The NESMaker Distinction

[MachineCode | 159]

Just now, FrankenGraphics said:

You're absolutely right. Apologies on my part!

No need to apologize my friend. We're all here to take part in and learn about a hobby that centers around software development of some sort. If I got offended every time someone didn't get exactly what I do, I'd have no friends and no job either since management can be quite non technical.

[FrankenGraphics | 104]

An idea. If the purpose really is to categorize titles as engine flips or shovelware or likely to never be finished, maybe a thread completely separate to the issue of listing games in general could be used by collectors and consumers to help make wise consumer choices... homebrew is a jungle, and it's pricey to put something on cartridge, have it shipped, maybe with customs fees etc, only to find out it was not what it said on the tin. Or, like is the case with some kickstarter/crowdfunding campaigns, that some games simply fizzle out of existence. There are usually tell tale signs that a game developer might not be experienced enough to actually bring a nes game out, but it can't hurt with consumers actually having a platform for being a bit critical. 

It just needs to be kept classy and mature, and avoid unnecessary toxicity. 

Edit: And yes, i'd rather show my support for homebrew projects i really like, ground-up or engine based, rather than talking some project down. Let's not use this idea to step on someone trying out a new hobby or just wanting to do a show and tell. 

Edited November 15, 2019 by FrankenGraphics

[OptOut | 8,883]

The NESmaker distinction?

Who's using NESmaker? Tiny baby children?

I code all my NES games in a cave by rubbing sticks together and sparking flint shards.

Fuck gate keeping bullshit, geez get a life.

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

23 minutes ago, MachineCode said:

 If people wanna get bent out of shape about that and skip over it because you dared use NESMaker as part of the process, that's their loss. 

Well, unfortunately, that is untrue, since if the NESMaker label deters buyers, that is to the direct detriment of Mugi.

Edited November 15, 2019 by arch_8ngel

[FrankenGraphics | 104]

I guess i must be a bit naive, because i fail to see how Dimension shifts' origins would make it any less attractive... nobody cares as far as quality is concerned if a game is made with game maker, as long as it looks and plays great, right? Just look at the AM2R fangame - it took the crown from big N and they know it. The official remake that came later had poor sales, and at the same time the bootleg market is distributing am2r because there is a continuing demand for this cease-and-desist:ed game. 

Edited November 15, 2019 by FrankenGraphics

[MachineCode | 159]

7 minutes ago, arch_8ngel said:

Well, unfortunately, that is objectively untrue, since if the NESMaker label deters buyers, that is to the direct detriment of Mugi.

While I do see that side of it, it is still their loss as well as they miss out on something good. I also feel there is a difference between categories and a smear campaign.

For example: We have the BET channel. Black Entertainment Television. A channel that’s made to feature content by black creators, artists, and performers. Some people see this as a positive draw and helpful. Some check it out and don’t quite care for the content they provide indifferent to who made it. And then others avoid it completely due to their own bias against those that made it.

But those last types don’t get to ruin it for everyone else. We shouldn’t lose out on the positive aspects of categorizing due to some people’s irrational prejudices. If people make great games using NESMaker, then the designation becomes a positive one. I also feel that disclosing what was used to make a game just helps lend recognition to the tools and methods used to create games as well as helping everyone become more informed about the process and work that goes into it.

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

6 minutes ago, FrankenGraphics said:

I guess i must be a bit naive, because i fail to see how Dimension shifts' origins would make it any less attractive... nobody cares as far as quality is concerned if a game is made with game maker, as long as it looks and plays great, right? Just look at the AM2R fangame - it took the crown from big N and they know it. The official remake that came later had poor sales, and at the same time the bootleg market is distributing am2r because there is a continuing demand for this cease-and-desist:ed game. 

AM2R is a game that defies the stigma, but for many years, people seemingly associated Game Maker with yet-another-low-effort-cookie-cutter-JRPG.

 

If "nobody cared" , then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place.

[Gloves | 11,776]

3 minutes ago, MachineCode said:

While I do see that side of it, it is still their loss as well as they miss out on something good. I also feel there is a difference between categories and a smear campaign.

For example: We have the BET channel. Black Entertainment Television. A channel that’s made to feature content by black creators, artists, and performers. Some people see this as a positive draw and helpful. Some check it out and don’t quite care for the content they provide indifferent to who made it. And then others avoid it completely due to their own bias against those that made it.

But those last types don’t get to ruin it for everyone else. We shouldn’t lose out on the positive aspects of categorizing due to some people’s irrational prejudices. If people make great games using NESMaker, then the designation becomes a positive one. I also feel that disclosing what was used to make a game just helps lend recognition to the tools and methods used to create games as well as helping everyone become more informed about the process and work that goes into it.

Exactly.

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

15 minutes ago, MachineCode said:

For example: We have the BET channel. Black Entertainment Television. A channel that’s made to feature content by black creators, artists, and performers. Some people see this as a positive draw and helpful. Some check it out and don’t quite care for the content they provide indifferent to who made it. And then others avoid it completely due to their own bias against those that made it.

But those last types don’t get to ruin it for everyone else. We shouldn’t lose out on the positive aspects of categorizing due to some people’s irrational prejudices. If people make great games using NESMaker, then the designation becomes a positive one. I also feel that disclosing what was used to make a game just helps lend recognition to the tools and methods used to create games as well as helping everyone become more informed about the process and work that goes into it.

Nobody is forcing content to be on BET if they want to have it on another distribution channel.

The "label" in that case is at the discretion of the author or content creator.

 

 

To my recollection of past discussions, this issue didn't come up over some positive attempt to categorize, rather as something of an attempt to gatekeep "real homebrew".

Edited November 15, 2019 by arch_8ngel

[FrankenGraphics | 104]

So basically.. It's useful and potentially benign, but also like the star of david or pink triangle. Used of free will, it becomes a symbol of pride, identity and positive exposure. Enforced, it becomes malign, because it's used as an instrument to help degradation and discrimination and reduces you to a symbol. Does that sum it up?

The comparison is blunt and not quite on point, because you can't escape your personal and bodily identity in the eyes of others as an ethnic, sexual or religious minority, for example. I do not seek to trivialize this issue through my comparison.

[Gloves | 11,776]

18 minutes ago, arch_8ngel said:

The difference here is that nobody is forcing content to be on BET if they want to have it on another distribution channel.

Point being, the "label" in that case is at the discretion of the author or content creator.

 

This issue didn't come up over some positive attempt to categorize, and to suggest otherwise seems to ignore the past discussions on the topic.

You're right, but what we CAN do is to try to bring some positivity going forward. 

Frankly @Scrobins can do with their list an they please, but if they want to make the list more definitive, I'd say let's try to expand it a bit and include info on the tools used across the board. More info is never bad IMO and like many of you I'm very interested in knowing how stuff is built.

This will have the added side effect of some people seeing "nesmaker" and not being interested in that game. That's fine. I don't buy beat em up's. It's whatever. 

But if it means that someone sees "nesmaker" and publicly states negativity about that with no other reasoning then that's not cool. 

It honestly baffles me that anyone would be negative about people dedicating time and effort to a 30+ year old console that we all love. 

I bought NESMaker. It seemed like a way to make a game without necessarily having to learn a whole new coding language inside out. I get enough of that in my day job as a web developer. I have ideas for some space shooters that I'd have loved to make come to life. It wasn't going to be possible to make my shooter with nesmaker out of the box but it would have been a nice foot in the door, so to say. When I tried to get help and share my progress with people I got shit on pretty hard by a few people. Not real development. LOL NO PROGRAMMING REQUIRED. Learn assembly or don't do it at all. I was pretty fuckin disheartened man. And call me weak, but I gave up. Now nobody gets to play Doug's Cool Space Shooter Game. 

Fuck that. 

More homebrews good. 

If someone takes nesmaker and makes a shit game and tries to trick people they'll be TORN APART. This community is one dedicated group, but goddamn some of you can be judgemental. Cut that shit out, take a step back, and remember that you have a whole group of people who just wanna make NES games and some of us don't have the time or aptitude to learn Assembly, at least not from the get go. We learn in different ways and nobody is every gonna see "Worlds greatest game idea X" if it's sitting in the head of some designer who picks up nesmaker cuz it enables them to make their idea happen and people fuckin shit all over them cuz NO PROGRAMMING REQUIRED! Fuck that noise get off your high horse and let's make some fuckin games. 

[Scrobins | 1,725]

This is a fascinating and illuminating discussion, and I will align my lists to what the community thinks makes sense. My goals were to maintain compilations of homebrew available and in a way that would be useful to the community, striking a balance of what they might want to know/encourage people to make their own games. That my threads reignited the debate is fair,  but I included the label to inform and promote and I don’t appreciate others assuming that my intentions are malevolent just because of your interpretation of a label that does not have a universal normative meaning.

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

5 minutes ago, Gloves said:

I bought NESMaker. It seemed like a way to make a game without necessarily having to learn a whole new coding language inside out. I get enough of that in my day job as a web developer. I have ideas for some space shooters that I'd have loved to make come to life. It wasn't going to be possible to make my shooter with nesmaker out of the box but it would have been a nice foot in the door, so to say. When I tried to get help and share my progress with people I got shit on pretty hard by a few people. Not real development. LOL NO PROGRAMMING REQUIRED. Learn assembly or don't do it at all. I was pretty fuckin disheartened man. And call me weak, but I gave up. Now nobody gets to play Doug's Cool Space Shooter Game. 

Fuck that. 

More homebrews good. 

If someone takes nesmaker and makes a shit game and tries to trick people they'll be TORN APART. This community is one dedicated group, but goddamn some of you can be judgemental. Cut that shit out, take a step back, and remember that you have a whole group of people who just wanna make NES games and some of us don't have the time or aptitude to learn Assembly, at least not from the get go. We learn in different ways and nobody is every gonna see "Worlds greatest game idea X" if it's sitting in the head of some designer who picks up nesmaker cuz it enables them to make their idea happen and people fur in shit all over them cuz NO PROGRAMMING REQUIRED! Fuck that noise get off your high horse and let's make some fuckin games. 

And I think that whoever acted that way about it should be genuinely ashamed of themselves.

 

Maybe I misunderstood the context of why THIS thread was started, but I distinctly recall the Brewery discussion on the old forum revolving around forcibly tagging development threads with the NESMaker moniker.  Which seemed to be very clearly aimed at prejudicing or minimizing the discussion about those games.

Hopefully we get a few really strong finished homebrews to come from NESMaker that blow the lid off of the possibilities, like what AM2R does with GameMaker.

 

Edited November 15, 2019 by arch_8ngel

[toggle switch | 29]

as somebody who programmed my own game out of nearly 20,000 lines of pure assembly and wrote other tools in java to assist in level creation, i'm strictly opposed to requiring an NESMaker label. 

let's allow games to stand on their own merits.

that said, i think if somebody takes the time to make an incredible NESMaker game, then advertising it as such would be a good thing - both for the NESMaker community, and to show the rest of us what can be done with it.

somewhere along the line, making an NES game by yourself is basically impossible - you're going to use a compiler that somebody else made, an emulator that somebody else made, probably famitracker and an NES audio engine like famitone or GGSound, etc etc. literally nobody has ever done all of this stuff on their own. nobody.

so instead of creating divisions and castes of developers, i suggest we look at a developer's output and just judge its value on gameplay and other tangibles. we are, all of us, standing on the shoulders of giants to make this hobby a real possibility. 

EDIT - i would just like to add, i didn't always feel this way - i was really concerned when NESMaker came out that shovelware would flood the scene and that by the time project blue was released people would be over the idea of new NES games. honestly i feel like i was completely wrong about that - instead a year later i feel like NESMaker has done a lot to invigorate the scene and you can see that just in the kickstarter returns for various projects - things are trending upwards, not downwards. 

Edited November 15, 2019 by toggle switch

[MachineCode | 159]

31 minutes ago, arch_8ngel said:

The difference here is that nobody is forcing content to be on BET if they want to have it on another distribution channel.

Point being, the "label" in that case is at the discretion of the author or content creator.

 

This issue didn't come up over some positive attempt to categorize, and to suggest otherwise seems to ignore the past discussions on the topic.

Fine, let’s try this again. Back in the day, CDs and albums used to come with a 3 letter designation to point out whether Analog or Digital technology was used in the Tracking, Mixing, and Mastering stages of the process. If you were all analog, you got AAA. All digital, DDD. Analog recording, digital mix, digital master, ADD. This was not by artist choice. For the people that paid attention, some found they liked the warmer sound of analog while others preferred the cleaner sounds of digital. Most people either didn’t care or didn’t notice, as long as the album and recording was good. Some were biased against digital, others biased against analog seeing it as passé. There were good and bad examples of both types of albums.
 

Bottom line, this is only a scarlet letter if treated as such. Some people will find a way to stigmatize and be prejudiced towards literally anything. I literally used to have some parents bar me from hanging out with their kids because I dared to ride a skateboard! Those types should not dictate our behavior.

[WaverBoy | 20]

19 minutes ago, Scrobins said:

This is a fascinating and illuminating discussion, and I will align my lists to what the community thinks makes sense. My goals were to maintain compilations of homebrew available and in a way that would be useful to the community, striking a balance of what they might want to know/encourage people to make their own games. That my threads reignited the debate is fair,  but I included the label to inform and promote and I don’t appreciate others assuming that my intentions are malevolent just because of your interpretation of a label that does not have a universal normative meaning.

Your intentions are in no way malevolent.  The one guy here with his elitist gatekeeping panties in a bunch (who also uses tools created by others to make his “legit” “from scratch” homebrews but for some strange reason doesn’t want to talk about that) knows who he is.

[WaverBoy | 20]

3 minutes ago, MachineCode said:

Bottom line, this is only a scarlet letter if treated as such. Some people will find a way to stigmatize and be prejudiced towards literally anything. I literally used to have some parents bar me from hanging out with their kids because I dared to ride a skateboard! Those types should not dictate our behavior.

Bottom line, if the NESMaker tag is forced, it’s a scarlet letter, an asterisk.  A homebrew is a homebrew, good, bad or mediocre.

[MachineCode | 159]

2 minutes ago, WaverBoy said:

Bottom line, if the NESMaker tag is forced, it’s a scarlet letter, an asterisk.  A homebrew is a homebrew, good, bad or mediocre.

No, it is a scarlet letter if ONLY it is forced and nothing else. Label it all or don't label any. But just as the SPARS code wasn't a scarlet letter on albums, but merely a way to inform the consumer of the technological changes in the album making process, this doesn't have to be either. I do agree though that if we just single out NESMaker games and don't require the same behavior of others then it is just being discriminatory.

[FrankenGraphics | 104]

I think it's just seems even more arbitrary because the poor choice of words ("tools").

Let's say i got khans' blessing to use "the incident" as an engine base for a turn based adventures of lolo-inspired game. I think people would be delighted to know that fact, and it would also be pretty formative to the new expression. You would on the other hand have a hard time discerning whether i used photoshop, aseprite, yy-chr or nesst or the built in NESmaker tile editor for the graphics creation. Likewise, you can't really discern if someone used nesasm, asm6 or ca65 for an assembler. 

But yeah, i've decided i'm team "free will by author" on this. 

Edited November 15, 2019 by FrankenGraphics

[Scrobins | 1,725]

6 minutes ago, WaverBoy said:

Your intentions are in no way malevolent.  The one guy here with his elitist gatekeeping panties in a bunch (who also uses tools created by others to make his “legit” “from scratch” homebrews but for some strange reason doesn’t want to talk about that) knows who he is.

Beau is not elitist, he’s the first friend I made in the homebrew community and he was so patient and informative when I was learning what was available in the community when a few others ignored my PMs and made me feel like an intolerable noob. I struggle to see how anything he’s said in this discussion is substantially different that what anyone else in this thread sharing his opinions has said. People are giving him grief because as a brewer he does have some skin in this debate, he was one of the first to share his viewpoint, and all that in an earlier iteration of this debate that carried a lot of vitriol. Can we please keep this discussion focused on the merits and not on attacking people’s character?

[Gloves | 11,776]

This is more meta about the forum as a whole, but honestly guys we've been coming at VGS as a second chance of sorts. There's a lot of history with NA and I get that. But we've let back in people who were banned on NA because with time people can change. 

Some don't, and that's cool too. But if anyone is thinking Beau is elitist or whatever because of something from the past, let's at the least give a chance to clarify his stance. 

Calling out individuals isn't gonna be tolerated, so if you have a legit issue with a person please pm a mod or admin. But if you just disagree with someone's views, then focus on that - the views. You can disagree with someone without being a dick about it. He's not called anyone anything just stated his views, to my knowledge, so let's avoid slinging mud eh? 

[Raftronaut | 100]

1 hour ago, Gloves said:

I bought NESMaker. It seemed like a way to make a game without necessarily having to learn a whole new coding language inside out. I get enough of that in my day job as a web developer. I have ideas for some space shooters that I'd have loved to make come to life. It wasn't going to be possible to make my shooter with nesmaker out of the box but it would have been a nice foot in the door, so to say. When I tried to get help and share my progress with people I got shit on pretty hard by a few people. Not real development. LOL NO PROGRAMMING REQUIRED. Learn assembly or don't do it at all. I was pretty fuckin disheartened man. And call me weak, but I gave up. Now nobody gets to play Doug's Cool Space Shooter Game. 

I'm a little confused by this, shit on by the NM community? I feel like i've had the exact opposite experience and have received a lot of community support and assistance. Granted, shmups don't seem to be very popular in that scene, my project is one of the only games currently in development using it for anything remotely shmup-like 

Edited November 15, 2019 by Raftronaut

[Gloves | 11,776]

1 minute ago, Raftronaut said:

 

No, shit on by people who don't like NM. 

[FrankenGraphics | 104]

in addition to what scrobin said, let's not forget what environment we had when NESmaker launched on KS. 

There were some legitimate concerns worrying about an increase in low-effort/shovelware that would make life harder for people who put in a lot of time and effort into their projects to get noticed - maybe even deteriorating what little homebrew awareness there was. Turns out, the market for homebrew is NOT that fragile. We're seeing a consistent upward trend of more and more people discovering commercial homebrew on their radar and enjoying it. Just look at backer numbers for excellent games like Lizard, and look at backer numbers now. If Lizard was announced today, you'd see a very different backer figure. 

A lot of it probably has to do with the efforts of high quality homebrews and high quality campaigns like NEScape, Twin Dragons, Nebs n Debs and Micro Mages. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if NESmaker added a considerable chunk to that awareness cloud as well. 

All there is to it is a bit of raised stakes - when you can make a the legend of zelda-quality grade game in half a year, all that means is that you need to shape up in order to stand out. That can only be a good thing. 

Edited November 15, 2019 by FrankenGraphics
typos and incoherent phrasing

[WaverBoy | 20]

15 minutes ago, Scrobins said:

Beau is not elitist, he’s the first friend I made in the homebrew community and he was so patient and informative when I was learning what was available in the community when a few others ignored my PMs and made me feel like an intolerable noob. I struggle to see how anything he’s said in this discussion is substantially different that what anyone else in this thread sharing his opinions has said. People are giving him grief because as a brewer he does have some skin in this debate, he was one of the first to share his viewpoint, and all that in an earlier iteration of this debate that carried a lot of vitriol. Can we please keep this discussion focused on the merits and not on attacking people’s character?

If he’s not an elitist then he’ll be able to let homebrews be homebrews and not insist on being a gatekeeper.  Attempting to be a gatekeeper is dickish IMO.

Edited November 15, 2019 by WaverBoy