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!"

Comments

This is what the industry needs.

[JavaLord]

A class where students actually make a game, rather than just design it. Game design is one thing, and everyone "has an idea for a game" nowadays but not everyone can make one. I'm glad to see students working on a console, even if it is an old one.

Re:This is what the industry needs.

[JavaLord]

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.

I think they are different also. I find that most schools that offer "Video game" courses tend to lean twards design. Being a programmer, this doesn't please me that much. :) As for the repetition, it depends if the person considers the repetition fun. One mans fun is anothers boredom. MMORPG's are a good example of this. Some people I run into are hopelessly addicted to them, other are utterly bored by the repetition and lack of conent. I agree that repetition for the sake of content is a bad idea, but some personality types are attracted to this and I think feel confort in a stable environment. I know this sounds strange, but how many times have you seen someone replay the same game over, and over and over.

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.

Oh yeah. So many games do this poorly. While I'm not that musically inclined, some games just "have it" where the music fits the mood(Uplink, Rez, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Unreal Tournament, etc) others feel like the music was haphazardly slapped onto the game by the marketing department (Madden 2004 springs to mind). A few actually manage to use sound to significantly enhance gameplay (Counterstrike).

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.

Or it just frustrates the hell out of them. I started playing Ninja Gaiden on the X-Box this weekend. I had to sit through a silly intro about some dark dragon sword. I kept hitting start, but alas the authors felt I needed to know about this sword to play an action game. After 2 minutes of frustration, the game started and I managed to die before I made it to a save point. This managed to frustrate the shit out of me since I had to sit through the damn intro again to start over. While this is a minor complaint about a game that everyone loves, it still is a good example of frustrating a player.

Quake did a good job here -- click and you're back in the game.

It's so true, that is what makes FPS games like digital crack. Ok, you died you lose all your weapons and respawn. Time to start again. There was an old playstation fighting game like this, called Bushido Blade. The fights were quick, you could kill each other in 1 hit with a clean strike. However, you could just press 1 button to play the same match over and over again. A friend and I played 400 matches one night. It was like we were rats hitting a button provided by a scientist to get more drugs.

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...

I touched on MMORPGS earlier, but they are living on this. People do the same things over and over again (Star wars galaxies is a good example) for the perception that they are gaining something (progress twards Jedihood, their next skillbox). It's amazing how addictive these games can become for some people in spite of the repetititive game play.

We do this already in high school!

[Nomihn0]

Actually, my high school does this.
If time permits, the students in the Java programming class get to design and code a fully networked multiplayer Java game. The class works as a team to write the game.
The class has been known to experiment extreme programming techniques for short stretches also. Also, most tests are open-book and internet (as real-world jobs are). I find this pretty impressive. Most schools take the easy way out and stick to an oppressive lecture-only teaching format. Booklearning gets tedious and gives you no idea of how the industry works in real life.

Xilinx board

[wickedj]

I remember I took a computer systems architecture class in college where we took a programmable Xilinx board, two "customized" NES controllers, and a monitor and created our own game system. We emulated our own MIPS processor, created a compiler, wrote our own OS and filesystem and then wrote Pong for the system and a driver for the monitor and the controllers. Needless to say, it was a learning experience. Timing was a pain. We had about 9 weeks to do it all and I don't think we finished. Most of the parts were completed but we didn't have time to integrate everything. I wish we did, it would be nice to say I developed my own "console" on my resumè ;-)