An Aspiring Game Developer Appears!

chronosv2

New member
Hey there folks. I've made a couple posts and haven't introduced myself yet, so I guess now's as good a time as any!
I go by "chronosv2" (Chronos version 2, as "Chronos" is usually taken) pretty much everywhere. Twitter, YouTube, Mixer, Twitch...
I've participated in two Ludum Dare compos, having successfully created a game both times (of varying degrees of quality). You can catch both of them on the Ludum Dare site, or my page at itch.
  • My first LD game, Destruction Zone, was a strange little one-screen game wherein you had to protect "support towers" on a stage with a rapidly decreasing safe zone. Moving into the void caused your health to deplete rapidly, and when your health hit zero you spent a number of seconds waiting to respawn, all the while enemies are destroying your precious towers. Towers being destroyed subtracted a significant amount from the game's timer, and when the timer hit zero the game was over. Probably wasn't the best use of the theme "Small World" ever but it worked.
  • My second LD game, Factory Panic, was a space management puzzle game. Ore piles of four different colors came down conveyor belts, dropping into storage bins. You took the ore, put it in a processor, and got points for matching certain color patterns. If the bins filled up each pile would create overflow, which slowed your movement to walk through. Thankfully you could sweep up the overflow, reducing the danger and removing the effect. If too much ore ended up on the floor a countdown would begin that ended your game.
I've self-taught myself a number of programming languages over the years:
  • QBasic
  • DarkBASIC
  • Visual Basic 1.0
  • C#
  • Python (at least a little bit of it anyway -- used it for RPG Maker VXAce)
  • JavaScript (as above, used for RPG Maker MV)
  • PICO-8 and TIC-80 Lua

So why NESMaker, then? I recently got back into retrogaming (and even went as far as grabbing a NES and a decent CRT) thanks to AGDQ's Strider speedrunning tutorial, where I discovered that even a legally blind gamer could speedrun. I wanted to play it on physical hardware, and then from there I branched off and started trying to find games I loved from my childhood. Not long after I heard about NESMaker. Admittedly I was a little skeptical, though I kept it to myself. I wanted to be a backer but after getting burned on the platform a few times I adopted a "wait and see" approach. Then the Pi beta came out and I kicked myself a little because yes, it was real, and I was very much wrong. :p
NESMaker is shaping up to be everything I dreamed a visual game development tool for the NES could be, and I'm happy that, a mere few days before the launch, I was able to get in a pre-order in.

I've always been a "Jump in head first and see where I end up" kind of guy when it comes to programming, so when I found out that NESMaker was really coming I decided my next learning experience (and the second system I'm going to seriously invest time in) is the NESMaker tool and asm6. Paired with Unity for modern titles I feel like I've found my preferences in game design. Make a wide variety of games in Unity, make more limited games with NESMaker and maybe put out some real cartridges for people to try!

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text -- brevity was never one of my strong suits. Good for describing problems and documentation, bad for conversation. ;P
It's nice to meet you all!
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Welcome chronosv2
We are glad to have a experimented person like your, here with us :)
Can’t wait to see what you will make with NESMaker!
 

chronosv2

New member
Thanks! The first step is keeping my ideas under control. Sometimes I think way too big for my capabilities, then end up staring at the screen thinking "What do I do now?"
Haha.

Also, I agree with your signature on a good cup of coffee. Somehow it makes the code flow easier.
 
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