Mystic Searches / The New 8-bit Heroes

This is not my project, but since I don't think it's been mentioned here, I wanted everyone to see this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1316851183/the-new-8-bit-heroes-new-nes-game-and-creation-doc

summary quote:
The creation of a new 8-bit game for the NES, a documentary about its creation, and tutorials to help others make their own NES games.

The guy behind it is a member of the forum here, also. I think it's a cool project, and definitely has some potential to make more people aware that development on the NES is more accessible than may be commonly thought. I'm hoping the game cartridge would be usable as a dev cart, that's been my main suggestion, and it's probably the direction it was heading anyways.

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edit: 10-18-2015
The trailer for the film has been released. Check it out:
https://vimeo.com/142582274

Nice, I think I saw a video of this earlier. It looks like the KS campaign is well run and will meet the goal.

I'm really hoping this meets it's goal. I've been plugging it where I can, but of course like most kickstarters it starts to slow down after the first few days.

Besides the large donations make for the Executive Producer tiers, it seems like most support is for the actual game and not the documentary. I'm wondering if this would have gained more traction if it was marketed as a game with a documentary, instead of a documentary with a game (or 2 games technically).

Pledged $20! I really want to see the documentary.

Two interlinked games, tutorials and a documentary with the project lead taking on programming and film producing? All in a year? Did I understand that right?

It's simply too ambitious. Too many KS projects have failed where they were only trying to do one of those things. They don't need to do so much.

Could potentially be three game projects if someone took the $10,000 tier reward. I don't really understand the budget, with only $7200 allocated "the team" of 9 people? This makes me presume that the bulk of the labour has to be unpaid. Either this, or there is additional funding from somewhere else, but that doesn't sound like the case, especially with the $10k tier offer. Anyhow, I don't want to speculate too much about somebody else's money (even though a Kickstarter campaign is an open invitation to do so), just giving my brief assessment here.

I am most interested in the documentary part. I think it's clear he's got a talent for that kind of thing, and I would love to see it, even if it ended up being about a failed game. I want to see it all succeed, and I hope it makes it, but I would buy in just for the documentary.

I pledged $50 because I want to support the arts, but I will say that this isn't without it's faults. If I was him, I would've come here and see if I could recruit people who actually have experience with the NES, and not some movie composers or fantasy authors or other people of irrelevant professions. I would also make it entirely about the NES game, with a faux-retro game (which was the base game) being the more accessible version that will make the most money. Finally, the game just doesn't look interesting or promising, partly due to the game being programmed by someone who isn't a programmer, and the team doesn't have anyone who could think outside the box.

Memblers is on the list of people, and Sivak. Sivak is a bad programmer, but he can help at least. Memblers though I'd assume to be pretty good.

I thought Memblers was just there for the documentary? And since this looks to be a Zelda-like game, with no true scrolling, I think Sivak will be good enough.

I might have my history wrong, but wasn't Memblers' Garage Kart the very first homebrew NES game ever programmed (and then made into a cartridge)?

I think you need to recheck the details. He has been teaching game design for over 8 years. So he is a programmer, but this is his first public project for the NES.

As for the other programmers, they are a part of the documentary, not the game.

It's the morning (before coffee) so my humor RAM is still filled with random garbage.

Is this teasing your buds or a statement that you can make successful games without being a genius coder?

It is really, really unfair and incorrect to call Sivak a bad programmer.

Only in the sense that Michael Jackson was a bad singer.


And the whole world has to answer right now just to tell you once again
Who's bad?

Do we want a repeat of the drama from two years ago?

He might not be the most knowledgeable NES/game coder ever, but you have to admit that going from absolute newbie to having released 2 incredibly successful NES games in such a short timespan was pretty amazing. AFAIK, the Battle Kid games are the most successful NES homebrews to date, and even though their engine isn't particularly impressive, the fact that he managed to go come up with all that content and actually finish 2 long games is more than you can say about any other NES programmer today.

Well, if we all accepting copy-and-pasting the most important parts of the engine, having to develop minimal software instead of making it great, I don't see it as all that hard myself. But fair enough.

I'll disagree that the two BK games have copy pasted engines. Sivak has at least said in his play through commentary that he implemented proper trigonometry tables, and variable rate timers. Which is a huge difference in how things move. I say the 2nd game sometimes feels like running through literal clockwork.

but to get back on topic, what's going good for the Mystic Searches team is the focus of designing the whole game, not just programing it. It is a good thing to not be concerned with state of the art programing practices, so that things actually get done. I know, because I've practiced the antithesis, perfectionism, for so long.

You must hate most NES Capcom games then.

Recycling code is nothing new, and it doesn't automatically lead to a bad product. Don't forget, lots of games are made using the same game engine or the same libraries, which is no different from what you're complaining about.

(this is the only post I'll make on this matter, because derailing)

Not the main engines, but most sub-engines are copy and pasted, and I mean not from his own work. If I took a sound engine, took my okay animation/display engine, then just made a generic core engine, that is simple, could have a game out in 3 months if needed. But perfection, and real development takes time, like the year they give themselves on this title, although I'm sure it'll use generic tools too.

Don't a lot of NES games reuse engines and assets whenever possible? I remember Kasumi mentioning that something as arbitrary as a text dialogue box takes an absurd amount of time to design and implement (in an NES game), so it'd be fair to reuse something that took a long time to make. I also noticed that Mega Man's sprite, especially in 3 onwards, looked incredibly archaic in contrast to the newer design cues in, say, 6, and Capcom are the masters of reusing assets for as long as possible.

Speaking of reusing assets, didn't some early NES games share similar voice samples and sound? For example, Defender II has the same sounds and music as Punch-Out, and Kung Fu Heroes uses the 1-up sound from Mario and the voice samples from Kung-Fu, completely unrelated games.

If you really want to see this in action, quite a lot of the 2D IGA Castlevania post-SotN use a fairly large chunk of sprites from SotN; though the GBA ones tend to reuse their own, smaller ones for most enemies. (Bosses still often get drawn from SotN.)

Also surprised you didn't point at MM9 or 10.

edit: They do mention on the KS page that it's a "work of passion" or "labor of love" so yes, they know they're not really paying themselves, but still...I agree that it's quite something to do a documentary, two connected games with a hardware issue (and a third for $10k)...

I didn't mention 9 and 10 because they are not NES games. NES programming is much less approachable than anything modern, which would justify asset reuse. As mentioned before, something that people take for granted like a text box takes weeks to develop, and about a month or two for it to be implemented.

Also, Adventure Island 3 is almost a literal rehash of Adventure Island 2. In fact, I dare say AI3 is a glorified level hack of AI2. They reuse much of the same graphical assets, the music, sound effects, mechanics, and levels. Only thing different is that the pointless "choose an egg" room has been removed, which speeds the game up considerably.

Glad to see this got funded. I hope it goes well!

The trailer for this film has been released. Check it out:
https://vimeo.com/142582274

It was unexpected, but it turned out that Joe Granato came to Indiana, so I've made a small appearance in this.

At 1:16 that's tepples and I playing Thwaite.
At 0:23 I'm soldering a CHR-RAM onto a GTROM prototype board.

At 2:31 who's playing Russian Roulette?

I like the idea of the interviews with homebrewers in the documentary.

Pretty cool.

Oh, word. The map I illustrated for Swords and Runes shows briefly at 1:20.

I just realized that "The Film" page of http://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/ doesn't list koitsu, who organized the documentation that made NES homebrew possible especially in the early years. I was told he was interviewed, but is there a reason he was left out of the "NES Advocates" section? Is he in the film, just left out of the page because of limited space?

And is there an expected release date?

Hey there - thanks! Just seeing this...haven't been actively looking at this thread. I thought I got everyone added in, but it seems I missed a few in each category. Been quite an adventure with so much to keep track of! Make no mistake, in the film, all will be credited. I will try to adjust the site asap, as in the next few days I'll be doing some management anyway.

Thanks for the note!