I for one am very excited about this software.
Pushing the NES hardware to its limitations Shovel Knight could look decent, play well and stay faithful to its counterpart.Īs the packets for NES Maker are improved by the development team or exploited by the user community, people will be able to make any type of game they want with minimum effort. It could ported to the NES hardware using NES Maker and a lot of hard work.
You could make an entire series of RPG’s or platform games that could be an instant hit with retro gamers, it’s a real possibility with this software.Ī personal project I would like to work on myself is I would like to bring Shovel Knight to the NES platform. This means you could make a custom game, create a label, burn it to aftermarket NES carts and sell the game for profit. One of the coolest features of NES Maker is the option of burning your custom NES ROM to an actual reproduction cart to play on actual NES hardware. With the NES still as popular now as it was in the late 80’s, NES Maker will change how we not only play our games, but how we make those games. Soon, there will be dedicated community forums where people will share ideas, make scripts available for download or help you with your game.
The community is very small right now, but as the software is released, updated and the news of its existence spreads, there is no reason that the community couldn’t grow into the millions. I believe this single piece of software could be as influential as the original NES or the Raspberry Pi. Now we can create just about whatever we wish to with only our imaginations limiting us.
No longer will we be confined to use existing ROM hacking software to only mod a game. The software opens up the world of the NES to the rest of us in so many ways. A user can whip up a nice simple game within a few minutes by using the preinstalled packages or can expand their game with more enriched and fine tuned content over a matter of days or weeks by importing their own resources. The software itself is very easy to use, user friendly, streamlined and straight forward. This drawback is only temporary because Joe and his team are continuously improving the software by updating it and will be offering “packets” that will expand the software’s current limitations. You can make just about any type of genre of NES game you wish for the exception of maybe sports, shooters or puzzle games. Every detail you can imagine can be manipulated or implemented with very little restriction. Let’s start from the beginning, NES Maker will allow a user to import sprites from existing games, Photoshop or make their own custom sprites. I want to talk a bit about the impact of this software and some general details about it. Even in it’s basic package, the NES Maker software offers so many prepackaged options and tools that someone who has had no training in coding can point, click, save and make a NES game from scratch.
Why is this thing getting so much funding? Simply, NES Maker is a generic GUI PC based program that handles all of the NES code for the user and simplifies everything there is to do to make your very own custom NES game. The Kickstarter is currently underway with 21 days left and has surpassed the pledge goal. Joe Granato has launched a Kickstarter that should interest not only retro gamers, but NES fans in general. An announcement that is just under a week old and is more exciting than the news of Nintendo working on a Zelda II game, is the announcement of NES Maker.