It’s a great time to be alive and making games people! Retro game developer New8BitHeroes’ NESMaker Kickstarter has, at time of writing, reached $172,000 of its £23,000 goal.
What can you do with NESmaker?
- 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.
What you get
For $88 you can get the NESmaker Toolkit which nets you the:
NESmaker software, a Kazzo usb cartridge cart flasher, and a blank, reflashable cartridge. This provides all of the software and hardware you need to make your NES game!
Or, for $36 you can pick up the software and get the hardware at a later date.
https://ksr-video.imgix.net/projects/2689503/video-849932-h264_high.mp4
So far they’ve smashed their stretch goals and will include:
- Adventure Module
- Platformer Module
- RPG Module
- Brawler Module
- Shooter Module
- Troll Burner Demo
- And a Music Maker
It’s likely going to be a long time coming before release (and as always there is the Kickstarter disappointment risk) but I’m excited and if you’re a fan of retro then you should be too!
At time of writing there are 18 hours left on the clock, so get in quick if you want to snag a copy cheap!
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