Kickstarter description: "NESmaker is a software tool for creating brand new, hardware playable, cartridge based games for the Nintendo Entertainment System...without having to write a single line of code. A few years ago, while developing our NES game engine in the archaic 6502 Assembly language, our team (made up of mostly non-programmers) realized that we needed a much more efficient method for rapid prototyping and testing. Instead of digging into the assembly every time we needed to make changes, we conceptualized wysiwyg tools for common tasks that would output, reorganize, and manipulate the underlying code; developing screens, building animations, altering AI...things like that. We recruited Josh Fallon, tool developer extraordinaire, to help realize these tools." https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1316851183/nesmaker-make-nes-games-no-coding-required
As a fan of things like RPG Maker, I'm excited for this. Hopefully it is easy to use and sprite insertion is easy.
The Chinese pirate developers will now have a reason to revitalize operations But seriously, this looks cool. There's a lot I'm already dreaming up I wonder if it would be possible. I just hope it can be truly customizable like Game Maker Studio. Don't want every game to feel like the exact same engine.
Bramsworth: Based on their tutorial videos, I'm expecting that they'll provide a series of pre-fabbed bits of object-bound functionality in each "module," and it'll be up to creators to use them in new and interesting ways, or mod them with custom ASM code to produce unique functionality. Their tutorial videos for their RPG game give me this impression, as they have a series of tile types that you'd likely want to use in an RPG, such as water tiles, hole tiles, spike tiles, etc, and each functions as a prefabbed chunk of logic. You can assign your own art, place them into the world in unique configurations, or even mod their code if you're a pro user. But probably it's not quite as flexible as Game Maker is, at least not without some ASM knowledge. That's my take, anyway. Still, very compelling and exciting project.
well this is awesome... And i was just abort to build something simpler (more live debugging) for the SNES but i might wait and see how this works out...
If they allow commercial games, this could be big for indie developers. I've always admired fans of consoles like the PS2 and Dreamcast who keep the consoles alive with new homebrew games but this could be big for the original Nintendo.
I would love to develop for the NES! I have lots of ideas for games that could be of great fit for the system
I'm really curious what kind of people are giving and who is expecting to be able to make games with this. I mean, there must be some people (or kids) who think they can make a game, but are in for a rude awakening when they find out how much work is involved. It will be interesting to see what kind of games we get out of this. There are other systems that need this more. I'm still waiting on the SMS port of Mega Man 2!
I'm definitely a bit hyped, but I'll probably be waiting at least a few months after release to really gauge how capable this thing is before trying to do my own stuff with it. Don't want to use it if my idea just looks like a graphical hack of everyone else's projects.
I agree. It's all well and good to make programming tasks accessible to the common person, but if you have to trade that with flexibility, then everyone will have a project that is going to look similar to everyone else. It's already pretty common for people to look at some gameplay footage and go "Oh, this is a RPG maker game" or "Oh, this is a Game Maker project", etc. In some ways it just contributes to shovelware, since now anyone can compile a crummy project and release it without much effort, work, or thought.
When used properly, RPG Maker and Game Maker can be used in many creative and fun ways. It is even possible to make games look and feel entirely different from the default RPG Maker style. I do agree it is easy to create shovelware using them, however. The same could be said for Unity and Unreal Engine as well.
Oh absolutely! There are always talented people who can stretch a game engine to become more than the sum of it's parts. But those are probably very uncommon cases. I would say that the amount of shovelware a platform receives is directly proportional to how easy it is to get something running. I'm sure Unity and Unreal have their own shovelware as well, but the barrier to entry is probably higher.
Wow! This would be a fun program to play around with if it is ever finished. Imagine the possibilities... Also love the video. Looks like an old video game commercial
