The Game-Maker Archive: Easy Lifting

June 26, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Indie game design being what it is, especially for younger developers the impulse to kife elements from your favorite games is almost irresistible. Witness Duke Nukem (icon of the shareware movement), which not only copied its catch phrases from Bruce Campbell movies; the 2D entries blatantly ripped art resources from Turrican and other Amiga games. Depending on your philosophy, you might call this reappropriation lazy, criminal, postmodern, or pragmatic. Frankly, theft is a fact of the creative process. The creative aspect depends on how far you take the theft, how well you reinterpret the material you’ve stolen, and how well you cover your tracks.

Game-Maker being set up the way it was, a certain amount of reappropriation was almost encouraged — particularly of RSD’s own sample games. Some of the results were more blatant than others. The male and female characters or the background tiles found their way into practically everyone’s games at some point or another. I had a few original sprites and tiles lifted, myself. Generally all it took was an e-mail to the derivative author, and I would get a credit and a virtual handshake. It was a pretty loose culture.

And of course that loose-fingered approach had little real effect on the quality of a game. Granted, the more borrowed elements generally the lower the bar. Still, it’s interesting to see what can grow from someone else’s seeds.

Angelo Felix’s Shanna

On its own merits, Shanna is a rather unassuming, cleanly presented platformer. You’re a knight off to find the eponymous lost little girl.

Although the game isn’t all that ambitious, Angelo Felix exhibits a better-than-average mastery of Game-Maker’s quirks, has his own voice, and manages to paint a game that is enjoyable on its own terms regardless of the whole Game-Maker thing. Rather like Mark Hadley, Felix does such a good job in avoiding the typical pitfalls and complications and tropes of so many of his peers’ games that Shanna hardly feels like a Game-Maker game itself. It’s just simple, charming, and itself.

The visuals are mostly original, and for their part are both striking and appealing. Yet there is a bit of trickiness at work; some of the monsters and weapons appear to have been borrowed from Firefall. It’s not hard to tell the original, if you’ve used Deluxe Paint and have a grasp of VGA palettes. I wonder why Felix felt compelled to borrow the sprites, as he has such a lovely visual style of his own, and frankly Shanna is a much better game than Firefall. You will notice, though, that Felix put some effort into hiding the theft. He only borrowed the animation frames he needed, and then altered them a bit to match the game’s style. If anything, I think I prefer his edited axe to the original.

I wondered briefly if Felix and Firefall Softwarez were the same entity, but it seems unlikely. Their visual styles are quite different, as is their external software. Shanna‘s title screen is an EGA job probably assembled in Paintbrush or something similar, and Firefall‘s is a complex Deluxe Paint project. Consider that Firefall came first, and the downgrade in tools would be peculiar.

Marty Valenti’s Flying Guts

You have to remember when Game-Maker was popular. This was the period of Moral Kombat, Donkey Kong Country, and CD-ROM multimedia games like Night Trap and The 7th Guest. In that brief period before everyone fell in love with the polygon, the mass media and industry consensus was that schlocky digitization and sex and gore were the future of the medium. Thus we have the ESRB that we know and ignore today.

This was also the era of Doom, though whereas today we mostly remember it for its meticulous design and providing a template for the whole FPS genre to come, its original touchstones were its ultraviolence and its contribution to “virtual reality” — which somehow the media stirred in with the digitization and multimedia nonsense.

So impressionable youth as we all were, Marty Valenti decided to digitize himself and throw himself into a world comprised of Doom samples and textures. He really put a lot of work into his theft; he unwound the Doom .WAD file, found all the best imagery and sound effect, then meticulously converted it all to a format and resolution comprehensible to Game-Maker. And then he got someone to take dozens of photographs of him in various stages of walking, running, and dying, cleaned up all the photos, downsampled and adjusted them again, and animated a character sprite out of them.

And it does animate pretty well. It also moves about as well as any platformer character in a Game-Maker game. Jumping mechanics aren’t the easiest thing to get right, and Valenti gets them spot-on. Even the control scheme is sensible, spreading the game’s five weapons across a series of two-key bindings: Z and X, A and S, Q and W, and so on.

For all Valenti’s effort, I’m not sure how much art there is to Flying Guts. He did a great job with the item sprites, but when you pick them up you get digitized quotes from Bill & Ted. The levels are designed pretty well, but thanks to his effort in stealing and showcasing id’s textures there’s almost no variety from level to level. And frankly the game’s gore component gets old within about ten seconds. Still, wow. Think of how this game would be at least as good (and probably better) with wholly original sounds and visuals, and marvel at the determination involved.

Most interesting, I think, is the protagonist. As far as Game-Maker goes, I think I’ve only seen three instances of a fully digitized player character: the Muybridge lady of Sheldon Chase’s games, a rather disturbing “your-face-here” game that some entrepreneur whipped up, and Marty Valenti’s efforts. Of the three, Valenti’s are the best-executed (so to speak), and probably the most inspirational. Based on his efforts here, it would probably be feasible to design a whole Game-Maker game out of original photographed material. I don’t know why one would bother, but it could turn out pretty well.

For your convenience, you can find both of the games here.

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