What do you think about the homebrew scene?
Do you like the homebrew games already released?
Do you wait for a special homebrew game to be made?
Do you make your own games where you atleast try to put in some 3D aspect to take advantage of the Vbs power?
—————————–
MY THOUGHTS
Sad to say, but I think the homebrew games are boring
Blox was an ok game and really did show that people can make Vb games since blox had sound and a menu (not 100% certain if blox had sound thought)
Maybe blox 2 will have some cool 3D effect to take advantage of the vbs power
V tetris is an example that in type C they atleast tried to take advantage of the vbs power
I have seen screenshots of someone making a Mario level demo and it looks ok since its new but it is still just mario 2D
Maybe in 1-2 years someone will make the full vb mario game and I hope when they do u can do some cool things like go in and out of the screen threw bridges like the original vb mario land 2 game was suppost to do
I mean the new vb games nintendo was going to realese, but never did showed what the vb could do unlike the homebrew games that are ok since they are new, but the games are nothing special
CONCLUSION
Yes I know the Vb is old and can not really be compared to gemes today, but I still think 1st person shooter games, racing games (like mario kart or just a regular racing game), platform games (like Zelda, Mario or Wario land), maybe a dance dance revolution where u use the d pads or just homebrew games like the ones already released but atleast with some form of 3D effect is games that need to be made to really enjoy the Virtual Boy
Atleast people try to make games and in the future when people have learned how to add cool vb effects to the games we might see games like that in 1-5 years, but for us who cannot make games (even with all the tutorials) we can just wait and hope that the vb homebrew games will get better in time
I think your hopes are too high about homebrew… or you really don’t realize how much difficult and time consuming it is to create a game by yourself; it is not only the programming (which is a huge task by itself), but creating the graphics, sounds, design the levels, etc, etc,etc are to many task for a single person to do.
It is sad that the VB homebrew scene is quite little, but there are brilliant people here who had made a lot of awesome stuff, not only games or demos, but research and hacking the machine to let the rest of us know how it works, and all of them have been very kind when asked for help about programming for the VB.
About the games… Blox is just ok??… It was programed by someone who doesn’t even is a programmer professionally!, and it works great on hardware!… I assure you that half of my programming classmates will never understand by them selves how to display an image in a specialized machine like the VB… or any game console for that matter, let alone make a game that not only works in the emulators but on the real hardware.
It is a shame that not many commercial games took advantage of the VB’s capabilities, but making that criticism to the homebrew games is not fair, being that every homebrew demo is an achievement by itself because of all the effort that it requires to program using hacking docs, not to mention that as far as I know, none of the persons who have contributed with their code are being paid for it, and have shared their work with you for free.
Not trying to be harsh… but sometimes we gamers ask to much.
MY THOUGHTS
Sad to say, but I think the homebrew games are boring
Instead of complaining, maybe you should download the development tools that are there and try to write a game yourself.
If you can’t program, maybe you are good at art or music and can offer your assistance to programmers who need help.
I was just reading some comments in the programming contest thread that the BLOX2 programmer is asking for an artist to help him create a title page and some in-game art….
If you know about sound formats jojobean, and would like to create sounds for the mario demo I’m programming it would be great…. but you will need to know how to convert from what ever format you work, to the VB sound format, because I really don’t understand it.
Yes… I think you’re expecting too much out of homebrew if you expect them to compare to commercial games. Making games is very time consuming, especially with just one person working on it, and most of us have full time jobs and/or are going to school. Also, when you’re talking about the released homebrew games/demos… a lot of those were released as examples on how various things work, or basically as a “hello world” (and probably several years ago). Many of us are working on much larger projects, but they take a very long time to complete because we either don’t have the time to work on them, or we jump around from project to project (we do this for fun, so if we lose interest it goes to the back burner).
The VB scene doesn’t really have the wide audience like other scenes do, so most of us that do homebrew are low level coders rather than game designers, so we can make stuff that works really well, but it lacks the artistic and playability qualities you’d get from a commercial game with a whole design team. We also have only limited tools / hardware support functions, so we end up making a lot ourselves (which is time consuming), design everything manually specific for the project, or just leave it out altogether. Documentation is also pretty scarce, as is example source code, so until we build up the required tools, libraries, documentation, etc… we’re all kinda handicapped. Luckily, most of the people in the scene are friendly and helpful, so if anyone knows anything, they’ll usually share or try to help out.
But yeah… you’re free to post your opinion… I don’t take offense to you not liking them… I’d agree that most homebrew stuff is pretty boring. My favorite homebrew game would probably be 3D Battlesnake… unfortunately it requires a link cable since it’s 2 player only, so there’s probably only a few people who’ve played it. It’s hardly commercial quality, but I think the fun factor is there for head to head play (it has the old fun arcade game feel to it). Maybe I should add AI so it could be played 1P, although the fun may really come from playing competitively against another person.
