SNES Homebrew Development

[Scrobins | 1,725]

For all the homebrew we've seen come out for the NES, the SNES homebrew scene generally hasn't been as robust. But in the past week, two announcements have been made teasing new SNES homebrew development tools.

First, Retro Game Builder posted this tweet to announce their upcoming Kickstarter: 

And a few days later, the New 8-Bit Hero himself Joe Granato posted this video announcing his upcoming rollout of SNESmaker: 

I'll be curious to see what games come from these tools, but it's fascinating to see this development for 16-bit homebrew. What are everyone's thoughts on either or both announcements? Anyone thinking of backing one, the other, or both?

[erac | 78]

Well, my opinion on Joe is that he's clearly ADHD. The first KS he did, the NES game, is now years late, because he got sidetracked into making a NES maker, then a prequel, then .... In other words, he should finish what he started before jumping into yet another distraction. He owes that to the original backers.

I won't be backing either project, since I can code for the systems. If folks want to try easy SNES stuff, remember that RPG maker started on SNES. Grab the ROM and the translation patch, and off you go to RPG making on the real console. I don't really see the appeal in a simple maker on a more complex console; most likely SNESmaker will be limited similarly to NESmaker, you just get nicer graphics and sound.

[gauauu | 81]

3 hours ago, Scrobins said:

What are everyone's thoughts on either or both announcements? Anyone thinking of backing one, the other, or both?

Neither has enough detail yet to be a very interesting announcement. Yet.  I'm cautiously interested in seeing what the Retro Game Builder does. It could end up being a really well-designed system, it could be janky garbage, or it could just be vaporware.

[erockbrox | 33]

I'm happy to see that now developers have more options when making games for the SNES. However, as someone has already said, Joe and his team are already busy with NESmaker and Mystic Searches. These two projects could still take years to finish. Also when you are making a game engine like NESmaker, you could be potentially working on it for the next 5-10 years doing updates and improving stuff. So I don't think Joe should be working on SNES maker right now. Finish Mystic Searches and improve NESmaker first then dive into SNES maker.

As for the Retro Game Builder (SNES development program), this was stated on his Twitter today.

"Retro Game Builder will let you program games visually using something called “logic flows”. Logic flows contain nodes that you can configure and link together interactively."

You can also have access to the assembly code to.

At this point, it's too early to say anything. I hope it turns out great, but you never know. But usually even if you don't like a game engine, someone, somewhere will make something cool with it.

I'm one of those people who know a little bit of assembly, but not enough to build a game from scratch, so a program like this appears to be more user friendly and lowers the entry bar so that I can make something with it.

 

Edited April 28, 2020 by erockbrox

[FrankenGraphics | 104]

fwiw i think it's a pretty smart move from the standpoint that most of the 6502 codebase they have is directly portable with little or no modification, and the 65816 more forgiving. I imagine a lot of the windows gui tool can be reused, too. The snes is a more suitable target than the nes,t if you want to make a game with little to no prior knowledge, insofar someone makes the overarching technical decisions for you. 

Edited April 28, 2020 by FrankenGraphics