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Carnegie Mellon Students Develop New NES Games
dalangalma writes "Students at Carnegie Mellon University who took the student-led course 98-026: Game Development for the 8-bit NES have finished up their ROMs and made them available for download. Most of these ROMs were developed using NBASIC, which was written by their instructor, Bob Rost. These are some of the first new NES games developed in years, and best of all, the ROMs are legal! You can get the games and learn about the NES (and the software tools developed for this class) at the course web page. You can even start developing your own games!"
I wonder if I should develop my first serious homebrew game under NES or Gameboy? It will be instantly cross-platform under all those emulators, less likely to encounter those nasty hardware configuration problems and I won't have to worry about conforming to the latest 3D graphics.
:D
I would go for the gameboy if I were you. You could buy a compact flash card then and play your game on a gameboy advance which is a bit cooler to show off than just playing it on an emulator on your PC.
Oh, and I couldn't resist: first post! Nah, that was me. YOU FAIL IT!
I think reason that it's newsworthy is because the class is a homebrew game development class, which I've never really heard of being done before.
Kinda cool really, wish my University had that class. Doesn't matter now though, my job takes care of that...
see that teaching a course where the output is a complete game is valuable but why do it for a NES emulater and why in a dialect of basic??
Computer Science students often start off with Pascal. It's not as important what platform they are programming for, It's more important that they learn the basic concepts for making a game. While teaching J2ME coding on a Cell phone emulator might be more practical for a 1 man development project, it doesn't mean teaching for the NES is worthless.
Students will learn a lot more being able to produce sightly more unfinished demo's using more relevant technology. For example which is more useful to a potential game designer, being able to write and understand algorithms to manipulate the pallete to get more apparent colours or learning how to use Direct Input (or some other modern API, like OpenGL)??
I don't think the course is about trying to get a job in the gaming industry afterwords, it's more about concepts that are needed for game devolpment (ie Double Buffering, different types of collision detection). While you might understand these things if you have made a small game already, you probably don't if you just have a CS degree.
You joke, but I know somebody who knows C++, Java, PHP, and just about any other current language you could think of... and he got hired at his current job because he knows COBOL.
Game design is a different sort of thing though. I think both are interesting. There are a number of properties that a good game should have (and I haven't seen much attempt to analytically break it down). For example, repetition is generally a bad thing. Syncing visual stimmuli to audio stimuli tends to be exciting (if you can put together an intelligent music engine and sync beats to something, you might have something interesting going -- Rez depended heavily on this, for example, but it'd be okay to be less blatently music-oriented. Minimizing time that a player is "out of the game", be it chapter screens or a "death screen" reduces addictiveness, since it provides opportunity for a player to stop playing. Quake did a good job here -- click and you're back in the game. Players become more involved in a game if they feel that they are "gaining" something constantly -- RPGs lived for a while on almost this characteristic alone. So on and so forth...
May we never see th