The Game-Maker Archive — Part 18: Call and Response

December 9, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Back in July we unearthed two previously unknown Game-Maker games, Roland Ludlam’s space racer Hurdles and Matthew Groves’ free-roaming space shooter Space Cadet. We then tracked down and interviewed those two authors. Roland Ludlam is currently working on a WiiWare project and Matthew Groves is considering Android development; each was generous with his time and memories, and with some prodding each was generous enough to find and forward some other long-neglected projects for us to record and archive. The former scrounged around on an old backup of a backup, and the latter mailed us a collection of 5-1/4″ floppies to extract.

From each party we received two games: one fully developed and substantial, and one experimental or unusual. We’ll start with the “big” games, and then once we’re primed we’ll turn to the really interesting stuff.

Mystery Mansion

Both of Matthew Groves’ rescued games share several traits with Space Cadet. They call on many of RSD’s sample resources to build their environments and monster collection. They employ simple sprites, tiles, and backdrops consisting of flat colors and basic, yet well-defined, shapes. They betray a fondness for PC and arcade games over an obvious console lineage. Despite that, they feel very reminiscent of games for early-1980s Atari hardware.

In particular, Mystery Mansion feels a bit like an Atari 5200 version of Gauntlet — perhaps crossed with an ASCII dungeon crawler like Nethack or Groves’ preferred design tool, ZZT. Despite its simplicity and borrowed tiles, the game is very playable. Its controls are crunchy and responsive, and the levels make an interesting, Roguelike use of space. Of especial note are the diagonal hallways and long narrow corridors connecting open rooms.

As in all of Groves’ games, the original character sprite and behavior largely makes up for the borrowed incidentals. Here, Barry the Brave is cleanly rendered and fairly well animated. When he stands still, quarter notes spiral his head as he whistles to himself. When he dies, he slowly melts into a puddle of blood and tissue. It’s unexpected and gory, and kind of cool.

With registration, users are promised a sequel entitled Mystery Caves. This game did at one point exist; the author no longer has a copy. No one registered, so unlike the three shareware games no copies are in the wild. It may then reasonably be considered lost.

John’s Archaeological Adventures

As Ludlam described in the interview, this is his tribute to George Broussard’s Pharaoh’s Tomb. Ludlam took his share of liberties, some of them artistic and some of them — thanks to Game-Maker’s infamous quirks — logistical. The result is an unusual and rich single-screen puzzle-platformer.

The game is unusual in at least two obvious respects. For one, there is only a small handful of Game-Maker based puzzle games. (Of those, most are missing, incomplete, actually unmade, or merely rumored.) Granted, this is an action puzzler and it rarely gets more complex than key-and-door mechanics. Still, it’s novel to see the engine used this way.

The other strange bit is the single-screen level design. Each level is scroll-locked in all four directions, meaning each screen is a meticulous construction where every tile is important. Only one other locked-screen Game-Maker game comes to mind, and that’s a slightly weird (though memorable) Christmas game from Singapore. Of the two, John’s Archaeological Adventures is the more carefully designed.

A further point of acclaim is the character animation. For such a small sprite, Ludlam made the best use of every frame — a tendency that we’ll see in his other work.

The game has its problems — mostly technical and unavoidable, partially aesthetic. Game-Maker’s trademark bouncy monster collision becomes a problem here, as it does in every game with a moving platform. Hop on a platform, and just hope you don’t spring off or through it either through your own momentum or through the platform’s movement.

Another issue is with Xferplay’s strange edge-of-screen issues, where within a few pixels of the screen edge all animations cease, all sprites vanish, and clipping becomes highly unpredictable. In a scrolling game, the character (one hopes) will rarely reach the screen edge, so the worst consequence is occasional sudden monster pop-in. When the screen is locked, though, navigating its edges becomes a whole new adventure.

John’s Etcetera consists of three episodes. The first is shareware; the second and third are available to registered users. It is unclear whether Roland Ludlam still retains copies of the later episodes; if he doesn’t, again the chances are that they’re gone forever.

Jet Driver

Now we’re entering the weird and glitchy zone. Glitchier.

Whereas Matthew Groves’ Space Cadet and Mystery series were conceived and completed as discrete trilogies, Jet Driver seems like it was more of an ongoing process. The shareware version contains five tracks, and registration gets you a bunch more plus a bunch of new graphics and sound resources. As above, if it’s not in the shareware version then it’s probably gone.

Although Groves describes Jet Driver as a sort of early draft of Grand Theft Auto, perhaps a more apt description would be Spy Hunter without the shooting, or Bump ‘N Jump without the jumping. You can drive in four directions, or hit “B” to brake. Touch another vehicle and you instantly explode, Pole Position style. Run over children, and be rewarded with a sound clip of screaming.

Thanks to Game-Maker’s set map size, the tracks are all short. Some of the tracks take a swerve far enough to the side to allow the map to loop. Since Game-Maker’s sense of momentum is fairly limited, and the ability to combine moves is perhaps even more limited, driving isn’t as smooth as it might be. Thus those curves can be a bit of a problem to navigate. No one’s fault; the game is an experiment.

Jet Driver is awkward and experimental, and there may be reasons why it resembles no other Game-Maker game. Yet it’s also fascinating, and designed with the same clean style and genial spirit as Groves’ other games. And again, hey. Someone’s got to push the boundaries.

Mech

Roland Ludlam spent ages fiddling with Game-Maker’s powerful visual design tools and comparably little assembling those elements into complete games. That’s understandable; the best part of Game-Maker was always the design. The worst part was always the actual game engine.

Mech is less a concentrated and aborted attempt at a game as a test run for a new set of background tiles and for perhaps the most carefully and intricately animated character in a Game-Maker game. Ludlam expressed his frustration with the engine’s limitations: “Mech is just a demo — one level and I think a boss. It was sort of experimental and then I lost interest in it. It features 2 (count em!) 2 weapons, and also incredibly twitchy controls. So for Mech, there are actually 4 firing buttons. 2 for grenades, and 2 for lasers. Terrible.” Actually there are three (wonderfully animated) weapons, resulting in six attack keys. In another game that might seem excessive. Somehow when the main character is a bipedal mech, the controls make a kind of sense.

Although the levels are just sort of there — beyond a point the main level is clearly unfinished, and the boss level isn’t even completely playable — they’re also interesting and clever. Ludlam makes a good use of space, and of a very unusual palette comprised mostly of dusty pinks. You stride across a sort of painted desert, avoiding land mines that blast an actual hole in the ground, until you reach a waterfall. Descend the waterfall and avoid falling on sharp rocks at the bottom, and travel through a cavern full of acid. The cavern eventually loops under the waterfall, which feels not so much awkward as revelatory. “Oh, so that’s where I am!” you think. At the end of the cavern, dive into a deep pool. This takes you into an underwater passage full of fish and other appropriate creatures.

The next level, dedicated to the boss, looks potentially very clever. Since the character can’t shoot properly and therefore it is impossible to attack the boss, it’s unclear exactly what Ludlam had planned. Still, what’s there is neat — a huge, multi-segmented biomechanical creature embedded into an overhang.

If Ludlam had bothered to expand the prototype into a full game, Mech might have been one of the most striking designed with RSD’s toolset. As it is, it’s a tantalizing glimpse of what a person might do with the tools, given the right kind of talent.

Since you will not find these games elsewhere, you can download them all here. If you like what you see, by all means track down the authors and let them know. Many thanks to both of them for their time and effort in contributing to this research.