.
After clicking the link someone provided and I seen the games in progress being made with NESMaker I'd agree with the "mah first gaem evar!!!11!"
I'm afraid that nesmaker will bring in "games are political" people.
Games are political! It's too late! We're already here!
I think we should all just ignore those toxic ranting "cool kids" who think they can define what's good and what's bad and enforce it upon everyone. I'm referring to those who overuse the terms "noob" and "cringe" and other derogatory inspiration-killing expressions. So what if people make these "My first gaym!" projects? Let them have their fun! If anything, we should support them by helping them see better possibilities of making games. That's how it was with me when I had a Sonic fan character recolor thing that was basically a combination of everything I liked in Sonic characters mixed with my favorite colors. After some time, I've branched out and made my own style and created my own universe with its own project and everything. If we 2007's internet people could have the fun to make "crappy" YouTube videos with Windows Movie Maker and "Unregistered HyperCam 2" hanging on the top-left corner without being called out as stupid and noobs, and if we had our babysteps in developing our projects and creative styles, then why don't we let the new young generations of the internet have those babysteps so that they can also grow like we used to?
Today's tornado of triggers and trigger lists is just disabling these babysteps and no wonder people don't want to do anything now. The internet is uninspiring like never before. There's too much crap and too many triggerings because WE haven't let these young generations be able to experience what it was like to have a freaking old collapsing 700MHz 384MB RAM Windows XP computer in freaking 2011 with Movie Maker and HyperCam 2 and a couple of botched software without being insulted for "not using professional tools" and "being such a dumfuck" (I actually quoted an arrogant programmer there who did that to me).
Today we Millennials are called out as being lazy and entitled and wanting to have everything handed to us on a silver platter. Well, I didn't have anything on a silver platter. I had no mentors to help me with anything. The help of the teachers that I had was so inefficient and outdated to the point of cringe that I got such a humiliating score on the computer competition in software development. Every day I couldn't study history or geography because I was busy with thinking about what kind of an awesome silly Let's Play or video game I'm gonna make. I had to make drawings of those things because I was unable to be at the PC all the time because my brother would take the seat or I'd have to study. I had to dig out the maximum of what I had and there was no certainty that I would have it. The certainty was only in my nerdy heart. In 2012 when our Croatian Language class teacher commanded us to give all of our phones to her table so that we don't cheat on the test while going to the bathroom, it was clear who was rich and who was poor. Everyone had some super ultra expensive hugeass shovel-like Android or iPhone while I had a collapsing Sony Ericsson C510 that I loved so much because it was the only thing I had and so much that I installed so many J2ME applications like Opera Mini, eBuddy, PaintCAD, VibeJive, MiniCommander and other neat utilities and there I drew the pixelart for my recolor hedgehog, composed music, chatted on phpBB forums, cuddled with an Australian girl through RP who was my inspiration at the time as we were both heading towards depression and I was quietly enjoying my adventure with my online friends. So if there's anyone to tell me that I'm entitled, well according to the UK dictionary, I am, but according to the US one, I'm not. I definitely deserve a good computer for once especially when there's nobody even bothering to watch any video that isn't 4K 60FPS enough to not trigger one of those graphics bitches who only care about how good a game looks like and not about how good a game plays (I'm looking at you, Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy). One horrible mistake I did back in 2013 was deleting my YouTube channel because I thought it was immature. That's when I also lost my momentum in programming and gamedev. In fear of botchy games, I started learning GML and C++ without success of making a simple game engine that's not some Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion. But if only there was someone to help me, and there was nobody, I would have been more confident in myself and I would have built so many games and I would have been a YouTube star. Now I'm just embarrassing myself in front of everyone when I talk about what happened in the past while all that there was in the past is deleted by me because I was too ashamed of myself. But ashamed in front of who? In front of some stupid real life drugdealers in my class who everyone thought was cool? I was supposed to listen to my online buddies who were the real ones supporting me all along, but I just fell short in my faith in online friendship due to peer pressure of believing that internet friends aren't real and that Let's Plays are immature and that Sonic stuff is cringy.
Now I'm trying to prevent anyone from going the same path as I have and I'm struggling hard with getting anything done because right now I'm in college and I'm questioning myself do I have what it takes to work in an industry that is unstoppably changing without any certainty. All I can say is that now that there are more people who can support those young generations, we SHOULD support them. Someone makes a crappy game? Mod the game and make it look beautiful and give them as a gift! Someone has spelling errors? Translate their game like you would translate Mother 3! Help each other, people! We're online and most connected finally! Who knows when we're gonna have such an awesome connection again. Let's not listen to those "cool kids" who always bullied us in class and now online. Let's just ignore them and avangardly push our own dreams forward like we used to in the past! We finally have NESmaker! We have Troll Blaster! We have a whole community of people! We just don't have the good relations with each other and a good fellowship. Please, let's unite and be nice to each other like we used to be 10 years ago.
I hope this has made sense.
8bitMicroGuy wrote:
I started learning GML and C++ without success of making a simple game engine that's not some Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion. But if only there was someone to help me, and there was nobody, I would have been more confident in myself and I would have built so many games and I would have been a YouTube star.
Learning to program takes dedication and lots of it,if a person is determined to learn they will succeed.Many,many programmers are constantly helping others but they can only help so much the rest has to come from you.
8bitMicroGuy wrote:
Everyone had some super ultra expensive hugeass shovel-like Android or iPhone while I had a collapsing Sony Ericsson C510 that I loved so much because it was the only thing I had
I also have a collapsing Sony Ericsson phone, and it's not because I'm poor (I'm not) it's because I have no interest in having a new/expensive smartphone whatsoever. Also I have my current phone as well, but I know I'm not going to like any newer/more expensive phone.
Games always were (potentially) political.. think of the 80s. RushnAttack wouldn’t exist without the cold war and is about two american commandos surgically invading the soviet union to sabotage their nuclear arms capacity, Guevara was renamed guerilla, contra was rebranded as probotector, the first boss you fight in Strider is council members of the duma merging to a centipede chasing you with a hammer and sickle. Some were explicitly making a political point or two here and there, others just parasited on the political backdrop, and many of them were conditioned to avoid provoking social and political tensions.
All that, and apolitical games too (i guess tetris and the like would be a good example of apolitical content), exist side by side. But even apolitical games (this goes for any cultural artifact) do not exist in a completely neutral vacuum.
8bitmicroguy wrote:
So what if people make these "My first gaym!" projects? Let them have their fun!
This! My first gaym was made using batch scripts, then the couple following ones were done in qbasic, relevant to very few, short and admittedly very poor. I gave them to friends with DOS computers on a floppy. Now people can do that using NES/emulators too. That's pretty awesome. I'm thinking back to when i held a workshop for kids with no summer plans to try out making graphics and design ideas for the NES and also show the results on the NES. Imagine if i had had NESmaker at that time and they could actually see their pixel drawings do quite elaborate things easily. What would these "noobs" do with that experience in a couple of years? Who knows.
I don't think NES Maker is any more liable to bring "lazy noobs" to the scene than, say, Game Maker, RPG Maker,
nbasic (remember that?), etc. are.
Nobody's first game is good. Lowering the barrier to entry only makes it easier to
stop being a "lazy noob" by actually enabling people to learn how to create things and develop their own skills without having to restrict themselves to doing everything in assembly from square one like it's still 1985. Consider it part of a learning process, if you like - some people might eventually become experienced and ambitious enough to move on to something "better", and others might just play around with NESMaker to make a couple of forgettable toy projects or something, but nobody is losing out from allowing either of these things to happen.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
8bitMicroGuy wrote:
So what if people make these "My first gaym!" projects?
This! My first gaym was made using ...
Hah! I learned BASIC programming on an Atari 800, but I think my first gayms were some pretty simple things made in Hypercard. I'm pretty sure they are still on some old floppy disks sitting in a corner of my parent's house... I kind of want to see if I can find them and get them running in an emulator now. We should start a thread for all our "embarrassingly" simple first projects we made.
So yeah, I started as a wild eyed beginner that had no idea what I was doing and made some crap. That's why I wanted to learn to program in the first place. Now I work (mostly) full time in the games industry as a freelance programmer.
Developers that I idolized as a kid now use the physics library that I wrote as an adult. That never would have happened without people supporting me when I was a beginner. (The internet wasn't around yet, but my parent's and teachers certainly never told me my little projects were dumb)
Standing on the shoulders of giants and all. Provide the best pair of shoulders you can, it's one of the only ways you can influence the future.
Guys, I know games "are political", I'm just referring to people who shoehorn politics into games to the point of absurdity. You know what I'm talking about.
8bitMicroGuy wrote:
Please, let's unite and be nice to each other like we used to be 10 years ago.
We are the world, we are the children
I don't know why you thought it was necessary to do such a heartfelt speech when I'm very sure that NesDev is one of the most noob friendly communities on the internet. When homebrews barely register on people's radars and are often confused for simple sprite hacks of commercial games, it's only natural to be worried about our community's body of works from being devalued further. It's like doing an RPG Maker game, no matter how good your game is, it's still "an RPG Maker game" (this already happens, see Mike Matei playing through Action 53 on the Cinemassacre channel and saying that Streemerz is a Bionic Commando hack). This really doesn't bother me that much since I'm sure that NES Maker is nowhere as easy as something like RPG Maker anyway, but I see where people are coming from.
Punch wrote:
I don't know why you thought it was necessary to do such a heartfelt speech when I'm very sure that NesDev is one of the most noob friendly communities on the internet.
Well... I mean there is the thread title + the OP.
slembcke wrote:
Punch wrote:
I don't know why you thought it was necessary to do such a heartfelt speech when I'm very sure that NesDev is one of the most noob friendly communities on the internet.
Well... I mean there is the thread title + the OP.
One thread title by a single user does not erase years of expert users documenting the NES and helping "noobs", always discussing things in a civil manner. See: this very thread's posts.
8bitMicroGuy wrote:
I think we should all just ignore those toxic ranting "cool kids" who think they can define what's good and what's bad and enforce it upon everyone. I'm referring to those who overuse the terms "noob" and "cringe" and other derogatory inspiration-killing expressions. So what if people make these "My first gaym!" projects? Let them have their fun! If anything, we should support them by helping them see better possibilities of making games. That's how it was with me when I had a Sonic fan character recolor thing that was basically a combination of everything I liked in Sonic characters mixed with my favorite colors. After some time, I've branched out and made my own style and created my own universe with its own project and everything. If we 2007's internet people could have the fun to make "crappy" YouTube videos with Windows Movie Maker and "Unregistered HyperCam 2" hanging on the top-left corner without being called out as stupid and noobs, and if we had our babysteps in developing our projects and creative styles, then why don't we let the new young generations of the internet have those babysteps so that they can also grow like we used to?
Today's tornado of triggers and trigger lists is just disabling these babysteps and no wonder people don't want to do anything now. The internet is uninspiring like never before. There's too much crap and too many triggerings because WE haven't let these young generations be able to experience what it was like to have a freaking old collapsing 700MHz 384MB RAM Windows XP computer in freaking 2011 with Movie Maker and HyperCam 2 and a couple of botched software without being insulted for "not using professional tools" and "being such a dumfuck" (I actually quoted an arrogant programmer there who did that to me).
Today we Millennials are called out as being lazy and entitled and wanting to have everything handed to us on a silver platter. Well, I didn't have anything on a silver platter. I had no mentors to help me with anything. The help of the teachers that I had was so inefficient and outdated to the point of cringe that I got such a humiliating score on the computer competition in software development. Every day I couldn't study history or geography because I was busy with thinking about what kind of an awesome silly Let's Play or video game I'm gonna make. I had to make drawings of those things because I was unable to be at the PC all the time because my brother would take the seat or I'd have to study. I had to dig out the maximum of what I had and there was no certainty that I would have it. The certainty was only in my nerdy heart. In 2012 when our Croatian Language class teacher commanded us to give all of our phones to her table so that we don't cheat on the test while going to the bathroom, it was clear who was rich and who was poor. Everyone had some super ultra expensive hugeass shovel-like Android or iPhone while I had a collapsing Sony Ericsson C510 that I loved so much because it was the only thing I had and so much that I installed so many J2ME applications like Opera Mini, eBuddy, PaintCAD, VibeJive, MiniCommander and other neat utilities and there I drew the pixelart for my recolor hedgehog, composed music, chatted on phpBB forums, cuddled with an Australian girl through RP who was my inspiration at the time as we were both heading towards depression and I was quietly enjoying my adventure with my online friends. So if there's anyone to tell me that I'm entitled, well according to the UK dictionary, I am, but according to the US one, I'm not. I definitely deserve a good computer for once especially when there's nobody even bothering to watch any video that isn't 4K 60FPS enough to not trigger one of those graphics bitches who only care about how good a game looks like and not about how good a game plays (I'm looking at you, Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy). One horrible mistake I did back in 2013 was deleting my YouTube channel because I thought it was immature. That's when I also lost my momentum in programming and gamedev. In fear of botchy games, I started learning GML and C++ without success of making a simple game engine that's not some Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion. But if only there was someone to help me, and there was nobody, I would have been more confident in myself and I would have built so many games and I would have been a YouTube star. Now I'm just embarrassing myself in front of everyone when I talk about what happened in the past while all that there was in the past is deleted by me because I was too ashamed of myself. But ashamed in front of who? In front of some stupid real life drugdealers in my class who everyone thought was cool? I was supposed to listen to my online buddies who were the real ones supporting me all along, but I just fell short in my faith in online friendship due to peer pressure of believing that internet friends aren't real and that Let's Plays are immature and that Sonic stuff is cringy.
Now I'm trying to prevent anyone from going the same path as I have and I'm struggling hard with getting anything done because right now I'm in college and I'm questioning myself do I have what it takes to work in an industry that is unstoppably changing without any certainty. All I can say is that now that there are more people who can support those young generations, we SHOULD support them. Someone makes a crappy game? Mod the game and make it look beautiful and give them as a gift! Someone has spelling errors? Translate their game like you would translate Mother 3! Help each other, people! We're online and most connected finally! Who knows when we're gonna have such an awesome connection again. Let's not listen to those "cool kids" who always bullied us in class and now online. Let's just ignore them and avangardly push our own dreams forward like we used to in the past! We finally have NESmaker! We have Troll Blaster! We have a whole community of people! We just don't have the good relations with each other and a good fellowship. Please, let's unite and be nice to each other like we used to be 10 years ago.
I hope this has made sense.
Completely agree and seriously hope it will be that way (and I'm already am helping people using NES Maker, seeing as I've made NES Maker discord and all), but let be real, this is the internet and while I hope nesdev community will try and welcome these new devs, there will be many outsiders who wouldn't be so welcoming.
Punch wrote:
One thread title by a single user does not erase years of expert users documenting the NES and helping "noobs", always discussing things in a civil manner. See: this very thread's posts.
Certainly, but it does explain why somebody would post a heartfelt speech.
darkhog wrote:
there will be many outsiders who wouldn't be so welcoming
I'm out. This thread just imploded or something. lol
Current active in progress games if you're interested.
http://nesmakers.com/viewforum.php?f=13
There is nothing wrong with "my first game", I have 10 of them, on floppy disks, in locked Disk Storage Boxes, that will never see the light of day, even if the disks are still readable.
The issue is the vast majority of titles being released are "my first game" and hence eveybody who looks at the scene thinks its all "my first game" and this cements their already down nose looking option of "home-brews are crap" even more.
This is more an issue with the NES communities size rather than with people using NesMaker per se.
dougeff wrote:
Quote:
Maybe it will be the NES version of "Backbone", which seems capable but is rather looked down upon..
What's Backbone?
http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/Backbone_FullIts basically an evolved AMOS, so a no programming needed toolkit for the Amiga O/ECS AGA and CD32. Basically its as fast a AMOS, so a game made with it tends to be slow and limited compared to a made from scratch game.
For some Examples
http://www.indieretronews.com/2018/08/n ... games.html
darkhog wrote:
8bitMicroGuy wrote:
I think we should all just ignore those toxic ranting "cool kids" who think they can define what's good and what's bad and enforce it upon everyone. I'm referring to those who overuse the terms "noob" and "cringe" and other derogatory inspiration-killing expressions. So what if people make these "My first gaym!" projects? Let them have their fun! If anything, we should support them by helping them see better possibilities of making games. That's how it was with me when I had a Sonic fan character recolor thing that was basically a combination of everything I liked in Sonic characters mixed with my favorite colors. After some time, I've branched out and made my own style and created my own universe with its own project and everything. If we 2007's internet people could have the fun to make "crappy" YouTube videos with Windows Movie Maker and "Unregistered HyperCam 2" hanging on the top-left corner without being called out as stupid and noobs, and if we had our babysteps in developing our projects and creative styles, then why don't we let the new young generations of the internet have those babysteps so that they can also grow like we used to?
Today's tornado of triggers and trigger lists is just disabling these babysteps and no wonder people don't want to do anything now. The internet is uninspiring like never before. There's too much crap and too many triggerings because WE haven't let these young generations be able to experience what it was like to have a freaking old collapsing 700MHz 384MB RAM Windows XP computer in freaking 2011 with Movie Maker and HyperCam 2 and a couple of botched software without being insulted for "not using professional tools" and "being such a dumfuck" (I actually quoted an arrogant programmer there who did that to me).
Today we Millennials are called out as being lazy and entitled and wanting to have everything handed to us on a silver platter. Well, I didn't have anything on a silver platter. I had no mentors to help me with anything. The help of the teachers that I had was so inefficient and outdated to the point of cringe that I got such a humiliating score on the computer competition in software development. Every day I couldn't study history or geography because I was busy with thinking about what kind of an awesome silly Let's Play or video game I'm gonna make. I had to make drawings of those things because I was unable to be at the PC all the time because my brother would take the seat or I'd have to study. I had to dig out the maximum of what I had and there was no certainty that I would have it. The certainty was only in my nerdy heart. In 2012 when our Croatian Language class teacher commanded us to give all of our phones to her table so that we don't cheat on the test while going to the bathroom, it was clear who was rich and who was poor. Everyone had some super ultra expensive hugeass shovel-like Android or iPhone while I had a collapsing Sony Ericsson C510 that I loved so much because it was the only thing I had and so much that I installed so many J2ME applications like Opera Mini, eBuddy, PaintCAD, VibeJive, MiniCommander and other neat utilities and there I drew the pixelart for my recolor hedgehog, composed music, chatted on phpBB forums, cuddled with an Australian girl through RP who was my inspiration at the time as we were both heading towards depression and I was quietly enjoying my adventure with my online friends. So if there's anyone to tell me that I'm entitled, well according to the UK dictionary, I am, but according to the US one, I'm not. I definitely deserve a good computer for once especially when there's nobody even bothering to watch any video that isn't 4K 60FPS enough to not trigger one of those graphics bitches who only care about how good a game looks like and not about how good a game plays (I'm looking at you, Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy). One horrible mistake I did back in 2013 was deleting my YouTube channel because I thought it was immature. That's when I also lost my momentum in programming and gamedev. In fear of botchy games, I started learning GML and C++ without success of making a simple game engine that's not some Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion. But if only there was someone to help me, and there was nobody, I would have been more confident in myself and I would have built so many games and I would have been a YouTube star. Now I'm just embarrassing myself in front of everyone when I talk about what happened in the past while all that there was in the past is deleted by me because I was too ashamed of myself. But ashamed in front of who? In front of some stupid real life drugdealers in my class who everyone thought was cool? I was supposed to listen to my online buddies who were the real ones supporting me all along, but I just fell short in my faith in online friendship due to peer pressure of believing that internet friends aren't real and that Let's Plays are immature and that Sonic stuff is cringy.
Now I'm trying to prevent anyone from going the same path as I have and I'm struggling hard with getting anything done because right now I'm in college and I'm questioning myself do I have what it takes to work in an industry that is unstoppably changing without any certainty. All I can say is that now that there are more people who can support those young generations, we SHOULD support them. Someone makes a crappy game? Mod the game and make it look beautiful and give them as a gift! Someone has spelling errors? Translate their game like you would translate Mother 3! Help each other, people! We're online and most connected finally! Who knows when we're gonna have such an awesome connection again. Let's not listen to those "cool kids" who always bullied us in class and now online. Let's just ignore them and avangardly push our own dreams forward like we used to in the past! We finally have NESmaker! We have Troll Blaster! We have a whole community of people! We just don't have the good relations with each other and a good fellowship. Please, let's unite and be nice to each other like we used to be 10 years ago.
I hope this has made sense.
Completely agree and seriously hope it will be that way (and I'm already am helping people using NES Maker, seeing as I've made NES Maker discord and all), but let be real, this is the internet and while I hope nesdev community will try and welcome these new devs, there will be many outsiders who wouldn't be so welcoming.
Really? Can you send me a link to the server?
Oziphantom wrote:
The issue is the vast majority of titles being released are "my first game"
Yeah, it kinda bothers me when people can't tell the difference between a personal accomplishment and something worth releasing to the public that can actually be enjoyed by others.
Hot take: If you're afraid of your game being overshadowed by a "no coding required generic NES engine" game, maybe you should try harder.
Or the fear might be that any polished game release at all would get pushed off the list of recent free-to-play ROM releases by a supermajority of no-effort "hello world"-class ROMs released by the novices tokumaru mentioned who can't tell a private accomplishment from a public-worthy one.
ndiddy wrote:
Hot take: If you're afraid of your game being overshadowed by a "no coding required generic NES engine" game, maybe you should try harder.
That's a pretty ignorant statement.
It's not about being overshadowed by these games, it's about being ignored because of these games, because people might not bother to look at your game and simply assume right from the beginning that it's just another beginner's NESMaker game. Or maybe they don't notice it at all among all the other games.
I have no doubt that my adventure game will be better than the first timers' NESMaker games. But for people to notice this, it requires them to have a look at my game. Which
might be more difficult if NESMaker will cause a lot of shovelware.
I don't think you need to be worried DRW,on the c64 majority just ignore the maker games as they understand the quality of those games,nobody needs to point it out as most everyone can tell.People will eventually know the difference and the ones that can make good games on nes maker will stand out,the only games I'll even play made in seuck are games made from a few that make good games,they've proven they can create good games and continue to do so.They rest I don't bother with unless someone( member's' that I know can judge a good game from a terrible one) that plays it and recommends the others try it.There will be a few that will create very good games with it though and I'm interested in seeing what these people do with nes maker.
I think DRW is talking about people with zero (or close to zero) technical knowledge, who just want to play games and don't really care about how they're made. If there's a sudden influx of bad NES games and they keep pouring in, that could maybe cause people to pay less attention to NES releases in general.
Unless the is a deluge of such games I wouldn't worry too much about it. The only difference is, you cannot make a sample like "junkrom" and call that an accomplishment anymore
How many active project right now? It will either grow or fade. I'm not worried at all. Maybe some of them will graduate to be member here and make more advanced game, others, they had their fun making their "first game". For some people, that will be more than enough.
As the creator of NESmaker, the director of The New 8-bit Heroes, the programmer for Mystic Origins, Mystic Searches, Troll Burner, and several other small projects, the full on advocate of this community, Nintendo Age, RetroUSB, all of the homebrewers that we've met along the way (right now, my collection is at about 20 games and counting), and everything you amazing people are doing, I thought I would chime in on what seems to be a very divisive post, with a long, thorough response.
First and foremost, I've been preaching the gospel of NESdev and all of its figureheads for five years now. We spent three years traversing the country meeting and interviewing homebrewers, chronicling what they've been working on, bringing their games to conventions and letting people know that development for this system is alive and well. Folks like Kevin Hanley, Derek Andrews, Brian Parker, Beau Holland, Memblers, Tepples, John White, Brad Smith, the entire Collectorvision team, Brian Provinciano, and several others, I've not only met, but some I've become fairly close friends with. I'm not some separate entity from this community, I am an active member of this community, and have been for about 5 years now. Memblers even has the link to our documentary front and center on the main page of NESdev, and I consider it a badge of honor that he feels that our project gave outsiders at least some indicator of what goes into this.
I have said, still say, and will continue to say until I retire from all of this altogether that the single best way to develop a NES game is to dig your heels in, spend a few years really learning not only 6502 ASM, but all of the particulars of how it interfaces with the hardware. I've continued to post this throughout our campaign. However, as a long time educator of game design and development at both the high school and collegiate level, I noticed a horrible barrier between the average young developer and the potential to create for the NES. Some of you consider this barrier a good thing. Some of you want to horde development in this medium in some elitist way, that you've worked so hard to deconstruct. I understand this and appreciate it, but fundamentally disagree.
In the five years I've been traversing the country working on this project and all of its outgrowths, I've heard endless stories of people who have started down the road of designing a NES game, found the constraints and limitations absolutely unscalable, given up, and either started to build their vision in a more user friendly environment (like GameMaker or Unity), or just abandoned it altogether. This doesn't serve the purpose of keeping some level of sanctity about NES development as I think some of you believe that it does...all it does is make the NES a less viable option for developing games. And as us old heads who grew up with nostalgia for the system begin to age out of this ambition, the next generation of potential developers may not have the same desire to create for the NES when there are so many other ways to create. In that, everyone loses. People aren't buying the consoles. Therefor people aren't getting the hardware. Therefor people don't have any need or desire for new games, negating interest in what homebrewers are doing. And it becomes a tiny little niche hobbyist cult rather than the inviting passion project that I firmly believe it should be.
I took many of the lessons that I learned from teaching wysiwyg tools like GameMaker and Unity and figured out many ways to apply them to NES development. But here's the thing. Even though NESmaker is a front end, it's really mostly just a user friendly asset organizer. If you guys are making serious NES games, you're all building your own (and if you're not, you're either needlessly moving at a snails pace, or you're some sort of masochist! haha). Even if you haven't built your own tools, if you have ever used any of Shiru's screen tools or space checkers, or have ever used famitracker with FamiTone or some other pre-existing sound engine, or got started using Nerdy Nights tutorials...hell, reading this forum right now and having access to the wiki, then you, too, have take a proverbial shortcut that those who came before you may have scoffed at. For those of you who have some sort of contempt for NESmaker, consider this: I'm sure that some of the actual NES composers would look at the famitracker tunes you're making and scoff at how the ease of it took away the art of it. I'm sure that some of the nes artists would watch you use Shiru's NES Screen Tool or YY-CHR and scoff at the fact you weren't doing it with graph paper and long hex tables. We've just taken that to another level...a suite of tools that are as customizable as we can make them within the constraints of the system. It is absolutely designed to be editable on the code level in bite sized, manageable chunks as an ASM learning tool. Rather than the 15 year old kid spending a month bashing their head against code they don't understand trying to get their first screen built, then shrugging and jumping ship to make a GameMaker game for their iPhone, they have a working, assemblable skeleton up and functional, and are able to see immediate visual feedback of code changes they make. They are able to assign script definitions, so they can A/B scripts...using scripts they know work, and then checking them against custom scripts they create. They could conceivably write an entire engine in ASM from the ground up using these tools, though the UI of the tool may constrain them as far as what they can edit from the front end. But the point is, they don't have to.
In the last 30 years, one of the major things that has changed for video games is they're no longer just a computer science geek's weekend project. They are legitimate forms of expression and entertainment. Unlike in the NES days, not everyone who creates games is a programmer. There are storytellers and musicians and artists, all equally contributing to game development teams. There are so many amazingly evocative (and financially successful) game experiences today that are created utilizing 90% of a pre-existing engine, but where the assets give it a uniqueness and a voice. Why wouldn't we, as NES developers, want the NES to be able to be used as a creative outlet as well? Would we presume that someone who may not be the best at programming couldn't have the capacity to build an amazing game experience using other tools? Of course they could...so why not for the NES?
These were some of the considerations that went into building NESmaker. We brought it to retro gaming events for 18 months before deciding to officially greenlight it. Portland Retro Gaming Expo, Seattle Retro Gaming Expo, Retropalooza, Retro Game Con, PAX South, Emerald Coast Con...I did ASM workshops at University of Baltimore, UCLA, Ringling College of Art and Design, Towson University, and a bunch of others...all getting feedback, gauging needs, enthusiasm, and trying to find the right balance between capacity for complexity and ease of use. A lot of thought went into this, and with it, all of the passion that we have for NES development, just like the rest of us here.
Lastly, I'll leave you with a thought, for those of you who think this will just end up producing a bunch of shovelware and not actually teach people anything about game development. Here's just one of the many examples of users who have NEVER used ASM prior to this, always wanted to make a NES game, thought it would be impossible because they're an artist not a programmer...doing something WAY outside of the box using ASM, after just working with the beta for a few weeks...
A first time ASM user going DEEP to completely rewire the pathing system to fit their game's needs, and sharing with the community:
http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=3& ... hing#p1770And there are many more of these stories if you check in on those forums or the facebook group.
Some of you may still think that somehow this will somehow corrupt this community or this passion. I appreciate your devotion to this thing that we do, but I definitely hope to prove you wrong with it. And for those who have met me, who have worked with me, who know what it is that we're trying to do here, I appreciate all the support and the kind words in the face of this weird condemnation for trying to bring a new tool to the tool belt for creating new NES experiences...
Thanks for listening to the rant. Hopefully it at least gives some perspective.
Maybe the "junkrom" example above may have been abrasive if you don't know that it refers to Tony Young sample that was done around 1997 (?) when it was a proof of concept and people didn't know much about the platform. It was just a snarky comment for joking around that now with nesmaker you can show something on the screen with no effort compared to that era. So we went a long way if we take things in perspective. I remember in 2008 when I shown some nametable captured from bionic commando and was all excited about it but I'm sure most people must have been "duh" seeing that sample
We all started somewhere.
As I have mentioned before in other threads, any tools is fine as long that you reach your goal (we had many debates about nesasm, ca65 etc) so I have no issue with NesMaker at all, on the opposite, if it make great games, why not?
Personally, I wouldn't use it since I want to develop the low level code and that is what I find interesting. I'm not an artist so I will use other tools that exist when required. In 10 years, a lot of new editors, drivers came out so it does save me a lot of time that I don't have ^^;;
I think what people are afraid of is the "app store" effect: when anybody and their grandma can make a game, will it become cesspool affecting the discoverability of current homebrews or a lot of great game came out of it and promote it even more. I can see why some people are concerned about that. But since people are quite vocal and we always derail the thread (^^;;) sometime a simple message become a long debate with all kind of "hairy" contents.
It will be interesting to see how NesMaker progress and what it will become. Some people "maybe" elitist like you mentioned but I don't think that everyone think that way. Some are just concerned on the impact since compared to 10 years ago, we are now starting to see more and more homebrew these days.
Revenant wrote:
I don't think NES Maker is any more liable to bring "lazy noobs" to the scene than, say, Game Maker, RPG Maker,
nbasic (remember that?), etc. are.
Uhhhh huh. An "RPG Maker situation" is pretty much the worst possible outcome I can imagine from NES Maker.
But I don't really think it's likely to happen that way. NES Maker is too limited with what you can do to command the same kind of lazy shovelware that RPG Maker (and a lot of other "easy to make games" products) produces.
In other words, to make something satisfactory with NES Maker, you still need to put in a lot of effort. Or at least that's my impression.
I'd like to address the fact that some of the posts here, jumping to the defense of NES Maker (most obviously 8bitMicroGuy's large post, and JoeGtake2's own), seem to take the stance that a lot of people here are actually against NES Maker.
But I think it's very obvious that that is not the case, and I think darkhog, in creating this thread, is just addressing the elephant in the room. A discussion that's only healthy to get out of the way, now that NES Maker is finally happening.
I myself expressed a bit of a worry about the devaluation of the product of a homemade NES game, but that is not the same as to say that I am not in favor of NES Maker. In fact, if you didn't make NES Maker, I would very likely have ended up making something similar myself, as creating dev tools is probably a bigger hobby for me (as well as my fulltime job) than actually finishing a game.
Rather, the "worry" is completely subjective and very biased. Something that I'm ready to admit, but unable to ignore.
In smalltime hobby game development communities there is often a split between games made by programmers, and games made by game designers and/or artists. The former might result in technically impressive demos, but games completely lacking the nice finish and sensible user interfaces, while the artists create beautiful games that are never finished, or feel terrible to control, etc. At the end of the day you obviously need either the rare individual who masters all aspects of game development (someone like Konjak or Matt Thorson, etc), or of course the classic team made up of people of various skills. Those are the games that take off and hopefully get popular because, well, they deserve it.
So I think it goes without saying that a tool, that essentially removes the programming skill from the equation, easily comes across like it is a "threat" to the value of those of us whose most useful skill is that of programming. All of a sudden it is no longer cool to just make something run on the NES - if you want to showcase whatever makes you, as an individual, relevant, you need to specifically target something that NES Maker is unable to do, which actually takes away a bit of our freedom.
I think that is a very relevant perspective to keep in mind, even if you might not like to think that way.
It doesn't mean that I don't think NES Maker is beneficial to the homebrew scene. There is no way that opening up the potential of creating NES games to a ton of new people isn't a good thing, and you'd be a fool to ignore it.
Maybe it becomes my charge, then, to figure out a quality metric and some sort of proper sounding board for those that have risen to the top as far as quality (not just NESmaker games, but all new NES games). This is not something I’d ever want to or be able to take on personally (time and conflict of interest), but I am jacked in to enough outlets that this might be both a solution to the concern and a promotional point for those who have done something awesome and worthy of praise (because let’s face it - self promo beyond these forums is most NES homebrewers achilles heel...).
If I had the support of the community for this, I’d look into this. If nothing else, I’ve developed a bit of reach and some pivotal contacts for something like this.
That way, we are to a GOOD point of “anyone and their grandmother” can be toying with NES development and feel that magic of games on real hardware, and new generations understand why it’s so cool, yet there is also a benchmark of successful games that separate them from the young learners shouting “i made a game!”.
Thoughts?
I think the biggest issue for me is.
NES games and by virtue 8bit games are quick and easy to make. Being "at the metal" is the 'joy' of making them. Things happen quick and fast during development. We can make games of the '8bit god' variety. The time sink is not coding, its protyping, designing and testing, so even though coding the games is really fast and easy, it still takes 6 months to make something good. but its a lot faster and easier than on other more modern platforms.
If you are not here for the challenge of the machine, to find and push it in new ways... why come?
Sumez wrote:
In smalltime hobby game development communities there is often a split between games made by programmers, and games made by game designers and/or artists. The former might result in technically impressive demos, but games completely lacking the nice finish and sensible user interfaces, while the artists create beautiful games that are never finished, or feel terrible to control, etc. At the end of the day you obviously need either the rare individual who masters all aspects of game development (someone like Konjak or Matt Thorson, etc), or of course the classic team made up of people of various skills. Those are the games that take off and hopefully get popular because, well, they deserve it.
Yeah, i think collaboration is key for most of us to get to the next level. The nesdev compo brings a lot of impressive solo efforts, but i think we're going to see more and more co-labs, because people have their specializations - and ambitions. Nesdev is predominantly made up of programmers. NESmaker seems to bring in more artists, who are also getting a tool to train themselves in technical limitations. Sounds like a match.
revenant wrote:
I don't think NES Maker is any more liable to bring "lazy noobs" to the scene than, say, Game Maker, RPG Maker, nbasic (remember that?), etc. are.
I remember nBasic. I did my first hello world for the NES using it in 2008, inspired by what it could do with small demo games like sack of flour/heart of gold, that penguin game etc. Granted, i didn't look to continue in so many years (i think i joined up in nesdev 2016, after i felt i grew out of romhacking for a few years), but it was the personal starting point. I'm pretty sure NESmaker will work the same for some people, except NESmaker allows for a smoother transition (both allows you to get something working quickly and allows you to grow out of its GUI front end) and is a much more expanded tool than family basic or nBasic ever were.
oziphantom wrote:
If you are not here for the challenge of the machine, to find and push it in new ways...
idk. My ambition is to make experiences that will impress, something that takes the library of nes games in a bit of a new direction. Part of it is aesthetic, part of it is doing things the original hardware designers wouldn't have expected/anticipated. Whether i succeed is another story, but just making a game/part of a game in itself has no charm for me. That's why i don't do much pc game stuff. But just to have something working on the nes might be a charm in its own for some.
JoeGtake2 wrote:
Thoughts?
Just some stray ones.
-Maybe a curated "new NES game news" channel... with guest appearances from known youtube faces doing a second opinion?
-The assembly line is a podcast that sort of does this in a different take on it; chronicling homebrew history, talking about rumours, and interviewing homebrewers, but it is also a bit of an internal affair amongst homebrewers and users of the NintendoAge homebrew subforum (a subportion of all homebrew gamers). I like the cozy club feeling, even if the guys behind it go out of their way to make it digestive for anybody. Maybe promoting this podcast can be part of a wider strategy? They don't do reviews per definition, but it's a great effort towards extending homebrew awareness.
-Another thing i've pondered much about is what to do with the european backwater market. I'm sure there is untapped potential here, it's just that we don't have a proper distribution network/publishing system/news channels in place to tackle logistics and duties. I guess this task is more up to me and other fellow euros.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
idk. My ambition is to make experiences that will impress, something that takes the library of nes games in a bit of a new direction. Part of it is aesthetic, part of it is doing things the original hardware designers wouldn't have expected/anticipated.
So the challenge then
To push the pedal to the metal and do that which was though impossible
Sumez wrote:
I'd like to address the fact that some of the posts here, jumping to the defense of NES Maker (most obviously 8bitMicroGuy's large post, and JoeGtake2's own), seem to take the stance that a lot of people here are actually against NES Maker.
But I think it's very obvious that that is not the case
Why would I be
against NES maker ? If lots of shitty games gets released because of it I'd be against the shitty games, and then
possibly against NES maker, but as for today's stand there is zero reason to be against it.
As someone who never managed to actually released any of the full-featured NES games I planned, I would be in trouble explaining "my" way to develop NES games is superior...
Bregalad: Pretty much spot on
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Yeah, i think collaboration is key for most of us to get to the next level. The nesdev compo brings a lot of impressive solo efforts, but i think we're going to see more and more co-labs, because people have their specializations - and ambitions. Nesdev is predominantly made up of programmers. NESmaker seems to bring in more artists, who are also getting a tool to train themselves in technical limitations. Sounds like a match.
That's probably the best aspect of NES Maker. The scene always needed artists, because most pixel artist interested in doing "nes type graphics" aren't actually interested in working with all the crazy limitations that the actual NES imposes on you.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
-Another thing i've pondered much about is what to do with the european backwater market. I'm sure there is untapped potential here, it's just that we don't have a proper distribution network/publishing system/news channels in place to tackle logistics and duties. I guess this task is more up to me and other fellow euros.
I feel like this is a subject we bring up every other Tuesday. Is it time for something to finally happen soon?
I feel the strategy for Eurozone will be Master System. Hopefully one of my planned 16K Compo games comes through and then the artist and I plan to do a NES and SMS port, which will hopefully allow us to get some hard data.
Even apart from customs duties, to what extent does the European market actually require PEGI and USK content ratings or translations into five different languages? I know when I play some games originating in Europe, the first thing I see is a menu with DEUTSCH, ENGLISH, ESPAÑOL, FRANÇAIS, ITALIANO.
Sumez wrote:
Bregalad: Pretty much spot on
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Yeah, i think collaboration is key for most of us to get to the next level. The nesdev compo brings a lot of impressive solo efforts, but i think we're going to see more and more co-labs, because people have their specializations - and ambitions. Nesdev is predominantly made up of programmers. NESmaker seems to bring in more artists, who are also getting a tool to train themselves in technical limitations. Sounds like a match.
That's probably the best aspect of NES Maker. The scene always needed artists, because most pixel artist interested in doing "nes type graphics" aren't actually interested in working with all the crazy limitations that the actual NES imposes on you.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
-Another thing i've pondered much about is what to do with the european backwater market. I'm sure there is untapped potential here, it's just that we don't have a proper distribution network/publishing system/news channels in place to tackle logistics and duties. I guess this task is more up to me and other fellow euros.
I feel like this is a subject we bring up every other Tuesday. Is it time for something to finally happen soon?
If you need Boards made etc I know a guy who might be able to help.
As for news/distribution etc the Eurozone is where all the publishers are. RGCD, Protovision, Poly.Play, Psytronik etc Just most are set up for Computer based releases, if you want to can ask them if they would do a NES game if you have one high enough quality for them to publish.
Retro Indie News, its facebook page, Retro Gamer Mag, There are a few generic retro fanzines as well I think.
Knights'n'Bytes are porting Sam's Journey to NES, so that will get Protovision geared up for NES deployment.
re: tepples - language, localizations:I can't speak for every european, but i believe that's largely a thing of the past. People have much better english literacy these days, and honestly most of us started to learn english from media (such as games) before school did even back then.
Some efforts were just plain annoying, like the german subtitles in super metroid or german audio in rondo of blood. Well, in the later case it could feel a bit thematic. German can have a very "gothic" ring to it, at least to outsiders, when spoken solemnly.
Anyway, modern nes developers should just ignore translations imo.
sumez wrote:
That's probably the best aspect of NES Maker. The scene always needed artists, because most pixel artist interested in doing "nes type graphics" aren't actually interested in working with all the crazy limitations that the actual NES imposes on you.
Here's a minor chord though... there has been some clashes between expectations from the comforts of famitracker (and expansion sound, my god) and the realities of putting music into an actual game already. But i'd blame the demo scene mentality that has grown around famitracker and chiptunes in general. Personally i wonder why expansion sound is so popular when basically noone actually experienced it. It didn't exist for the NES, and it was kind of a fringe thing on famicom.
I'm pretty sure that'll even out, but ugh, it is painful to watch GGsound getting undeserved grief (despite being perfectly well rounded for use in games) just because users expect to be able to do everything famitracker does (even with little or no difference in the end result).
Quote:
I feel like this is a subject we bring up every other Tuesday. Is it time for something to finally happen soon?
Haha! guilty as charged. Well, first things first. Project Blue the full version is supposed to get a kickstarter campaign the first quarter of 2019. I want to get some experience under my belt with that before jumping head-first into something potentially bigger. But a bit of brainstorming couldn't hurt. What's best? Organizing group buys? Have an euro distro distribute games on license from american homebrew makers and publishers? Source affordable sticker and box printers? One unified web shop? Something else?
Well, as for things like famitracker/ggsound...there's no mandate that NESmaker users GGsound. Just like someone can write new physics scripts, someone could write or import new music handling scripts, too, and then manage them from the tool. The base of NESmaker is meant to be vanilla and incredibly malleable. The intent is for users to take the base and begin manipulating it to fit their needs, much like starting with a tutorial set and then diverging.
I think GGsound is great. If people want better support, they're always welcome to bring on someone to write a better sound engine for them, if they're not capable themselves (more value for the NESdev community there, too).
Let's say my cousin and I have developed a more capable audio driver that handles more FamiTracker effects than GGSound (but not DPCM). I developed the driver itself and its MML converter, while my cousin maintains the FamiTracker converter. But there's currently no NESmaker integration for this driver. Would I first need to buy two license seat of NESmaker, one for myself and one for my cousin, with which to build and test this integration? And possibly a license of Microsoft Windows with which to build and test any GUI tools that users of the integration may require? (The used ThinkPad into which I'm typing this post came with a copy of Windows that was deactivated because the volume license server was on the previous owner's corporate LAN that could not be reached, and its COA sticker had been torn off. It ended up wiped and Linuxed.) Or what am I missing?
FrankenGraphics wrote:
re: tepples - language, localizations:
I can't speak for every european, but i believe that's largely a thing of the past. People have much better english literacy these days, and honestly most of us started to learn english from media (such as games) before school did even back then.
True, but most people are still more fluent in their native language than English, even though understanding of English improved due to internet/games exposure. It's a tradeoff between translation quality and my own poor understanding of English, if a quality translation is available I'll take it to make sure I understand everything, if only a shitty translation is available then if offered the choice I'd rather play a good translation in English and "translate" myself on the fly, despite this "translation" being poor it's still better than many game's shitty translation.
Quote:
Some efforts were just plain annoying, like the german subtitles in super metroid or german audio in rondo of blood. Well, in the later case it could feel a bit thematic. German can have a very "gothic" ring to it, at least to outsiders, when spoken solemnly.
It's not an "effort", the original Rondo of Blood was dubbed in German, probably because it felt exotic to Japanese players, and because the game trakes place in Transylvania which used to be a largely German-speaking country, before the second world war. You mention german is
Gothic, which is totally true considering the language was written (mostly, not always) with gothic letters until the second world war. (This has nothing to do with the modern "gothic" fashion)
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Some efforts were just plain annoying, like the german subtitles in super metroid or german audio in rondo of blood. Well, in the later case it could feel a bit thematic. German can have a very "gothic" ring to it, at least to outsiders, when spoken solemnly.
That's pretty much the idea
The German voices is intended to make the voice over feel more authentic, despite everyone else speaking Japanese after that point.
Rondo of Blood wasn't released in Europe at the time. It wasn't even released outside of Japan.
In Japan around the 90s it was popular, nee prestigious to be able to speak German. So knowing and understand German was a 1up, and you could look down on the little people who didn't. Hence why Asuka Sorely Langley of Eva is German and gets angry at Shinji for being unable to speak it. She had to lower herself to a commoner and use Japanese. This was kind of tacky and hence in Rebuild of Eva her German aspect was dropped. You also see it in a lot of any other anime and manga, there is the pompous character that talks in German for no real reason..
To which I would not be surprised if the intro was in German in the Japanese version.
When I went to Japan, some people there would get me to read something in German and they would ask me if I "supurekon za dejitsu" to which I would pause for a moment, eventually realize they meant "spreken ze deutsche" and then say it for real and watch them facefault...
Other side note : For our just(ish) released C64 remaster, adding in FIGS for the game and manual was a thing we did. I think Spain still really appreciates it
I like ggsound too, it's great. It's always a tough choice between ggsound, pently and famitone and lately penguin, each premiering some unique features. Or famitracker+neslib, if your game design and resources permits it.
The problem i perceive isn't that some people might think they're stuck with ggsound (they aren't, and if so was the case, it'd be a fine driver to be stuck with). It's more that they complain about it not being able to do this or that, when in fact it can do most of those things. So there's a subset of problems:
-There's a knowledge gap about just how much ggsound can do.
-It gets some undeservedly negative comments when people come in with volume channels, ft-effects for convenience, expansion sound chip channels, and expectations from software-emulated chiptune music as opposed to video game music with hardware limitations.
I hope this is a temporary phenomenon. But maybe an article and a few examples would be a positive way to show some possibilities?
Oziphantom wrote:
To which I would not be surprised if the intro was in German in the Japanese version.
.... let's reiterate
There was
only a Japanese version.
Ok, enough off-topic. Or at least -that- much off-topic
I though it came out on the PSP... With Symphony... hard to keep track of the Castlevania's and all their versions/rehashes etc
Quote:
Rondo of Blood wasn't released in Europe at the time. It wasn't even released outside of Japan.
That explains it. I was only able to play rondo of blood when it was released on the Wii. I'm glad i took german as an option in high-school and could make out the basic gist of the narration
But yeah, german and gothic themes feels pretty intertwined... not just the gothic font being associated with the horror and gothic romance genre increasingly, but also horror movies like nosferatu and frankenstein first being made by german film studios, and all the associations to pretty gothic poetry and music, like schuberts'
der doppelgänger. Listening to it just now, i think the parallel is striking.
Edit, anyway, back on localization. I don't think localizing game content does much difference, but europe is still pretty splintered. retro gaming swedes discuss and trade in swedish facebook groups. I expect pretty much every group of retro gamers in every country where the NES was a thing - that also has a small language base - to do that. To reach these as a potential audience for homebrew news, a bit of ambassadeurship may be in order. I'm terrible at social media, but will look into what i may be able to do.
Quote:
I'm glad i took german as an option in high-school and could make out the basic gist of the narration
I can hold a simple conversation in German without much problem but I don't understand much of the intro, only a couple of words.
[quote="FrankenGraphics"]But yeah, german and gothic themes feels pretty intertwined... not just the gothic font being associated with the horror and gothic romance genre increasingly, but also horror movies like nosferatu and frankenstein first being made by german film studios, and all the associations to pretty gothic poetry and music, like schuberts'
der doppelgänger. Listening to it just now, i think the parallel is striking.
[/quote}
I feel like you're confusing the 1980s "gothic" fashion/subculture (linked with horror and everything) with the actual, gothic art style from the middle-adges (which has nothing to do with horror, but has a lot to do with German culture and the gothic letters). Both usages of the word "gothic" are almost completely unrelated to eachother.
The Nosferatu movie is basically a ripoff of Dracula, just like Castlevania, so it's no wonder both are linked to eachother. Apparently the interest for horrors in the 1920s was due to the horrors of the first world war, which leads to the infamous "années folles".
Bregalad wrote:
but I don't understand much of [Rondo of Blood's] intro, only a couple of words.
As far as I can tell, no-one much else has either. I've tried to transcribe the dialog there, and no-one else seems to have arrived at the same transcription ... if anyone else has bothered to post it online at all.
On topic: I'm no more worried about NESmaker noobs than I was about noobs making things in ZZT, megazeux, Neverwinter Nights, Unity, GameMaker, RPGmaker, Ren'Py, or any of the hundreds of other game creation systems.
Oziphantom wrote:
I think the biggest issue for me is.
NES games and by virtue 8bit games are quick and easy to make. Being "at the metal" is the 'joy' of making them. Things happen quick and fast during development. We can make games of the '8bit god' variety. The time sink is not coding, its protyping, designing and testing, so even though coding the games is really fast and easy, it still takes 6 months to make something good. but its a lot faster and easier than on other more modern platforms.
If you are not here for the challenge of the machine, to find and push it in new ways... why come?
Because I like the retro graphics!
lidnariq wrote:
Bregalad wrote:
but I don't understand much of [Rondo of Blood's] intro, only a couple of words.
As far as I can tell, no-one much else has either. I've tried to transcribe the dialog there, and no-one else seems to have arrived at the same transcription ... if anyone else has bothered to post it online at all.
You can find it here:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/castlevan ... les/triviaAs a German native speaker, I can confirm that the transcription is correct and that the translation also authentically represents the words.
I can furthermore confirm that the game's intro is actual correct German, i.e. not some incorrect mess that you often hear when people speak German in non-German media.
(By the way, the voice is from the same guy who dubs Dr. House in German.)
Tepples - your stuff is obviously always top notch...would absolutely love to work with you to be able to use your music tool as an alternative base if you're up for it. Let's chat!
DRW wrote:
.... huh.
That is
definitely not the same audio I heard. Oh, I see, this is the version for the PSP.
Some things I could easily believe I misunderstood, but some simple things (like the order of "bat" and "wolf" being reversed) basically guarantees the audio on the original PCengine version is different.
lidnariq wrote:
DRW wrote:
.... huh.
That is
definitely not the same audio I heard. Oh, I see, this is the version for the PSP.
Interesting. I just noticed that there are two versions.
That's the other one:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/castlevan ... ood/triviaThis time, not with Dr. House.
Also, it looks like the original version is not as polished. It's still correct German, but the actual contents of the statements sound odd:
"Men begin to reject growth and call peace degeneration."
Wut? This makes no sense, does it?
Also, the narrator cannot decide whether he's a general narrator:
"During the good old times, men still lived in tranquillity and peace."
Or whether he's actually part of the cast:
"We are gathered here to call upon the forces of darkness through our cursed blood."
It's not poor German, but poor writing in general.
This is fixed in the PSP version which is a much better and more consistent text.
As one of these "noobs" being discussed, reading some of the posts in this thread has been a bit disheartening. I understand that the general attitude among people here is more welcoming than it seems, but I know for a fact that the way some of these criticisms are worded, it's not going to come across as friendly to a lot of people.
And that's a shame, because a lot of people who are going to come here because of NESmaker aren't just potential competitors, they're customers. If I had never heard of NESmaker and gotten involved in the community, I would never have played and enjoyed Lizard or Legend of Owlia, or Nova the Squirrel. Maybe there'll be a flood of lackluster games, but I think NESmaker will more than make up for it in how many people it brings to NES homebrew scene in general, as it brings NES game development closer to the mainstream.
That said, I'm hoping to make games that are decent enough that the little "Made With NESmaker" logo I put on my title screens is badge of honor, instead of an indication of poor quality. I don't want NESmaker to become another RPG Maker in reputation (the name is too similar already).
Oziphantom wrote:
If you are not here for the challenge of the machine, to find and push it in new ways... why come?
There's a simple charm to the NES that doesn't seem to be limited to the people who grew up with it. I admit that part of the appeal to me is to see if I can make something cool on such a limited system, but the charm of the system itself is what makes me want to try.
MistSonata wrote:
There's a simple charm to the NES that doesn't seem to be limited to the people who grew up with it. I admit that part of the appeal to me is to see if I can make something cool on such a limited system, but the charm of the system itself is what makes me want to try.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAhR4yCn24s -- surprisingly accurate.
Good old Guu that show was great..
I don't care if we have lazy noobs. I just hope the "noobs" don't spread false technical information based on confusing the system with the engine.
I think the real disaster are low level programmers so set in their ways that they actively find reasons to disparage beginners and early accomplishments. This sets up an antagonistic relationship where people don't want to support high level tools and high level tool users are wary of taking steps towards asm and C.
I don't see this yet in the NES dev community. So, there's hope. Topics like this make me wonder though.