2019 NESmaker Byte-Off (60+ NES Demo ROM's, RetroUSB AVS Give-away)

[Nz17]

http://arcade.thenew8bitheroes.com/

There are over 60 new NES games that you can play right now!

The 2019 NESmaker Byte-Off, the very first development competition for NESmaker, is now complete. There are some amazing submissions! Developers had 30 days to complete a proof of concept or demo for a game based on the theme "This World Needs New Heroes", and the quality and diversity of many of the entires is astounding.

The experience of developers ranged from complete beginners to experienced coders...the age range of developers spanned five decades and submissions came from entrants as young at 6 years old! It is an exciting time to be a fan of the NES, and we are glad that you are a part of this.

You can play these entries right now, and help select the Player's Choice award by voting for your favorite. Everyone who votes is also entered to win a brand new RetroUSB AVS system to play their NES games on.

You can play the entries in browser through a browser based emulator (this is an imperfect emulator, but is good for a quick playthrough for most games...it is missing features such as animated tiles, and might have imperfect audio, but is good to get a feel for games that you like!), or you can download the entire rom pack and play it on any emulator that runs mapper 30. Keep in mind, these are just demos. They may have bugs and glitches at this stage, and are not meant to be complete...just a sample! We hope the best of them go on to be complete games in the near future.

Play the games, and enter to win a RetroUSB AVS, at our website: www.TheNew8bitHeroes.com

And if you haven't joined us in starting to create YOUR NES game yet, what are you waiting for? Make sure to grab NESmaker and join us to bring new life to our favorite console!

http://arcade.thenew8bitheroes.com/

[YoshiM]

To kinda be on topic- has anyone here purchased NESMaker and if so what do you think of it?

When I can sneak time (my wife put a "no video games" rule in the house for Lent, so I can't play them there) I'll try these out. The videos I've seen of some of the projects look good.

[Nz17]

I own a copy of NESMaker. It's fairly good. It definitely has a learning curve to it. While there is not much written documentation, there are a lot of official video tutorials on YouTube. NESMaker's official user-support forum at http://nesmakers.com/ is where users and developers answer each other's questions.

Did you have any particular questions about NESMaker? I might be able to answer them for you.

[Niku-Sama]

play fishing games

[YoshiM]

I own a copy of NESMaker. It's fairly good. It definitely has a learning curve to it. While there is not much written documentation, there are a lot of official video tutorials on YouTube. NESMaker's official user-support forum at http://nesmakers.com/ is where users and developers answer each other's questions.

Did you have any particular questions about NESMaker? I might be able to answer them for you.

I was just out to find out what someone from our community thoughts were on it. I've doodled around with tools like Klik n Play/Click and Create/Clickteam Fusion and NESMaker looks kind of like those tools. I'm betting that to make NES games shine, one would have to play with the scripting. Is that so and if it is have you worked with it at all and what are your thoughts on it?

[Nz17]

I was just out to find out what someone from our community thoughts were on it. I've doodled around with tools like Klik n Play/Click and Create/Clickteam Fusion and NESMaker looks kind of like those tools. I'm betting that to make NES games shine, one would have to play with the scripting. Is that so and if it is have you worked with it at all and what are your thoughts on it?

NESMaker seems more difficult than those other game engines or tools from the few hours I spent with it. Nonetheless I managed to make a fairly small yet cool open-world running game.

However, the developers recently retooled the software development kit so that it is more modular and "future friendly" and they streamlined and otherwise improved things based on users' feedback. I haven't used the NESMaker SDK much since then, so I can't really comment on the changes and their intuitiveness.

However, I can say that you can make a pretty cool game using the provided genre-based modules, so if you wanted to make an RPG or a Zelda-like or Mario-like game you can just provide the graphics, music, sound effects, stages, enemy placements, and game rules without having to worry about programming.

The scripting is done with 6502 assembly code, so if you want to add something special or extra to the mix, there is the option.

All in all, NESMaker was worth $30 just to be able to make NES-compatible games whenever I want. But as I get distracted easily, I probably won't spend very much more time with the SDK unless I feel super inspired for some reason.