The Game-Maker Archive: Eclypse Games

May 15, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve given you a brief overview of Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker, a boxed game design suite from the early 1990s, and we’ve talked about one of the more prominent artists from the Game-Maker development scene. In our continuing series, we turn the looking glass to one of the most innovative Game-Maker artists, whose techniques may overshadow his actual games. Given that he rarely finished a game before moving on to new ideas, this is probably warranted. Yet those ideas were advanced enough that his contribution to the development community is hard to ignore.

Eclypse Games

Eclypse Games was basically a guy named James Faux, aka OmegAkira. He lived and attended high school in New Jersey, and he ran a Game-Maker dial-up BBS called SiNiSTRY, which I think was also the name of his personal rock band. The board was only available irregularly, as he ran it off his primary phone line. I can’t quite remember where I first found his work; perhaps on the official RSD BBS in Rockport. Eventually I found myself calling his BBS at all weird hours, to cut down on long-distance charges.

Significantly, Jim was a musician and he was one of the few individuals outside of Epic Megagames to figure out what to do with the .CMF music format that Game-Maker relied on. So if nothing else, his games tended to be all original: new ideas, new techniques, new graphical elements, new sound effects, new music. A few of his earlier games do use the familiar stock tracks, though that tendency soon diminished.

Ego Force

I’m just going to jump in here. Although this game has just two levels, and in many senses seems more like a tech demo, it’s one of the more advanced games to come out of the Game-Maker scene. It’s a forced-scrolling space shooter, that alternates between side-scrolling and top-down stages. It contains animated menus and titles, original music, and several neat tricks.

Though you can pull a few tricks, fundamentally Game-Maker is designed for top-down adventure games. Most of the fun in developing with the package is to make Game-Maker do what it doesn’t want to do. Thus you will see many noble attempts at jumping physics and textless role-playing games and action games so frantic that the engine can barely keep up. What I’ve only seen a few of are space shooters. Of those, Ego Force gets it most right. The ship’s idle animation forces it perpetually forward; monsters move in Gradius-inspired patterns, space junk and obstacles drift into the frame, demanding attention. The ship moves quickly and cleanly. The design is both sleek and gritty.

One throwaway, yet profound, detail comes right at the start. After hitting “Play”, you are thrown into an in-engine selection screen. You can choose three options: a practice mode, and two ostensible difficulty settings. That’s unusual enough. But to the left is a window, depicting the hero ship on a speedy elevator. the elevator platform is still in the center of the frame, while the background zooms past, using several layers of apparent parallax scrolling.

It’s a trick. It’s a very clever trick of the background tiles, and one I have seen repeated at least three times — once in another Eclypse game, and twice elsewhere.

Mortal Harvey

A well-designed platformer, inspired in theme by both “Weird Al” Yankovic and Mortal Kombat. The protagonist has personality, and he moves both quickly and precisely. When he dies, he dies gorily. When he waits around, he gets impatient.

Mortal Harvey is almost certainly the most developed game in the Eclypse catalog, consisting of several varied levels, each full of atmospheric background animation and neat tile tricks. It’s a hard game, full of traps and too-precise leaps.

Most significant, I think, is an elevator level that takes the ideas from Ego Force down a different path. From a design standpoint, this level is basically static. The player can run back and forth on a platform, while the background animates, giving an impression of movement. To give the level some danger, obstacles in the form of monster tiles slowly drift downward, into the visible frame at a rate that matches the background animation. The end impression is that the player is hurtling skyward, avoiding objects along the way. Once the player has avoided an entire vertical map’s worth of monster tiles, a timer gives out, allowing the player access to an exit.

The subjective use of monster tiles is just as important here as the false scrolling technique. What Jim Faux does here, that you see only rarely in other Game-Maker games, is he distinguishes between the actual mechanical behavior of the game elements and their apparent behavior. Monster tiles don’t have to be monsters. Character tiles don’t have to be characters. You don’t have to scroll to give the impression of scrolling. Taken to an extreme, active animation can apparently move whole hunks of the scenery at once. It’s all sleight of hand, and yet what else is game design but psychology?

Breaking Down

Next week we’ll explore a grab bag of other artists, other significant games. Few Game-Maker designers were very prolific; often you’d be lucky to see one or two completed games per user. And yet somehow that just makes the spectrum of voices all the cleaner: each game is so very different from the last, each with its own ideas as to how to use the game engine.

[Read all of our Game-Maker Archive editorials]