New Member- Excited to dive in.

KlaxMaster

New member
Before I spend the money I had a few questions I didn't see answers to directly when I looked. If there is a post here, or somewhere else, I would kindly appreciate a link. Didn't even really see a FAQ on the main site about the tool. I haven't looked at the tutorials yet, as it is a time investment, But plan to watch them in their entirety if I could have these Q's answered before hand.

1) All games I tried seemed to have sprites of a similar size. Is this a limitation, or more of a collective choice? (Think the recently released Micro mages, the Players are what seems like a1 tile sprite, But enemies could by 1, 1x2, 2x2, up to 8x8, or maybe more, could this tool handle that?)

2) Is multiplayer possible with this tool? If so, is it up to 4? or just 2

3) I had a game like Faxandu in mind, which is kind of a mashup up a side scrolling action game, and an adventure game, complete with menus, magic, equipment, and items (no player stats though)
I really liked "Witch City' and got me stoked to try this tool, but it did lack an adventure system like I described. Then I started to notice that no game I tried had a menu system. Could be luck of the draw, but I thought I'd check.
Faxanadu Gameplay - Side scroll, enemy, store
Faxanadu Gameplay - Menu selection

4) Referencing the same game above, It had a password system for Item, progress and Gold Piece retention. Is that, or a Save system possible?

5) Any other limitations of the software? Are there a types of games that are not possible with this tool? What types of game mechanics would this tool not be able to implement? etc
 

KlaxMaster

New member
UPDATE:
I ended up purchasing the toolset, because I am impatient, and even if I can't make the exact game I envision, it is still an awesome toolset with a growing supportive community.

Still wouldn't mine the questions answered though šŸ˜‚
 

JollyShadow

Active member
Hey there! Welcome to the Community! :D

Hm... To answer your questions, if you are willing to get into the programming side of things... Questions 3 and 4, are possible. Question 2's answer is: "Yes, there is multiplayer, it supports 2" but again I believe you can make 3 and 4 work if you're willing to program.

If you watch CutterCross's projects you'll notice that there is a LOT possible with this engine if you use it as a base and build off it.

With NESmaker as is, you 100% can make a game without needing to code, but you can make MAGIC if you invest time into coding.

Oh... Question 1... You can make spirits of various sizes... I believe it's 8x8 and 8x16? Someone else may need to answer this one
 

CutterCross

Active member
The NESmaker UI supports up to 7x7 hardware sprites per object. (used to be 8x8 hardware sprites, have no idea why that was changed in the front-end.) So the max size is 56x56 pixels. Of course, the NES can only render 64 hardware sprites at once and only 8 hardware sprites per scanline, so most objects are designed to be on the smaller end.

Also, objects greater than 4x4 hardware sprites can have some glitchy results with NESmaker's object system. It seems to only allocate enough room for a certain amount of hardware sprites per animation and larger sizes can overflow that limit. So the larger your object, the less frames you can make per animation without glitchy results.

The [4.5.6 +] UI does have 2nd controller functionality built-in, but it doesn't have a 2nd player object set up by default. But that's not too hard to implement with some basic knowledge of NESmaker's codebase.

As JollyShadow said, you can make a game without any programming under the hood, but your game will essentially be a tutorial reskin. As a whole, NESmaker is only as limited as your NESdev skills are. The front end is just that - a front end, which just so happens to come with a predefined codebase. You can take advantage of the data the tool outputs in interesting ways, and mess about in the underlying ASM codebase all you want - even rewrite everything from scratch if you wanted. (Though I imagine that's a little extreme for most people.) Many of the more impressive games made with NESmaker do a lot of custom programming under the hood and use the NESmaker UI as an organizer.

Menu systems aren't really a default thing atm. There's a textbox based one in 4.5.6, but it only looks half-implemented. Doesn't mean that you can't implement one by hand though. Same with all the other non-default features you listed.
 

Logana

Well-known member
nice to meet yah, there technically is now a menu system avalible, saving is not possible but codes are if you do them in a certain way.
 

kevin81

Active member
Welcome to the club KlaxMaster! I consider NESmaker as an extensive framework/UI to get you jumpstarted into creating your first NES game through the exosting scripts and modules. Through modifying and extending the assembly scripts, and gaining coding experience as you go, it may get you to a point where the only limitations are your imagination and the NES hardware. It might be a steep learning curve though, although not as steep as starting NES assembly from scratch. But even if you can't quite grasp the coding behind the NES game, you still can create some cool stuff with NESmaker. Anyway, I do recommend you start with the official NESmaker tutorials and work your way up from there.
 

KlaxMaster

New member
Thanks for all the feed back guys. I'm no software dev by any means, but i have small experience in C for microprocessors as well as batch scripting for windows, and bash scripting for linux. Lets not forget ZZT (which is basically C for children) Hopefully this will all lend itself to these hobbies. =)
 

KlaxMaster

New member
Faxanadu is one of my favorite NES games, so I look forward to seeing what you can make. Welcome to the forums!

Thanks! There is no guarantee here though. lol

Faxanadu is DEFINITELY one of my Faves. It went underrated for many years. Glad that people gave it a chance over time.

How do you pronounce it? We always called it "Fax - An - Uh - Doo" In my house when I was growing up.
As I got older I realized it is probably pronounced "Fuh-Zan-Uh-Doo" but I can't change it at this point in my life, haha. ;)
 

patrickb

New member
The title's a portmanteau of Famicom and Xanadu (the second game in the Dragon Slayer series -- which interestingly, Legacy of the Wizard is also part of under a different name) so I'd imagine it's pronounced Fah-Zah-Nah-Doo, going by how things are pronounced in Japanese in general.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Welcome KlaxMaster

Glad to have you here with us :)
Before you start making your own project, I suggest you to follow ALL the tutorials from the official website (in the LEARN section, the "intermediate" ones are the most useful). Then you will have a great knowledge of how the tool work and how tu use it.
Also, you can watch the "NESmaker Orientation" video:
 

KlaxMaster

New member
Welcome KlaxMaster

Glad to have you here with us :)
Before you start making your own project, I suggest you to follow ALL the tutorials from the official website (in the LEARN section, the "intermediate" ones are the most useful). Then you will have a great knowledge of how the tool work and how tu use it.
Also, you can watch the "NESmaker Orientation" video:

I started the orientation, built on 4.5, which only has empty/tutorial modules.

However 4.5.6 has the different BASE tutorial modules... but no generic 'tutorial module' which module should i be using on the orientaition?
 

PasseGaming

Active member
Greetings and Salutations! You need to go to the tutorial page and download the asset files for whatever tutorial you are looking to do.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
The 4.5.6 tutorials are on the LEARN section of the official website.
The Orientation video is more to show you how NESmaker works in general, don't need to follow it.
 
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