wallmasterr

18 hours ago, JamesRobot said:

a few testers on the roster offered little feedback or were completely

QA testing was a strange experience for me in the retro scene. As I'm used to testing games at my day job and know whats expected, how to find , what to test and how to document but  i know a bunch of other people aren't. I had a bunch of awesome people help test my games but also played them to death myself. One thing is knowing how to priorities bugs, time to fix vs is it game breaking.
I was initially afraid to ask the community to help playtest as QA is a really important job and I think they should be compensated but on these smaller productions its hard to build provisional testing into the budget. Some memebers do comit a bunch more time and are way more usefull than others. Theres always a few people who sign up to test every game but never give any feedback and i find it hard to keep track of whos contributing what and therfor makes it hard to cut anyone from the list of credits.
It would be great to have an elete group of trusted testers who did it for the love of games but i think this kinda free labor should never be taken for granted especial on biger budget projects.
much like in the film industry a credit in the game or manual goes a long way to saying thanks if you cant pay anyone.

great article loads of cool points.
I like the term homebrew and am not sure its interchangable with indie, as I see that as more of a current gen term. To me homebrew is creating stuff for old closed hardware. If it then gets released on modern systems the term gets a bit blurry , like my game "Parasite Pack" or "Haunted Halloween" on modern consoles, its technically an indie release of 2 homebrew titles in my eyes.
theres always a bunch of elete behavior and thinking in this scene but you just have to ignore it sometimes. no NES but i realy noticed it in the gameboy and dreamcast scenes, peopel are getting snoby about not getting custom pcbs printed over reflashing cheep boards or on dreamcast there's a group that wont touhc anything if its not a "pressed disc", this annoys me and is a barrier to entry to homebrew. I supose to a lesser extent the NES scene the use of new mappers is looked down on by some and embraced by others.
Thanks for the slight  note in the up and coming section 
I do feel i have a good understanding of the scene from a few angles, as a full time game dev(my full time job), as a NESmaker(Flea) user and as part of a non NESmaker team with Valdir (Tapeworm)
The use of a seal of quality is i think a bit like the pressed disc argument in that it gatekeeps the homebrew name a little. who decides, isnt that a kind of licencing in the end? If its open to use its meaningless and could be damaging if low quality or hatefull content becomes associated with it.
There is some fatigue for new releases on Kickstarter as during both my campaigns there were around 4 other homebrews live at the same time. I think thats why i like releseing to as many places with as many price points as possible so everyone can play if they want. 
Sites like jam.gg (piepacker) , ant stream and even Evercade have been licensing high quality homebrews which may act as a standard of quality. I like the jam and ant stream as it offers a place to play for free but dosnt give out the rom. if you want that to play on whatever emulation device u want then you have to pay. 
Sites like itch have made it super easy to share this kinda stuff and there is a general understanding on how to price a digital copy of your game based on the quality.

I too am looking forward to the n64 scene to grow as optimized 3d is my day job and I find it exiting and grew up with the n64. the difficulty there is that the micro code to do the 3d is Nintendo and making a release with intention to sell to repay our efforts would scare me due to the legality. 
Dreamcast on the other hand is great and is also prity well established. I'm working on something with a friend and think its gona be awesome.

People do homebrew for different reasons, so just wana do it coz its fun and interesting. Others wana make cools games, and some will try to make a business out of the thing they love doing if they believe they are good enough at it and thers space for all of that.
I'm definitely in the camp of doing something cool and well polished that can support itself. it takes a long time to make something good and I get bored easily so dont wana have to drag it out over years in my spare time.