/vr/ - Retro Games

You seem to misunderstand just how comparatively harder modern games are to make, especially the 'faux retro' kind. A game that somehow managed to be NES quality 'true retro' wouldn't take more than 3 guys today either, even less considering the assembly thing.

>Using the NES as an example of this.
>Not the 8/16-bit micros
So Americlap I'm going to vomit.

Most indie groups are but people trying to get into the industry who have never done a serious project before.

They're not professionals.

>>588665
good, hope you choke on it

>>588664
If that is the case, then why don't more of those programmers actually work in assembly? I'm honestly curious.

>Because the NES is unprofitable

Well you could always write the code in assembly first, and then release it with a standalone emulator. Fortunately, the NES is a well understood system, as many platforms can emulate it.

Besides, they have a huge profit margin even when releasing as physical cartridges, but not many would care to buy them. I would buy it though, just to support the arts.

>>588665
It's an example, calm your crumpets m8. We all know Follin rocked all chips, be it the SID to the average 2A03 or the single channel ZX.

but cave story was made by 1 person anon

>>588650
>Making huge ignorant generalizations that are hard to disprove
Please OP, stop making people argue.

A lot of 'faux retro' stuff is made by one-man or tiny teams and is far and away better than anything put out back in the day. You're looking in the wrong places.

Look at something like Offspring Fling. Made by a single dude, nothing that couldn't have realistically been done on a machine like the SNES, and good enough it would have been AAA if it'd had been released back in the day.

>>588691
>why don't more of those programmers actually work in assembly? I'm honestly curious.

Assembly is archetecture specific, meaning you'd have to rewrite potentially large swathes of code for each platform you wanted to port it to. And I'm not talking about console platforms, I mean processor archetectures. AMD x64, AMD x86, Intel x64, Intel x86, PowerPC (if you wanted to bother), etc.

Games are mostly expensive to make these days because of the detail required (modelling in particular) as well as the fact that publishers, pushing huge triple A titles, have ramped up the costs so much that its starting to become unsustainable. There's been comments from higher ups at Ubisoft that, for certain games, anything less than 5-8 million isn't good enough. That's insane, and shows how much those games are costing them.

Its likely management overhead, really. Games like Star Citizen are being produced on much less, and yet seem, so far, to be exhibiting far better aspects than a run of the mill AAA title.

>>588703
Yeah but it started in the late 90s IIRC, and took years to complete. Plus it's style is very proprietary, as it doesn't distinctively look like an NES game or anything. It could've been using 90's tech and style for all I know, and that's how it came out.

>>588729
Actually I was talking about the faux-NES games. I realize that all consoles have different architectures, but they all seem to use C++ or a common language across all of them.

>these require an entire staff of at least 20 people
Rebuttal: Humble Bundle
>take far longer to develop
Irrelevance.

NES Rodland is a pretty bad example to pick given it's a bit of a stinker. Far worse than the C64 and Amiga ports that were both handled by 2-man teams.

I'd even put the Amiga one above the original arcade version.

>>588743
>A lot of 'faux retro' stuff is made by one-man or tiny teams and is far and away better than anything put out back in the day.

That's easy to say, in retrospect.

>>588751
If we're talking about Assembly in general, it also lacks aspects of many modern programming languages, namely abstraction. It can be done, but it takes a lot of your own self defined functions and might be a real challenge.

Some games, such as railroad tycoon, for instance, have been programmed in Assembly, however.

>>588781

It's hard if your DE sucks.

>>588775
And equally easy to do. They don't have absurd system limitations to work around, and they don't have to worry about LDA_imm $EA like commands.

>>588650
It's still possible today to develop with just few persons.
The problems are asshats which aren't into programming.

don't worry OP

there's still some of us working on the real thing

>all the effort required to make the player properly slide off/around other characters
>suddenly understand why most old games just kill you on contact with anything

About 99% of the NES library is fucking awful and was verging on unplayable then, nevermind now.

Holding up the small handful of great titles that used the system expertly rather than the mountains of dross that could have been churned out by monkeys is disingenuous at best.

Also:
>NES Rodland

>>588650
>the NES was supremely more limited in it's abilities, and had to be programmed in 6502 assembly, which is nigh-unintelligible unless you're an autist
Why must you remind me. I'm trying my damndest to learn how to program for it and I can't even wrap my head around drawing a single screen of color.

>>588751
It took him 5 years and it was just a hobby he did in his spare time. If he worked on it full time he probably coulda cranked it out in about a year

>>588867
Don't give up. Remember, Rollercoaster Tycoon was coded in assembly.

>>588868
If he did it in a year it wouldn't have been nearly as good, time changes your perception on things, that shift in perception alters your priorities and helps you refine things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

Generally a small team working for longer will do a better job than a large team working for shorter. It's never a matter of getting the same amount of work done quicker.

>>588867
Why are you torturing yourself

>>588729
Whenever I say AAA, I'm using it in the worst way possible. As an insult that says "You fuckers couldn't budget a lemonade stand". It's as much of a buzzword as blast processing is.

I'm personally waiting on Starbound, which is 2D, sprite based, and looking way more fun than just about anything coming out this decade (except Dark Souls 2)

>>588867
Don't think in terms of frame-buffers like you would with PC programming, spend more time researching the PPU than the 6502, as the former has less documentation available.

>>588903
>small team working for longer will do a better job than a large team working for shorter
I'm sorry did you say something?

>>588942
I was under the impression that they weren't really working in the first place.

>>588817
That's cool, but will it be fun? A lot of homebrew games aren't very polished or fun, mostly because they're done by 1 man teams. Alternatively, we can look at the Mega Man fangames everyone seems to churn out. All the composers and artists use the easier route, while ROM hacks of Mega Man games tend to just alter the existing bosses. At the very least have a proper "Mega Man spriter" do some art for the NES, shit's getting shameful.

>>588957
They were researching memes for Borderlands 2. Why else did Duke say I've got balls of fail?

The one guy who did Cave Story took about five years. And its a short game too. Just because its retro looking doesn't mean it's simple.

>>588998
I was watching the Starbound stream last night, and Bart was spending hours trying to fix a minor graphic problem. Even the simplest of issues can be a major pain in the ass to fix.

>>588998
Plenty of old games were short, actually. They just seem long because the difficulty ramps up to pretty crazy levels later on in the game.

>>589087
You can say that again...

http://youtu.be/ziNld2ymVrc

>make legitimate thread
>someone shitposts in it
>janitor scrubs it until it shines
>see shitpost thread later
>think "nice job mods"
>brush it off
>wake up in morning
>"time to check for new posts in the general threads/new topics that may interest me"
>see shitpost thread bumped

>>588650
I don't know where you are getting your facts OP but you have some really broad generalizations there that you are smashing together with one another to paint a picture that really just doesn't gel.

There were plenty of NES/SNES games with small/large teams that were god or sucked that took a short or long period of time to create. Just like there are plenty of modern and faux retro games made by a few or a lot of people that take a short or long period of time to make, etc.

tl;dr you are generalizing way too much.

>>588867
Do C64 asm instead.
Hell, even Gameboy asm would be a more fruitful endeavor.
The only recent good NES homebrew game I've seen is Super Bat Puncher.

>>588914
Mostly because Starbound will keep updating and various randomly generated worlds which give the player a reason to keep playing (Find out what's out there and how far can one go?) It's as if you are actually ON an adventure across the cosmos to places unknown.