The Big 2018 Wrap Up, and the big 2019 push!
about 7 years ago – Tue, Jan 08, 2019 at 05:33:54 PM

There are many questions as to the status of this project.  Because of this, this will be a long update.  Any and all answers to all things related to The New 8-bit Heroes film, the Mystic Searches NES game, and the resources for aspiring NES developers, will be answered below to the best of my ability.  For those of you with questions or concerns, please give this a good thorough read!

First, a continued, humble thank you!

Kickstarter is, in many ways, a wonderful platform where supporters of an idea can come together to make projects happen that couldn't ordinarily happen due to lack of financial means or possibility of traditional funding routes.  A few years back, you all saw my passion for this documentary, game, and NES resources for other developers, and you put up your hard earned money to support this thing.  None of it could exist without that.  Our gratitude continues, and know that anything that has come directly or indirectly as a result of this project is thanks to you and your belief in us and support of what we're doing.

All of the things this project has brought into the world:

The pitch was simple.  "The New 8-bit Heroes is actually a series of projects.  First and foremost, it is a new video game...for the Nintendo Entertainment System, it is also a documentary...about the creators of this project and their insane quest to build something that's actually going to function on that hardware, and last but not least it is a series of tutorials that will help you or others who may be interested in making their own NES game."

At the time, we as a team had very humble ideas about the thing that we intended to create.  Our goal was for a small scale 80 minute film that showed our development process, a simple adventure game that could play on real hardware and in some way paid off on the unearthed concepts for the game I'd created as a kid, and some sort of online video tutorials for developers who wanted to also create their own games.

We never imagined the project would grow into what it has become.  The scope ballooned into something amazing.  In case any of you are unaware, I want to take this opportunity to let you know all of what we all collectively, our team with expressly your help, have brought into the world as a direct result of your support for this project.  

The New 8-bit Heroes

The film became so much more than we ever thought it would be when we began the project.  It became so much more than a look at developing for the NES.  It truly became a meditation on the value of the things we leave in our youth.  And the places it took us...wow.  From the set of the Goldbergs to the recording studio of David Sardy to a sit down with Howard Phillips (employee #5 of Nintendo of America, and one of the major forces behind Nintendo Power)!  We met with all of the major retro gaming YouTubers, including James Rolfe, Pat Contri, John Lester, Norman Caruso...we met with more than a dozen homebrewers all over the country to see their process and get their input.  The film ended up 111 minutes long...a whole "television episode length" longer than anticipated!  Not to mention, beyond the documentary, almost 4 hours of extended footage was created in the form of extended interviews, cutting room floor sequences, and other related material.

Further on the video front, we also created web content in support of the homebrewers that we met along our journey. 

We had our first public showing of the film in 2016, and subsequently, The New 8-bit Heroes first became available to backers in December, 2016, when we posted a secret link to the film just in time for Christmas.  In the year that followed, it was featured in about 10 film festivals, some international, being nominated and even winning some awards!  After its festival run, it found its way to Amazon, and at that point we sent out the blu rays to all backers whose reward tier included them.  To this day, it is still being programmed and viewed by new audiences, receiving great press, and we hope it continues to inspire others.

Here are a few reviews:

Baltimore Sun

Horror Geek Life

You did this.  You helped all of this become a thing!  It exists because of your support!

NESmaker

Just like with the film, we had modest aspirations for the resources.  My goal was to create a series of web tutorials comparable to the one found here on Squareknot.  That soon led to me finding video tutorials like this one to be a bit more efficient at demonstrating how things were done, and even produced comical (albeit as much for dumb entertainment value) looks at basic NES development concepts such as this video.  The whole while, though, we were developing basic tools that could help developers get beyond the trappings that we had when trying to program from the ground up.  We made screen tools, and animation tools, and object editors.  And before we knew it, we had a whole suite of tools that could be summed together as a truly significant NES making resource.  At the time, it was called the Mystic Searches Screen Tool and Game Engine, and soon became NESmaker.

The New 8-bit Heroes multi-tiered project no longer was just about creating a single game, but was revolutionizing the ways that NES games could be made.  If the reason you supported this project was because you wanted a new NES game to play, because of your support, let me give you a glimpse at what you directly helped build.

This is just a VERY small sample of games either created or in progress of creation that would not exist without NESmaker (you can see and even play many of these in progress at the forums at www.NESmakers.com, or through the facebook group at www.Facebook.com/Groups/NESmakers), which would not have existed without your support for The New 8-bit Heroes. 

There have been amazing stories about parents connecting with their kids over creating their NES game, people realizing their own long lost dreams and ambitions, people telling stories they've always wanted to tell, using it as a teaching tool, using it as a promotional tool for their small business...the stories are overwhelming!  

So while many of you signed up with the intention of supporting one game come in to the world, your support has had echoes to bring countless new NES experiences to life!  Right now, literally hundreds of new games are in development, and it was your support that planted the seed that made all of them possible.

The NES Game(s)

To date, The New 8-bit Heroes project has produced not one, but MULTIPLE NES games.  The first was Mystic Origins.  Mystic Origins is, essentially, the direction we were going with Mystic Searches in 2016.  At that point, we had a fairly solid engine, and we were taking test screens with us to conventions.  We had begun to construct the world for "Mystic Searches".  This is what you see in the film The New 8-bit Heroes when we discuss that we were almost finished.  It was world building time.  It was narrative time.  While we began to work on finalizing the map, we built Mystic Origins as a standalone proof of concept.  We knew many were waiting for Mystic Searches, and we wanted to demonstrate that yes, we had put in a ton of work and had some amazing stuff to show for it.  We created a unique prequel narrative and constructed a full game that touched on all of the planned game mechanics with a nice narrative that wouldn't give anything away about the actual forthcoming game.  We made that game available for everyone, and also made cartridges available for anyone that wanted them, complete with manual and box.

Mystic Origins STARTED as Mystic Searches.  In fact, take a look at the map, and you can actually see, Mystic Origins was a first draft of a part of the Mystic Searches map, back when it took far longer to create these sorts of maps.

On the left is "The Land of Varekai" from Mystic Origins.  You can see that the general geography lines up with the design for the map of Myrinda from Mystic Searches on the right.  The "mystic temple" = celestial observatory.  Dariav = Iohai.  The swamps.  The forest.  The mountains.  But it was while working on the final map for Mystic Searches that we hit several snags, and realized what we could do with a fully realized "Mystic Searches Screen Tool and Game Engine" (which would go on to become NESmaker).  Here is the completed draft of the overworld map for Mystic Searches using the engine as it was in 2016:

But as stated, for this game to meet our hopes and expectations, and to be worth the amount of time and passion we had invested into it, we knew we'd need a major overhaul to our tool set to facilitate as ambitious of a game.  For the record, just like with the film and the tools, the scope is exponentially larger than what we originally intended to create.  Not just in size of map, but in amount of narrative we could create, in amount of diverse game mechanics we could include.  It was all a big Tetris puzzle of memory management that was far too slow of a process, until we built our tools to become capable of more efficient ways to deal with that memory management.  We made the decision at that point to focus on the tools, and in doing so, built something so capable that it would allow users to do millions of things that we never ourselves thought of.  To demonstrate just how diverse these tools could be, we put out NES game #2, Troll Burner.  Troll Burner was a completely different genre that felt like a completely different experience, barely recognizable as having used the same base engine, and helped put the tools to the test.

At that point, it became a matter of gutting the base engine to recreate the foundation of Mystic Searches in a way that could be modified by the new tool.  When I talk about foundation, I'm talking about fundamental things you may take for granted, such as how to determine what input does in any given situation or how the graphics for each screen are loaded or how to enter different game states.  The entire fundamental structure was mostly re-written.  Meanwhile, to put this to the test, The New 8-bit Heroes lead artist Austin McKinley (who has zero programming experience) tested NESmaker by making his Sci-Fi adventure game called Stellarator.

As he worked through the tool, he gave us a better perspective of how someone who focused more on design would use it compared to someone who focused more on code and mechanics.  He helped us find bugs and issues we would've never found, and both the tool and the engine became stronger for it.

There were other projects as well.  For instance, at Game On Expo in Phoenix, we worked with Collectorvision to create a NESmaker port of their game Sydney Hunter live from our booth, with help of convention attendees.  We made a "Troll Burner Saves Christmas" novelty game to show off all of the new advances to NESmaker.  Not to mention, the smaller tutorial NES games we have created in service of showing how to use the tool.

What does it all mean for Mystic Searches?

Despite the many facets of this project, Mystic Searches has always been at its core.  If I hadn't found those old designs I'd created when I was a kid, none of the things above would exist, and you wouldn't be reading this right now.  Understand, Mystic Searches is more than a casual game for me.  It is the thing that launched my lifelong desire to be a creative individual.  At 8 years old, it is my first truly creative, original idea.  It in no small way led to me wanting to be a writer.  A musician.  A filmmaker.  A game developer.  These ambitions have defined me as I've grown up.  And I can trace them all back to those first Mystic Searches sketches.  This is both a blessing and a curse for this project.  When it comes to slamming out a game like Troll Burner Saves Christmas, I have no problem just having fun with it and snapping it together, making a satisfying button masher and shrugging off imperfections as part of the experience.  The tools we have created make this a pretty quick process, especially compared to the months it may have taken when we first started (seriously, watch me make a platform game in 20 minutes in NESmaker here!).  

But when it comes to the world building of this particular project, that sort of rapid creation is not something I'm willing to do.  Every decision is calculated.  Every opportunity maximized for its potential.  Every idea vetted thoroughly.  And to compound the issue, every NESmaker decision is in service of Mystic Searches, and thus every significant change requires an equally significant change to that underlying foundational code that I discussed above.  In developing this project, we have not just created a new NES game.  We had to create a new way to MAKE a NES game, and for that it is our hope that the game will be even better.

Almost everyone I have talked to has been supportive of this.  We've spent five years of our lives...now a significant, notable chunk of time, working on this project.  It's seen us through death of friends, birth of children, and a whole lot of life in between.  However, there are a few dissenters who have some notion that we are in some way neglecting this project, or that we've been remiss in doing everything in our power to deliver it.  To their credit, we are insanely beyond expected delivery of this part of the multi-tiered project, and some people only care about this part and could care less about the film, any of the related video content, the tools, all of the NES games that have been produced with the tools, the tutorials, or any of the other things that have come as a result of this project.  And I understand that - but hopefully above has shed some light as to why we've made the decisions we have.  It's been a constant source of frustration to find that there are supporters of the project that somehow believe we have abandoned it or that we somehow no longer care about the people who supported it.  Literally, every single day there is time devoted to this project.  Christmas, New Years, my birthday, my wife's birthday, my kid's birthday...every single day, working on it in some way...often times after a long day at work and hours of taking care of a screaming toddler.  I appreciate the anticipation that has turned into frustration - it's actually humbling to know people care about this that much.  But know if you're ever feeling impatient with the progress, there hasn't been a single day in 5 years that I haven't in some way been working towards the completion of Mystic Searches.  So while this is something that you possibly think or wonder about fleetingly, it is my every day!

**For those of you who may be disgruntled that you "paid for a game" that you never got, I have made this offer in the past and I will make it again.  Mystic Origins is really where the game was about the time we expected to be delivering.  Its monetary value is the same as your pledge.  It is light years beyond what we possibly could've hoped for when we began this project.  But we want the freedom to make Mystic Searches the way we'd like to make it.  So, if you feel disheartened by the length of time this project has taken and your only interest here is to get your NES game, I am happy to offer a cartridge of Mystic Origins as a substitution.  It is complete.  It is its own adventure game.  It has a box and manual.  It is quantitatively more than we originally promised when we began this project.  It satisfies everything intended game-wise when you first pledged.  This allows you to get your pledge reward while at the same time allows us to stay true to what we want to create.**

So, if you would like to get Mystic Origins now rather than waiting for Mystic Searches, we can make that arrangement.  Simply send us a private message through Kickstarter and express this to us formally.  Your order will arrive during the first quarter of 2019 (based on responses to this, I will be placing the next order, and the first of those will go to backers who wish for this option), and we will mark your rewards as fulfilled.  If later you decide you want Mystic Searches, you'll be free to purchase it.

For everyone else who appreciates the unexpected time that a project like this takes when its scope grows the way this project's has, the current version of NESmaker IS the version with which we will create the final Mystic Searches.  We are considering creating a weekly video developers diary to show progress as we rebuild the game, focusing on creative decisions, how we're making use of NESmaker, and technical limits that all yield the final outcome.  While I can't give an end date for this project, this window into development would give you the confidence of where we are and what we're doing on a weekly basis, and also maybe give you some really cool insight into the process, for those of you who like that sort of BTS look.

In Conclusion...

In conclusion, we are extremely grateful to all of you.  You have helped us not only create a film that has been enjoyed by thousands of people all over the world, create a tool that has allowed thousands of people to create their own new NES games, helped us to create multiple NES games ourselves...your continued patience allows us to create Mystic Searches, the ambitious vision of my 8 year old self.  

None of this would exist without you.

What's been up?
almost 8 years ago – Tue, Jun 05, 2018 at 11:28:52 AM

Hello all The New 8-bit Heroes / Mystic Searches supporters.  Just wanted to get on to give you the long and short of it for those wondering what's been happening.

The short version: Migrating Mystic Searches over to NESmaker has been an incredible process.  It has opened up more possibilities, and in turn, has given us new ideas of how to utilize a drag and drop tool to perform various things.  Mystic Searches will be a better game for it, and the patience will yield the ability for others to see their visions come to life on the NES as well, which we regard as the ultimate legacy for "The New 8-bit Heroes" project!

The long version: I wanted to give an idea of the sorts of things that need to be reworked in Mystic Searches to make it work with NESmaker as we build NESmaker into a tool that can create more and more versatile NES experiences.

With the engine at the core of Mystic Searches, every single decision was specifically for the functionality of that particular game.  Things were optimized (or lazily NOT optimized) for that particular games very specific needs.  If we used that engine as the base of NESmaker, effectively it would be a very refined Mystic Searches hex editor, but not much more.  Of course, we want NESmaker to be as versatile as possible.  So many of the things have to be reconfigured.

Here is just one of the myriad of examples.  The HUD.  in the original Mystic Searches engine (as can be played using Mystic Origins), the HUD is a very particular size and includes very particular elements and behaves in a very particular way.  For the NES, to change this is no easy feat.  The size of the HUD effectively determined how many bytes were needed to draw a screen (screen tiles - tiles it takes to draw the hud), attributes and collision data.  Changing the size of the hud changes all that.  The elements in the HUD need to be updated in what is called the vBlank, which is the very short period of time between frames when rendering is turned off, but since that time is so short, our engine was specifically optimized to handle updating just the tiles it needed to (for instance, changing score, the amount of health, etc).  Our game drew the filler of the Crystal Ball using sprites if you were charging up.  The problem with all this is simply that the changing these things, which seems like it should be trivial, requires major changes to the ASM. 

For instance, the way our memory management worked for Mystic Searches was that exactly 32 screens worth of screen data, collision data, attribute data, and nametable data (all the things that make individual screens) fit inside of a bank, over 16 banks, giving our game 512 screens.  The problem is, if we make the hud smaller, let's say, that means we need MORE data to represent the screen space...which means no longer would 32 screens worth of data fit inside of that bank.  So what do we do?  Reduce the number of screen possible (and alter the map dependent on that)?  Change the amount of screen data any given screen could have, and effectively have to rewrite what each of those bytes per screen does?  There were a lot of options, but which was the best?  Any one of them required major update to the tool.  And no matter what method we chose, it would require tweaks to the Mystic Searches engine to conform to this new change.

We ended up doing a fairly significant update to the engine underneath that will allow NESmaker users to create custom huds and dialog boxes and whatnot of all sizes, placed anywhere they'd like, with their own elements.  This forced us to update Mystic Searches to conform to these new changes.

But now, what's really neat is that a user of NESmaker can make updates to their HUD, what elements are in it, where it is placed, its background images, etc, without having to dig into the code!  This also helps us make necessary tweaks to Mystic Searches' hud without having to dip into the code.

Here's an example of changing values in NESmaker to get different HUD placement:

 It's things like this that are integral to NESmaker being able to make cool games, and NESmaker is integral to us creating Mystic Searches.  For those that haven't been following, from the beginning, we had to develop tools to help us construct the game.  The first tool was known as the Mystic Searches Screen Tool And Game Engine.  Even in the original Kickstarter, you'll see a reward tier for people to get the tools we create in order to make Mystic Searches.  It has evolved to this...something much more comprehensive then we ever could have imagined.  Already, even though the tool was only released as an early beta, look at the cool things users are ALREADY doing with it!  

So for those of you who backed this project because you wanted to see more new NES games, all of this is in service of that exact aim.  And make no mistake, we are constantly working on Mystic Searches in tandem.  :-)

Last of the Blu Rays, porting Mystic Searches
about 8 years ago – Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 11:43:58 AM

Two major things happening right now:

1. BLU RAY SHIPMENTS - The last of the physical blu ray discs are addressed and ready to be sent out (seen in below image).  However, we are awaiting ordered stamps before we can drop them in the mail.  If you have not received your blu ray, be expecting it within the next week or so, depending how far it has to travel from FL.  If you are international, probably another week beyond that.  Thanks for the patience...there has been a lot to get out!  :-)

2. MYSTIC SEARCHES - We are making slow but steady progress on porting all the hard work for Mystic Searches to the NESmaker tools, as they themselves develop.  It generally involves us breaking apart many of our static routines (just a quick for instance - what is drawn in the HUD menu), rewriting all of that static data so it's variable (so that a user using the tool has control over this thing), working out the GUI environment, and then plugging BACK in the specifics for the game.  Yikes!  It's a long process, and it continues to delay Mystic Searches, but the continuing awesome trade off is the ability for others to create brand new NES games in an intuitive WYSIWYG environment.

You can keep track of NESmaker progress at: www.MakeNesGames.com

No Updates?
about 8 years ago – Wed, Feb 07, 2018 at 09:26:11 PM

Strange - I had a backer write to me and tell me that they know I've been busy getting NESmaker going, but that they hadn't seen a The New 8-bit Heroes update since before Christmas.  I have posted four updates here between Christmas Day and right now (this makes five).  I hope everyone is getting these updates, as I don't know a better way to keep in touch with you all.  In any event, they are all public, so if ever in doubt, check to make sure there are no new updates on the KS page!

For those whom this applies, you should be starting to receive emails to the email address that was submitted in your surveys, one at a time, with address confirmation (for sending out blu rays) and a unique link and passcode to the digital version of the documentary.  Please be watching for this.  If you do not receive this email within a week, please let us know.  Thanks so much.

NESmaker, and what it means for Mystic Searches -
about 8 years ago – Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 11:26:33 PM

I know that most of you are following the recent success of NESmaker, the unexpected outgrowth of our *developer's resources* for The New 8-bit Heroes / Mystic Searches.  I wanted to take a moment to address how that may affect Mystic Searches and this project as a whole.

• Those of you who will receive a bluray as part of your backing for The New 8-bit Heroes - they are in, they are ready to rock.  However, we are going to be doing a mailing address check in before sending these out to make sure we're sending them to the proper place.  Please be on the lookout for that!  But this reward is ready and waiting for your eager hands.  We also want to check in with some of you who are international backers to see if you want us to hold everything so you only have to pay import taxes once and that sort of thing.  Don't forget, if you simply can't wait to see the film, it is available on Amazon and Vimeo right now for less than the price of a cheap cup of coffee! 
• Digital versions will also be handled in the coming weeks, and anyone who pledged a reward tier that gave them digital access will be getting a special Vimeo code.
• All the fun perk rewards will be rolling out as soon as we're able.
• Mystic Searches is still in progress.  Remember, the reason NESmaker exists is that we needed a tool like it to do the things we wanted with Mystic Searches.  They are complementary to each other...they have been necessary for each other.  Now, as we turn our "Mystic Searches Tool" into NESmaker, it has us tweaking and massaging the engine in all sorts of ways, which is making the game itself better, while become versatile enough to help others realize their once-impossible (or improbably) ambitions of creating NES games.  While most people have been incredibly patient, I do realize there are few of you that are let down by the long delay, and who don't feel that our ability to make this project even better was worth it.  I'd like to offer you an option.  We created (and refined) Mystic Origins to demonstrate our capability to make a NES game.  It's value is the same as your original pledge.  It exceeds our initial expectations going into this project.  We put it out exactly because we knew that Mystic Searches had grown in scope, and that we'd need our software tools in order to properly develop it into the best game we're capable of.  So now, what I will offer...if there are any of you who are simply disgruntled that this has not been fulfilled, I would gladly provide a copy of Mystic Origins, a NES game, as fulfillment of this component of the project.  We hope that people are encouraged by all of the progress that we've made, and by all the cool things we've been able to do, but we accept that some simply will not agree that the new capability was worth our time and just want their reward of a NES game created by us.  For those people, we will make this an option.  Just let me know.  And then, if you choose this, you can always purchase Mystic Searches when it's finished, but at least this provides an option for us to fulfill the promise of a new NES game right now while we continue to make Mystic Searches everything we want it to be.
• Lastly, backers who pledged for the developer's kit tier...don't forget, you're alrady grandfathered in to the beta tester tier of NESmaker!  No need to pledge again!  :-)

That's the latest on our end.  Hope all is well with everyone!