No coding required.
Most of us probably have at least one game rattling around in our skulls. The major problem is that there really aren’t any options that let you make a game without at least a bit of coding knowledge. But nowadays, the NES is a simple beast, and the story of NESmaker follows on that:
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.
Before we knew it, we had inadvertently created NESmaker.
NESmaker will let you, without any actual coding knowledge, create an NES game, regardless of type. You don’t have to worry about palettes or any other constraints, as the program handles that for you. And not only will you be able to test your game on emulators, you can also flash it to a cart and play on actual hardware.
NESMaker hopes to become the go to solution for aspiring NES developers by having all the required utilities needed to make a complete game presented in a user friendly graphical user interface for modern personal computers. Even better, it will support direct upload to flash cartridge which will enable you to test your creations directly on real hardware, an excellent compliment to testing games on emulators. Here are the currently implemented features:
- Design sprite graphics and color palettes that are automatically constrained to the NES limitations.
- Create assets with properties and behaviors to give developing for the NES an object-oriented feel, similar to modern tools such as GameMaker and Unity.
- Use a text editor to create text strings for NPCs or other narrative devices your game might have.
- Create ‘special screens’ like start screens, end screens, menus, maps, and more.
- Customize AI
- Set initialization parameters (items obtained, player strength/defense, starting screen, etc) for easy testing.
- Use the base engine to create adventure games, basic RPGs, basic platformers, basic brawlers, and several other types of games.
- Assemble with one click for testing in an emulator.
- Flash to cartridge in one click for play on actual hardware.
Right now, the base version has already met funding. But they do have stretch goals, that will allow them to polish the engine and add genre-specific modules e.g. Platforming, RPG, Adventure, etc. They’ve already met the goals for the first 3, and with little less than a month to go, they only need about $20k to meet all the stretch goals.
As things stand, the engine is on the fast track to success, as Retro has always been a thing. It just happens to be a big thing right now, and products like NESmaker will likely make sure that trend continues. Regardless, you can check out the basics at the team’s site.
Source: Nintendo Life
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