Have you not heard that phrase before, that doing something requires, time, money, and effort? I'm not a homebrewer (yet), so I don't fully know what goes into developing a game, whether it's the investment of actual resources such as the programs necessary to code a game, or the hardware necessary to publish it, or even the cost of what is forsaken by putting in the time to develop a game, creating a game isn't something I can do with no money put in to make it. Based on what I know from friends of mine who develop software as well as listening to The Assembly Line podcast, I feel pretty good about saying that developing a game from scratch is a more costly endeavor.

There's a reason that people don't like to be labelled, and I think it could be similarly applied to games as well.  

Onto part two.  Yes, there might be a difference between writing one's own code, and using a game creation tool; however, the end product still amounts to an original NES game.  You spoke to me earlier about trying to muddy the waters, but actually I'm not, rather I just see a situation where we are splitting hairs.

In the not-so-distant past there was a discussion on these forums about whether a game should be considered a homebrew game or whether it should be considered indie, especially as the (formerly known strictly as homebrew) games became more commercialized, larger, and more professional.  So perhaps it is best to make some kind of chart of how to classify all games for the NES going forward, based on the following:

NESMaker Games
-no matter if one wrote all the music him / herself, altered the code and made his / her own scripts, etc, if the game used the NESMaker tool for creation, it goes in here

Homebrew Games
-made solely with the intent of it being a hobbyist project
-small budget
-?? number of people on the team
-limited number of physical cartridges made

Indie Games
-made solely with the intent of commercialization
-larger budget
-??? number of people on the team
-??? amount of cartridges made

And that is thus imo why such unnecessary labelling actually creates more harm than good.  This is without even taking into consideration that as has been made clear on here quite early as the NESMaker project was materializing, a lof of people had less-than enthusiastic things to say about the program, creating a lot of judgements, before anything was even properly released.  Is it necessary to carry such sentiment over to the games?  While we both know that there will be some lazy cash-grabs coming to fruition from that program, likawise I am sure there will be a lot of titles that can hold their own, having altered the code drastically, games in which a lot of effort had been used.  While the knee-jerk reaction is that more effort would have been put into developing a game from the grounds-up, I don't believe that to be necessarily true either, all the time.

I just thought it was a bit odd trying to compare the financial state regarding a NESMaker homebrew versus a grounds-up homebrew.  Thanks for the clarification  


 

I don't think that a game being part of a particular toolkit's "collection" necessarily makes it a bad game, but in virtually every instance (that I can think of, and I imagine others can as well) there are very noticeable (if not downright obvious) similarities between games that roll out of a toolkit/workshop/etc. package versus those built from the ground up. Look at lot of the old Apple II/PC toolkit/workshop packages. Lots of people designed their own games, but if you're familiar with the various toolkits, it's fairly rare to not be able to call out a title as having been created with such a package (if not being able to call out the specific package outright). You might make the argument that NESMaker is different because it lets you make your own art, but there were plenty of examples of such toolkits for computers from back in the day (Broderbund's "Arcade Machine" being the one that most immediately comes to mind for me) which did the exact same thing. By your argument, creations such as new boards from toolkits like "Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set" should be viewed, classified, and potentially judged solely on their own individual merits--except that they most often can't since they're nearly always so intrinsically an extension of the tool used to create them that it's impossible to consider them a totally separate entity, worth of individual, independent praise.

Such games should definitely be labelled as such, if only to let the potential buyer know exactly what they're getting, with complete transparency. Not every author may use that toolkit in the same way, and some might even come up with absolutely fantastic games which nobody would ever be able to tell were built that way without being told about it. But plenty, if not most, will show their true colors in spades. Not labeling them appropriately leaves the door wide open for unscrupulous creators to spam the overall homebrew/modern third party commercial scene with garbage (modern retro "bloatware"), trick unsuspecting/non-savvy buyers, etc. If that happens enough, it could very well tank the whole scene, which I think virtually everybody would be against (with active/prolific homebrew developers understandably being some of the staunchest supporters of that camp).

If your argument that it unfairly stigmatizes games before they've had a chance by labeling them exactly as they are...you're potentially, at least partially right. For the small handful of games which may come out of that toolkit which are truly good/great. But not so much for the potential tidal wave of trash that's likely to be looming just over the horizon. Good/great games will be able to rise above any such labels and wear them as badges of honor, signs that they're greater than their humble beginnings. Bad games will potentially be quickly identified. Let's hope that instead of this happening, the game creators who wish to take this particular path knock everything out of the park so that "NESMaker" becomes a sign of quality versus one of, "Oh, one of THOSE games."

I'm gonna throw in my two cents. Now that I'm no longer invested in either approach as a creator myself, I have a more unbiased perspective as a consumer of indie games.

Whether a game is made with a piece of game making software I've come to believe is totally irrelevant to whether the game is good. The only thing that determines if a game is good is the amount of work put into it. And one can choose to put enormous amounts of work into both an engine and a game and its design, or enormous amounts of work into an existing engine but with a new game and design. If the end result is a good game, it is a good game, period. Take Undertale for instance. This is a towering masterpiece of a game, one of the best I think I've ever played in my life. It was made with gamemaker. Do I care that the programmer didn't use crazy c++ chops to build it? Not in the slightest. I care that it had a great story, great music, and fascinating puzzles.

It may be the case that the existence of game makers does attract a lot of users---and the reality is that a majority of those users will not put in very much effort---so you will see a large pile of crap made by users of this type of software. There MAY be a correlation between willingness to take a more manual approach and one's overall willingness to exert effort in the game design process, but there are clearly exceptions, such as Undertale. In other words, the creator of undertale had THE SAME LEVEL OF WILLINGNESS TO PUT IN WORK as what is typically associated with a creator who might have built an engine from the ground up.

That said, I don't see a problem with labelling something homebrew or nesmaker. That just helps people inform about the background of a given game, and may help someone interested in making an NES game choose a path to follow.

Bottom line: It doesn't matter. Using or not using a piece of game making software does not make "making a good game" any easier; it only would make certain aspects less time consuming. The reality of creating a good game is an extremely deep rabbit hole no matter how you choose to build one.

It just dawned on me to describe the difference between nesmaker and not-nesmaker as the following:

"Game maker software makes it easier to START a game project, but EQUALLY DIFFICULT to FINISH a game project."

I think that sums things up nicely.  NESmaker is a cool piece of software, but I don't really think it's at a point where you can kickstart a game with it yet.  Hopefully Dungeons and Doomknights will prove me wrong and will turn out to be a great game, but the track record for games being made with maker software that get finished and are good tends to be low IMO.
 

This whole debate reminds me of when Game Maker came out. I -- as well as many others -- would scoff when heard that a game was made using game maker. But then as the tool progressed, and more people got creative in their use of it, that inherent bias slowly dissipated. For me personally, when I first heard that Hotline Miami was made using it, I was shocked, and ultimately decided to stop looking at games via the ways they are made, but rather on the finished product.

This all being said, we are on a board in which tech-talk and the process of creation are heavily discussed, so it makes perfect sense to me to tag things appropriately to elicit appropriate discussion. When it comes to the final product, it doesn't matter if a game was made using ASM, C, NesMaker or whatever. But I definitely think there is value in tagging projects as such for a discussion board.

Then again, who am I to make such claims -- lord knows I can make any game