The Game-Maker Archive: Sheldon Chase and the Woman Warrior

June 24, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Toward the end of Recreational Software Designs’ support of its Game-Maker development suite, Sheldon Chase became a kind of pervasive presence. Somewhere around 1995 or early ’96, he hit on the notion of digitizing Eadweard Muybridge‘s early motion photography for use as character sprites — sort of a retro Mortal Kombat effect, if you will. The result was a few drafts of a silvery, jittery nude model. After a bit of anti-aliasing and some animation tweaks, and finally some wardrobe assistance, he presented to RSD a stock female character for inclusion in future software updates.

Much as RSD’s Sample hero formed the template for uncounted male protagonists, Chase’s Muybridge lady became the starting place for legions of (often lurid) sprite edits. If for that reason alone Chase’s input would be notable. Yet his Woman Warrior games also exemplified several unusual and advanced techniques, as well as a curious borrowed aesthetic that sticks in the mind.

Woman Warrior and the Outer Limits

As the title suggests, this game was inspired by an episode of our favorite 1960s anthology series.

Both this game and its sequel incorporate relatively enormous, multi-block monsters. On its own this is an unusual technique, as Game-Maker only really supports single-block monsters. More advanced designers will design large static monsters out of side-by-side monster blocks. One or two of those blocks will be “hotspots” that, when destroyed, will spawn swirling explosion monsters that consume all the surrounding blocks. The monsters generally are static, as once they get moving there is no way to guarantee that the blocks will all stay together. Yet somehow Chase gets it right. Here, enormous flying saucers move along complex synchronize paths, occasionally birthing a laser bolt to attack the character below.

Another curious trait of both Woman Warrior games is their extensive use of cutscenes. Characters and monsters animate along intricately timed paths and animations, accompanied by digitized sound, voice, and music cues to help tell the story. I struggle to think of another example of in-engine cutscenes in a Game-Maker game. I’m sure one or two simple cases are skipping my mind — the odd character or space ship traveling by its own momentum from point A to point B — but nothing on a scale like this.

Finally, Chase’s games are distinguished by a sort of rudimentary puzzle-solving. In The Outer Limits, this involves luring benevolent ant monsters to the exit, collecting arrows from the desert sands, slaying the ants with those arrows, and hoping the resulting explosion will take out a few of the mutant weeds that block your way. It won’t take more than a couple of tries, and the game only has the one level. Still, there’s a lot of stuff going on here.

Woman Warrior and the Attack from Below

The sequel is not quite as sophisticated, though it presents a few new twists on Chase’s calling cards. This time the multi-block monsters are enormous robots that stomp across the countryside. The solution almost calls to mind a traditional PC-style graphical adventure, in that (spoilers ahead) your goal is to steal one of the antagonists’ firearms out of her hands, and then turn it on her robot master.

I’ll note that in both these games the level design is simple at best and baffling at worst. Furthermore, the control schemes could use some work. Why does the protagonist walk so slowly, and why are her “walk at normal speed” keys so arbitrarily assigned? Yet the point isn’t so much in the design and the content as it is in the ideas at show here. Between these two games, there’s a bunch for an aspiring Game-Maker user to chew over.

Houses

Along with Terrain and Tutor, Houses is one of the more overt demo games to come with Game-Maker, and along with Terrain you could kind of consider it a spin-off or crossover from Sample. The object is to teach designers how to incorporate multiple characters within a single level. You wander a map riddled with houses of various designs. If you follow the path, each of the first few houses is a hotspot. Depending on which door you enter, you branch off into a parallel version of the map starring a different character.

The game contains (indeed begins with) a slightly less refined version of Chase’s Muybridge lady, wearing just a blue swimsuit — more or less a selective palette swap, adding both a bit of color and a bit of modesty to the black-and-white photos. Houses is a later addition to RSD’s demo portfolio, and perhaps was added for the 3.0 CD release. For posterity, that release also comes with a bare version of the Muybridge model — although I believe it exists only as a raw sprite set, and is not incorporated into any game.

Who exactly designed Houses? I don’t know. Possibly one of the Stone family; possibly Chase. Yet Chase’s character sprite holds center stage, and indeed provides the game an excuse for existing. Furthermore, the character swapping is a rather specialized mechanism to illustrate, rather evoking the convolution of Chase’s Woman Warrior series. So if nothing else it deserves a footnote in a discussion of Chase’s contributions.

Notes:

• Why does the punk unicyclist live in the ritziest house of all?
• Wow, what’s the deal with the shadowy forms in the row house windows?
• There is in fact a goal to find. It’s a house with the word “EXIT” above the door.

As usual, I have uploaded Chase’s games for your benefit here. If anyone out there still has Game-Maker installed, and has no experience with these games, you might want to pick them apart. They’re a kind of fascinating read.

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