http://nintendoage.com/forum/ -Sqooner http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-04T00:41:06 -05.00 tomkennes123 33
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   ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-03T23:20:13 -05.00 tomkennes123 33 Originally posted by: GradualGames

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.
  ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-03T09:28:58 -05.00 tomkennes123 33
"Game maker software makes it easier to START a game project, but EQUALLY DIFFICULT to FINISH a game project." ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-03T09:02:56 -05.00 tomkennes123 33
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. ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-03T08:18:17 -05.00 tomkennes123 33
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." ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-02T19:32:44 -05.00 tomkennes123 33 Originally posted by: Scrobins09

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. 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  


  ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-02T19:25:08 -05.00 tomkennes123 33 Originally posted by: SoleGooseProductions

Last comment first: labelling things is not the same as judging them. Judge the games all you want by the finished product, but there is no reason to hide the process.

You may not be alone in how you feel (though I suspect you largely are), but there is a genuine interest in people as to whether a game was programmed from the ground up, or if it was made using someone else's tool. It is a simple, neutral, judgment free thing. That is something to be respected, and not obscured.

There is a descriptive difference in activity between someone writing code, and someone making a game using a game creation tool. It is as simple as that. That is what the forum labels are for; a hack is a hack, a homebrew a homebrew, and a repro a repro. It is not about elitism, or a purist thing, but the activity that is taking place. Whether people decide one way or another on those issues, or judge projects based on how they are made, is a separate step. Highlighting the differences is a way of respecting people's right to think freely and intelligently about things, instead of blinding them to the differences. 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. ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-02T19:16:02 -05.00 tomkennes123 33 http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-02T19:03:42 -05.00 tomkennes123 33 Originally posted by: Scrobins09

I find the distinctions especially useful as I try to understand the diversity of what is being produced in the community. Understanding which are hacks, repros, and translations is important to me in striving to maintain an "ethical collection", or as much of one as possible. As far as NESmaker vs ground-up homebrews, I think of both categories as homebrews overall but also very different categories that reflect the time, money, and effort that went into each game as well as helping understand how I want to spend my money since I can only buy so many games at a time. I don't think less of either category, but if I want to be an informed customer or investor, I appreciate understanding as much about what's behind each game. While I can understand the part of time / effort, could you please elaborate a bit on the money part?  I'm a bit confused as to this. Perhaps you could provide a scenario about it?   

  ]]> http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=186982 2019-06-02T17:46:16 -05.00 tomkennes123 33