NESMaker Shows Off Version 5, Gets New Name, Announces SNES Tools

The New 8-Bit Heroes held a stream to make some announcements about their NESMaker development platform. They covered (among other things) details about the upcoming version 5 update, announced that it will soon be getting a new title: Retro Game Forge, and revealed that support for SNES game development is coming.

What interested me personally was the demonstration of the version 5 update of the platform. It has been on version 4.5. 9 since 2020. In its current version, it is still a capable program that allows you to create games for the Nintendo Entertainment System using modular code and a variety of tools that simplify the process. However, I saw room for improvement, and what they showed is certainly that.

The stream mostly lingers over the art editor, which gets a number of useful tools and tweaks. It also moves to the map editor, which adds the ability to make changes to various parameters on a screen-by-screen basis. It’s all good stuff.

They also explain the reasons for the name change. They are specifically making the tool console agnostic, with the first announced expansion allowing for the creation of SNES games. They promise that the tools will work in the same way, meaning that familiarity with the tools of one console will be largely transferable to other consoles.

A new marketplace called The Retro Verse, which makes it easier for developers to share and demonstrate projects.

I’ve been putting some effort into learning NESMaker and am slowly playing a little game of my own. However, I realized that when I recently formatted one of my drives after it got corrupted, I erased that project. But in the spirit of how much work I still had to do, I don’t consider it a huge loss, since I was still working mostly with placeholders to familiarize myself with the tool. There was nothing worth keeping. Maybe ever.

There’s no word on when version 5, the SNES tools, or the name change to Retro Game Forge will happen. But we’re told, “Please be patient. There’s still a lot we’re trying to work out.”