Does anyone take on commissions for nes games

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Aliaysleighbasic
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2022 10:00 pm

Does anyone take on commissions for nes games

Post by Aliaysleighbasic »

My boyfriend loves the game Lil’ Emporer for the nes. He wants to make some changes to it. Is this something that’s just too much to ask someone to do? It’s not a side scroller. It’s a pretty complex strategy game.
He even wrote a whole walk through on GameFaqs.
I want to help him realize his dream but it’s so hard to find anything out. I’ve looked around on upwork but everyone is geared to push out simple platformer for iOS and Android. I’m afraid to get NES maker, because I can’t imagine it has the functionality for a strategy game.
Any advice would be amazing.
I have some money to spend on this if anyone here wants more details. Thanks.
calima
Posts: 1745
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2015 10:16 am

Re: Does anyone take on commissions for nes games

Post by calima »

Yes, many folks here, me included. However budget expectations are often unrealistic, especially if you compare to eastern coders on Upwork offering cheap mobile sidescrollers. NES work, both from-scratch and hacking, is highly specialized, and experienced programmers aren't cheap. For a ballpark figure, think 50$/h.

Hacking an existing game is often quite difficult, and it takes many hours just to find where to make a change. For this reason it's rare to commission a hack, and the big ones you see are usually labors of love.

Doing a complex strategy game from scratch is also no small project, for any platform. NESMaker probably won't be able to handle such complexity, you're right there.
Fiskbit
Posts: 891
Joined: Sat Nov 18, 2017 9:15 pm

Re: Does anyone take on commissions for nes games

Post by Fiskbit »

What kinds of changes are we talking? It'd be helpful to know the scope of the project - the number and complexity of the desired changes. That might help with figuring out however much it might cost. If the project is quick and easy, someone might even do it for free, but if it's going to be long and/or challenging, then you're probably looking at costs higher than you're expecting. Programmers (even unskilled ones) aren't cheap. Note that doing work like this involves a lot of unknowns. A simple feature may end up being very easy to do to, or surprisingly difficult, based on factors such as how the code is structured, availability of free space, and cleanliness of the game's code.

People around here are very skilled, but as this site skews more toward development of new, from-scratch games, its members find ROM hacking to be a bit more daunting. Conversely, romhacking.net is focused on ROM hacking (and probably less good with from-scratch games), which is more what you want. There's overlap, though, with at least a few people here with the skills for it, and my feeling is that people here have a better understanding of the NES and would be less likely to make mistakes that, for example, prevent the game from working properly on a real NES.

My general thinking on a project like this is that paying people to work on it is often not the way to go, because hiring someone really is expensive. Rather, you want to keep the scope small enough that someone might just do it for fun, or try to find someone passionate about the game who likes the design you've come up with and is willing to implement it for free or little compensation.
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