Retro Game Forge, A Potentially All-In-One Homebrew Development Kit, Launches Kickstarter

Eight years ago three retro game developers assembled a set of GUI tools to streamline the development of their NES action RPG, then decided to sell those tools as a separate NES development kit. This kit became known as NESMaker, and dozens of 8-bit developers (including me) have authored their own games through it.

But Joe Granato always dreamed bigger, and NESMaker was too restrictive an engine for where he wanted to take it. So a few additional years of work went into a new game engine…one cross-compatible with NES, SNES, Genesis and just about every other machine introduced in the late 80s and early 90s (except the Neo-Geo, forget about that complicated beast). The project is now far enough in development that the first version could be released before the end of this year, so it’s time to introduce…RETRO GAME FORGE!

Granato took feedback from comments about NESMaker over the years — the good and the bad — and made sure Retro Game Forge improves on it in every way. Gone are the hard-set number of allowed animations, monsters and available screens…you can now make as many as you want, while a built-in meter will tell you how close you are to filling up the memory banks. You’ll be able to effortlessly shuffle material from one bank to another (take it from a developer, this is a very good and very needed thing). And forget having to use a separate program to compose music…RGF’s built-in composer covers all the systems, can be displayed in either DAW or grid format, and accepts MIDI keyboard input (and has its own if you lack one).

Retro Game Forge will support just NES when it launches in November, but the SNES module is on the way and more are coming in the future…but it all depends on how much support the software receives today. The Kickstarter, which launched this morning and smashed several stretch goals before sunset, offers several ways to make that happen.

The cheapest tier covers just the NES module for $40. The plan is to sell the modules separately. You can pre-purchase the SNES module for a $64 pledge. Wifi-enabled development carts that allow you to beam your latest prototypes onto working hardware can be had at the $128 and $208 tiers. There are other special offers if you go up from there.

The campaign for Retro Game Forge will run until September 7, with the first version of the tool being released two months later. For a full demonstration of how this thing works, you can either check out the mini-videos on the Kickstarter page or the massive one below.