Nintoaster_81
New member
Hey everyone,
Just getting started with NES Maker myself and thought I'd drop a line here. My name is Brandon and I'm 38 years old, so I grew up in the 8-bit/16-bit era. I've owned consoles from the Atari 2600 up to the PS4 and lots in between (I'm a collector of sorts), so you could say I'm a gamer.
I've also done some work with console modifications, repairs and upgrading, mostly to do with S-video modifications for increasing video output quality on retro consoles.
First of all, I've seen some of the projects that this group has created and I am seriously impressed! This gets me extremely excited to learn how to make a game from scratch and be able to actually play it on original hardware. It's been a dream of mine since childhood (as it has for many of you, I'm assuming), but I was always too intimidated by the actual process of creating a game to follow through with anything. At one point during high school I had a vision of attending a college based in Vancouver (can't remember the name of it) that was geared towards video game design and programming, but tuition was very expensive and it would have meant moving across the continent to do that. In hindsight, I probably could've found something more local, but I guess I never bothered to look into that.
Long story short, I never turned game design into a career, so it became more of a hobby. Like many hobbies in my life, I never stuck with it and focused more on playing video games, leaving the creating to the experts. I dabbled in Atari BASIC, QBasic, an educational high-level language called Turing (similar to Pascal) and Visual Basic. I have almost no experience with C/C++, and zero ASM knowledge. Hopefully I can get more familiar with 6502 assembly, but for now the NES Maker front end is at least making a homebrew NES game seem possible.
I haven't seen anyone tackle a side-scrolling shooter, so I thought about maybe starting there for my first project. I watched the "simple shooter" tutorial and got started on a basic template, but as I understand it scrollers of any type are very resource-intensive, so that will limit things somewhat. Some questions about implementation I have are (and I know lots of things are technically possible where modifying/writing ASM is concerned, but speaking generally within, say, the limitations of the simple shooter module):
- the implementation of a weapon power-up
- creating bigger/more complicated bosses
- having moving enemies fire projectiles
I'm sure I'll run into other things, but even with those three I don't want to get in over my head for a first project.
Anyways, thanks for reading and I'm looking forward to working with NES Maker!
Just getting started with NES Maker myself and thought I'd drop a line here. My name is Brandon and I'm 38 years old, so I grew up in the 8-bit/16-bit era. I've owned consoles from the Atari 2600 up to the PS4 and lots in between (I'm a collector of sorts), so you could say I'm a gamer.
I've also done some work with console modifications, repairs and upgrading, mostly to do with S-video modifications for increasing video output quality on retro consoles.First of all, I've seen some of the projects that this group has created and I am seriously impressed! This gets me extremely excited to learn how to make a game from scratch and be able to actually play it on original hardware. It's been a dream of mine since childhood (as it has for many of you, I'm assuming), but I was always too intimidated by the actual process of creating a game to follow through with anything. At one point during high school I had a vision of attending a college based in Vancouver (can't remember the name of it) that was geared towards video game design and programming, but tuition was very expensive and it would have meant moving across the continent to do that. In hindsight, I probably could've found something more local, but I guess I never bothered to look into that.
Long story short, I never turned game design into a career, so it became more of a hobby. Like many hobbies in my life, I never stuck with it and focused more on playing video games, leaving the creating to the experts. I dabbled in Atari BASIC, QBasic, an educational high-level language called Turing (similar to Pascal) and Visual Basic. I have almost no experience with C/C++, and zero ASM knowledge. Hopefully I can get more familiar with 6502 assembly, but for now the NES Maker front end is at least making a homebrew NES game seem possible.
I haven't seen anyone tackle a side-scrolling shooter, so I thought about maybe starting there for my first project. I watched the "simple shooter" tutorial and got started on a basic template, but as I understand it scrollers of any type are very resource-intensive, so that will limit things somewhat. Some questions about implementation I have are (and I know lots of things are technically possible where modifying/writing ASM is concerned, but speaking generally within, say, the limitations of the simple shooter module):
- the implementation of a weapon power-up
- creating bigger/more complicated bosses
- having moving enemies fire projectiles
I'm sure I'll run into other things, but even with those three I don't want to get in over my head for a first project.
Anyways, thanks for reading and I'm looking forward to working with NES Maker!
