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The NESMaker Distinction


SoleGoose

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1 hour ago, FrankenGraphics said:

This is just common business sense, i think. If you got a good engine, why not make a sequel or derivative to get more out of your efforts? Why not at least reuse the undercarriage (non- or low-formative maintenance routines at the very least) for a new engine?
 

If you are reusing your own engine, it is going to cut down development time on the later products drastically, would it not? What if two devs swapped proprietary engines? Or even if Sivaks brother made a new game using the Battle Kid engine? Would these be considered okay, or not? If you are reusing bits of the code, at some point it ends up being the same situation as what people are arguing about when it comes to NESMaker.

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2 hours ago, FrankenGraphics said:

tl;dr of it all: good games take time to make. cash grabs do not.
 

I totally agree about the triangle thing, it's the same with any sort of product or item.

Regarding the rest of your post, I'm not quite sure why, but I feel my point is either being missed, or ignored.

I honestly don't agree with the quote from you above, at all, and I'd politely like to explain why.

Time, money, and effort spent to create or do something should never be equated with quality. We've seen it with books, movies, games, music...you name it. Everyone has at some point seen a product that was just terrible, despite having tons of sweat, blood, and tears put into it. Likewise, there have been products which are great, made with little effort at all. Sending tons of money on the latest gear, and training for months, nonstop, won't guarantee you a place in the NBA or as a top marathon runner. It's the same with homebrew games.

Depending on experience with homebrewing, experience in similar fields, talent, intelligence, even creativity would all play a role in how the game turns out. I believe someone could easily put lots of time and effort into a game just to have it flop, but does that automatically mean it should be classified as a cash grab?   I'd personally hardly think so. Likewise, I'm sure there are some folks who could crank out a decent game with little effort, but it wouldn't even be up for consideration as a cash grab, even if it were.

Then again it seems a bit silly to be discussing the cash grab aspect, if there's not even much money to be had, with every product produced requiring a bit of effort to make.

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the game engine reuse is an interesting question, which leads to another.

as far as i know, several homebrews have to an extend, available source code (am i wrong that lizard's source code for example is atleast partially publicly available?)

regardless, lets play along and hypothetically think that it is.

now if someone takes that and makes a game using it, will that be then also somehow labeled upon its release as somehow different than a "pure made from scratch homebrew game" ?

the reason im asking is because nesmaker's engine is also written from scratch in assembly, and is in-fact freely available for anyone to use.

when you purchase a nesmaker licence, you are infact purchasing a licence to access the UI tool, and whatever tools come with it, such as the screen painter, CHR conversion tools, and whatnots. HOWEVER. nesmaker can be downloaded free of charge from their website, and does indeed come with a assembly source code for the full game engine. The executable is there and will ask you for a licence code, but nothing forces you to use the UI. the game engine is just assembly code, just as is any other piece of assembly code that is available from, say nesdev wiki or our hypothetically available lizard's source code.

 

is there a particular reason why code written by Joe has to be classified differently than code written and made available by anyone else ? is so, then how about if we put it in the nesdev wiki? will it still be have to separately be stated that it is nesmaker code if used? or is this about the tool only and not the actual assembly code? if so, then why is nesmaker the only tool that requires a label instead of labeling shiru's screen tool or eclipse or asm6 or any other tool ?

 

edit: to continue from above, if the answer to both above is no, then why does using both in conjunction require a label either ?

edit2: what then if i take our hypothetical lizard source code and load it up into nesmaker, does it then become a nesmaker game ?

or if i write my own game engine so that it is compatible with nesmaker's UI ? Is it then a nesmaker game ?

Edited by Mugi
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8 hours ago, fcgamer said:

If you are reusing your own engine, it is going to cut down development time on the later products drastically, would it not? What if two devs swapped proprietary engines? Or even if Sivaks brother made a new game using the Battle Kid engine? Would these be considered okay, or not? If you are reusing bits of the code, at some point it ends up being the same situation as what people are arguing about when it comes to NESMaker.

In a sequel, you expect it to have similar features and "feel" (people even start having objections when they are different; see the retrospect shade on castlevania 2 and zelda 2 popularized by avgn)  - meaning it makes a lot of sense to reuse a fair share of of the engine. There is a market for content in that format and feel.

The answer to the question, at least as far as i'm concerned with any game i'm involved with, is what i wrote in that same post:  "I 
probably wouldn't want to use the same engine for a bunch of very disparate game designs, though. That's where you start to dilute the quality." Whether people notice the similarity or not on a cognitive level, my worry is people would not find my games as entertaining, because they've felt that "feel" before.

SO, even if i were to reuse the engine yet again for a differently envisioned game, i would make sure to put time into making it feel like a fresh new experience. This process is the same for nesmaker as any other engine. There is a difference though in you're up for some pretty heavy redesign work if the engine has seen a lot of use, vs an engine that has been used just once. Also, if you take lizard and assemble it, you have not made a new game just yet - at this point, you have made a copy of lizard. So even in this case, you're up for a months of redesign. 

again, the deciding factor becomes time/effort. No, it's not a guarantee the NES game will come out good. But it is pretty much a requisite. 

 

Edited by FrankenGraphics
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22 hours ago, fcgamer said:

I also notice there was no comments about a from scratch guy reusing his or her engine for a new release.

This seems to me like a straw man argument.

I've already addressed the rest of your points. I may disagree with your assessments but I understand. No need to keep repeating the same thing over and over. I've already stated that I choose to let homebrews stand on their own merit, no matter how they were made and I'm leaving it at that. I refuse to play along with anyone who tries to argue just for the sake of arguing as there is no point and it is just a waste of time. I'm bowing out of this thread.

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21 minutes ago, Orab Games said:

This seems to me like a straw man argument.

I've already addressed the rest of your points. I may disagree with your assessments but I understand. No need to keep repeating the same thing over and over. I've already stated that I choose to let homebrews stand on their own merit, no matter how they were made and I'm leaving it at that. I refuse to play along with anyone who tries to argue just for the sake of arguing as there is no point and it is just a waste of time. I'm bowing out of this thread.

This was a serious question / point, and others have also wondered about it, after I initially brought it up. @FrankenGraphics had addressed her opinion on it, but I would also be genuinely interested in hearing yours, as well as anyone else's.  

One could also label games as having the Color Dreams distinction, the Battle Kid distinction. In music, there's the AC/DC distinction.

If we are going to be categorising NES homebrew games on a more philosophical level, then we should be discussing all aspects. If we don't want to do that, then it feels as if the distinction literally is just a bias or snobbery of sorts.

Edit: this is just my opinion on the matter though, and I respect your difference of opinion.

Edited by fcgamer
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I’m of the opinion that reusing an engine that you or your team has personally made is fine if used well. If you made it, I don’t see how that could be seen as lame or cheating or whatever if you put in the work and made a good game. Hell, using a 3rd party engine is fine if the game is made well. The end result matters most to me.

I will say though that with regards to current gaming, I do feel a bit of magic and uniqueness was lost when we got to a point where most games were built upon one of like 3 different engines vs when development houses at least generally made their own for each handful of games they released. Many people like to praise the CD Projekt Red for making their own engine for the Witcher games vs using unreal or unity like everyone else. And while I’m sure they would have made an excellent game using a 3rd party, it would make sense that their building a tailor made engine that contains everything they needed and nothing they didn’t would lead to better performance and a better realization of their original vision.

I feel that unless someone made a crappy engine, then yes, making one’s own engine and building a game from the bottom up is definitely worthy of praise and accolades. But on the opposite end, I don’t feel that simply using a 3rd party engine should make someone or their game the target of derision.

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On 11/15/2019 at 1:48 PM, fcgamer said:

I think the title of this thread itself though can be seen as a bit elitist, or negative though, especially with everyone knowing the backstory to how we got here. If no back story, the initial post would have been much more descriptive.

Bingo, although a dig like that was to be expected.  There should be absolutely no forced distinction.

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3 hours ago, MachineCode said:

Fuck it. Clearly people feel very strongly about this. While I personally support labeling it all in order to have as much info as possible, others, mainly those in the NESMaker camp don’t feel the same. I’m changing over to team developer’s choice whether or not they wish to label.

And that’s as it should be, the dev team’s choice.  Agreed 100%.

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Reusing your own engine is pretty much just industry standard, going way back to the NES days. Capcom certainly did it with Mega Man and the Disney games. Castlevania has been mentioned as another example.

I think we really need to be clear on what an "engine" in this sense is. In many cases it's basically an underlying framework. Eskimo Bob, Alfonzo, and Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl could all be said to use the same "engine" in one sense because they were all built from something that grew from the original Eskimo Bob game. At the same time, nearly every subroutine in both Alfonzo and especially Mall Brawl has gone through various reworks and optimizations to the point where they hardly resemble the original code base anymore. I'm sure most other games created by the same developer have gone through similar transformations as well. In this case, what could be described as a game engine is actually more like a very malleable codebase, manipulated into different things for different purposes. There are no custom tools or software being used besides the standard stuff like YY-CHR, and the only external library would be something like Famitone.

Other games are made with a much more rigid engine. I remember reading that Wisdom Tree used two engines to create all of their games, and it shows when you play them. There's the Bible Adventures engine and the Exodus engine. All of their games fall very neatly into one of those two categories, so it's clear that some type of custom in-house creation tools were used in these games' development. I'd consider games like this to be using an engine in a more modern sense, if that makes any sense. I may also just be ranting because I'm half asleep.

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Was Battle Kid based on Mega Man code? I always assumed it was. If so, would that really be more respectable than a game made by using a tool such as NES Maker as intended? Or is it just “a hack”? An extensive one, but a hack nonetheless? Not a wholly original homebrew? Yet it seems to be universally respected. Correct me if I’m wrong, in which case it’s either an amazing coincidence, or what we used to call a “rip-off”. 

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as far as I know, battle kid has been entirely written from sratch. That said, battle kid, sure, has similarities to megaman (most likely intended) but at the end of the day it differs quite a bit on engine level (no scrolling, entirely different ways to handle powerups, the list goes on.) there are also numerous resource available explaining a little about it's development process. I remember watching stuff on youtube where Sivak played the game and explained some of the design decisions and talked about the challenges in programming them while he encountered them in game.

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3 hours ago, Link said:

Was Battle Kid based on Mega Man code? I always assumed it was. If so, would that really be more respectable than a game made by using a tool such as NES Maker as intended? Or is it just “a hack”? An extensive one, but a hack nonetheless? Not a wholly original homebrew? Yet it seems to be universally respected. Correct me if I’m wrong, in which case it’s either an amazing coincidence, or what we used to call a “rip-off”. 

No, Battle Kid was from scratch.

Sivak made a lot of his own tools (built a gui based room design tool to lay out his game, even)

 

 

This actually makes me sad that there are people out there assuming that some of the best known homebrews are hacks of existing games.

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4 hours ago, arch_8ngel said:

No, Battle Kid was from scratch.

Sivak made a lot of his own tools (built a gui based room design tool to lay out his game, even)

This actually makes me sad that there are people out there assuming that some of the best known homebrews are hacks of existing games.

Thank you for setting me straight. I couldn’t remember. It looks and sounds and moves a lot like a Mega Man game. 

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5 minutes ago, Link said:

Thank you for setting me straight. I couldn’t remember. It looks and sounds and moves a lot like a Mega Man game. 

Have you played it?

He did "borrow" a sound or two from MegaMan (though he programmed them himself to sound that way).

(and stylistically, his disappearing blocks are very similar)

But the movement doesn't feel much like MegaMan if you ever play them side-by-side.

It is definitely its own beast.

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2 hours ago, gauauu said:

Why? (genuine question, not snarkiness)

 

Well, while I respect a number of well-made hacks (there are some impressive total-conversions out there -- a long with a couple of serious level-redesigns that involved some deep knowledge and programming) -- the seeming implication when somebody thinks you made a hack, is that you potentially leveraged a lot of existing in-game content and "your game" may only really be "yours" in a very superficial way.

 

Maybe that is what you think people think about NESMaker, but I'd at least recognize it as a toolkit where the person still essentially designed their own game.  (even if they did that within some confines/limitations of whatever NESMaker offers)

Right or wrong, to me there is a different implication of how much of the way the actual game plays were deliberate choices on the part of the individual.

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8 hours ago, arch_8ngel said:

No, Battle Kid was from scratch.

Sivak made a lot of his own tools (built a gui based room design tool to lay out his game, even)

 

 

This actually makes me sad that there are people out there assuming that some of the best known homebrews are hacks of existing games.

There is definitely a bit of a stigma when developing new NES games because of hacks. During the Alfonzo Kickstarter I had people asking if it was a hack of SMB3. Same thing with Mall Brawl and River City Ransom.

4 hours ago, gauauu said:

Every time I demo games at a show, I get asked "oh, did you make this in NESmaker?"

And this is the other question that's becoming common, and I find it's usually used with a bit of derision. The thing with NESMaker among people who don't know any better seems to be that people thing you can essentially throw a bunch of graphics into a program and *BANG*, there's a game. I'm certainly not suggesting that this is true by any means, but since's a fairly new product and it was heavily advertised as "no experience required", there are always going to be a certain set of people who discredit games made with it as taking less effort.

I feel like if a random guy on Twitter asks me if Mall Brawl is an RCR hack or made with NESMaker and I respond by saying that it was coded using "a heavily modified version of the codebase for Alfonzo's Arctic Adventure" that it just adds to confusion. The game isn't a hack of Alfonzo, and it's also not built using some tool also used to create Alfonzo. It shares some physics and collision detection routines, bankswitching code, compression for level data, and other stuff like that, but it is very much its own entity. It's just way easier to say it was coded "from scratch", and I don't feel that's dishonest. After all, it's based on code that I created from scratch myself to begin with, so for all intents and purposes, it's the same thing. Sure there are more complex issues like whether or not something was programmed in C or assembly, or if you got your start by using a tutorial, or if a library like Famitone was used, but in the greater programming community at large things like that are universally accepted as standard and for most people would still fall into the "from scratch" category.

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11 hours ago, arch_8ngel said:

Have you played it?

He did "borrow" a sound or two from MegaMan (though he programmed them himself to sound that way).

(and stylistically, his disappearing blocks are very similar)

But the movement doesn't feel much like MegaMan if you ever play them side-by-side.

It is definitely its own beast.

I think sivak said he drew more inspiration from "I wanna be the guy" than Mega Man.

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