The Game-Maker Archive - User contributions [en]

Game-Maker

2010-06-07T03:06:29Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker was a boxed design suite from the early 1990s. It offered aspiring pre-Web designers the world over their first taste of game developm…'

Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker was a boxed design suite from the early 1990s. It offered aspiring pre-Web designers the world over their first taste of game development. And for its era, it was darned powerful: VGA graphics, Sound Blaster sound, infinitely huge games. There were some strict limitations and quirks, but at the time there wasn’t much else like it — and it sure beat breaking out Lode Runner for the hundredth time, plus the graph paper and pencil to record your levels.

In its prime, Game-Maker enjoyed a large network of users, connected through dedicated dial-up boards and old-fashioned floppy exchanges. Development on Game-Maker ceased around the time that the Web began to enter the mainstream, and a few years after that Mark Overmars’ unrelated Game Maker (note the absence of hyphen) replaced its namesake, to find its own development community.

Although the software was cheap and easy to use, and there was a thriving community around it, it seems most users were content to finish at most one or two games, then to move on. As a result you have a handful of big, influential voices — the artists who made a handful of complete, original games — and a peppering of neato one-off games by people you never saw again.

* * *

Long before Mark Overmars’ popular design tool, Recreational Software Designs‘ Game-Maker (note the hyphen) opened the horizons of Shareware-era PC gamers, forged friendships and dial-up communities, and cluttered the upload directories of bulletin boards as far flung as Russia and South America. There were several dedicated BBSes, including the official RSD board in Kennebunkport, Maine. For those outside of calling range, there was always the USPS and 3-1/2″ floppies. And then development ceased, and slowly Game-Maker faded.

Game Maker was first released around 1992, as a set of VGA mode DOS utilities tied together with a text mode selection menu. For every game produced, the main program file, containing all of the important code, was the same. To distinguish one game from the next, the program file would call on a .gam file, in which the user would compile all of his content through a rather elegant system of brainstorming lines and form fields. The rest of the tools — tile editors, character and monster editors, a map editor, a sound editor, and so on — served to develop that content.

In retrospect it was kind of brilliant; from the program’s perspective all of the important information that made a game unique — visuals, sound, controls, rules, design, structure — was simple window dressing, to call in and process like so many documents. And design was nearly that easy.

Let’s say you had two maps, Map1 and Map2. In your .gam file you would click twice to plop down two boxes. Then you would draw a line from the starting point (the title menu, functionally identical in every game) to the first box, a line from the first box to the second box, and a probably a line from the second box to the ending point (the “game over” sequence, if any). In the first box, select your first map file; select a tile set; select a monster, character, and sound set. Define an entry and an exit point on the map. Do similarly for box 2. Click on the starting point, and add a title graphic or animation; change the text at will. Do similarly for the ending point. And then export.

There’s your game. Simple, but functional. The title menu leads to the entry point in Map1; the exit to Map1 leads to the entry to Map2; the exit to Map2 leads to the game over screen. It’s all just data, fed into the generic program file.

Over the years and several versions, Game-Maker grew more sophisticated and polished. The bugs were minimized. It began to support Sound Blaster cards, and .fli animations. It became possible to build bigger, more complex games, and to truss up your old games with nicer wrappers. I believe the final release was version 3.0, which went out on CD — a major, impressive move at the time. This was around 1995 or 1996. Full disclosure, that release was packed with my own demo games.

My involvement with Game-Maker began with an ad in the back of Videogames & Computer Entertainment, a short blurb about creating my own 256-color VGA PC games, and a shot of a rather intriguing box, covered with inscrutable snapshots suggesting all manner of game worlds just beyond my reach, yet as close as my imagination. Looking back, I notice I had no sense of level design. And good lord were my games derivative. Still, what can you do.

I soon developed a relationship with RSD. I was young, incautious, and probably bewildering to all considered, but they tolerated my phone calls and letters. The New Hampshire-based company was comprised of two brothers, Gregory and Oliver Jr., and their father, Oliver Stone. No relation. Gregory was the main programmer, and his brother handled design, music, and some extra programming. Their father ran the business, and was my main contact. All through high school I beta tested upcoming releases, suggested features, shared new ways of subverting the design tools.

After that final release, RSD kind of dissolved. From what I recall, the brothers went off to college. Which in retrospect would suggest that they developed Game-Maker and held down its development cycle while still in high school themselves. Maybe I’m misremembering; they might have been undergrads. The way I remember it, they stopped development when they went off to school, leaving their father to see the business off. Last I heard, they still intended to develop Game-Maker during breaks. I guess that never happened, though. And today, despite the once-thriving design community, you can hardly find a thing about the program. There isn’t even a Wikipedia entry, whereas there is an individual Wiki page for each of Johnny Depp’s toes. [citation needed]

What may have killed Game-Maker in the end was a certain lack of flexibility to the main program on which all the resources hinged. Although by the final release the scrolling had improved tremendously, the screen’s tracking of on-screen avatars was always strange at best. The character never quite stayed centered; the screen would move in fits and jerks. Sprites flickered and disappeared at the edges of screen, and had real problems with bounding boxes.

By 1996, several features also began to sting for their absence. The only supported music format was weird and proprietary; there was no custom music editor, and it was difficult to convert anything to the required format. I kept suggesting they add .mod or .s3m support, though by then I think the brothers had other life concerns. I also kept asking for text fields. If the games could have supported dialog and exposition, there was a whole extra level of complexity just waiting.

The inventory system was very limited, as was control mapping. If you wanted to allow a character to jump up, left, and right, you had to assign each animation a different key. Characters and monsters could only be of a certain size, and the interaction amongst all in-game elements was never quite flexible enough.

There were other issues of professionalism and tidiness. Every Game-Maker game had essentially the same title menu, with the same options in the same typeface. Also, rather than archiving and compressing content, the exporting tool merely dumped resource files into a directory, for end users and hackers to pick over at will. If you had a written epilogue in a text file, it simply copied the text file into the target directory, for anyone to read.

Still, even the big problems and omissions are tiny compared to the improvements that Game-Maker had seen over its short history. And even in its final form — heck, even in its earliest forms — Game-Maker was a welcoming, powerful, and rather brilliant design tool, well deserving a place in indie game history.

Firefall

2010-06-07T03:02:25Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'It’s not that Firefall is all that great, really. It’s more that this is the closest example I have to the kind of game that Game-Maker was designed to produce. In this case …'

It’s not that Firefall is all that great, really. It’s more that this is the closest example I have to the kind of game that Game-Maker was designed to produce. In this case the enigmatic “Firefall Softwarez” clearly tried to clone Gauntlet, and wound up with something rather different. What has always impressed me about this game is the rather nifty Deluxe Paint-derived visuals. Granted they’re hit and miss, but some of the monster design and most of the item and background tile design is rather grand.

Firefall feels like a first, experimental effort by a legitimately talented designer employing a very early version of the Game-Maker package and not yet used to the tools at hand. It was also one of the first Game-Maker games I found by another designer, so for that reason it has always stuck in my head — perhaps a little more solidly than it might otherwise. I can’t really justify it.

Orb: The Derelict Planet

2010-06-07T03:01:36Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'This is, basically, Metroid. An amateur Metroid, I grant you. And with a protagonist that rather baffles me; it’s basically an eye inside a glass orb. Still, hey. I guess the m…'

This is, basically, Metroid. An amateur Metroid, I grant you. And with a protagonist that rather baffles me; it’s basically an eye inside a glass orb. Still, hey. I guess the most distinctive element of Samus is her morph ball ability. And the most expressive Metroid game is the second one, in which you spend half of your time in ball form, rolling around the walls and ceilings.

Josh Turcotte did a good job here; Orb is one of the more complex and fully-featured Game-Maker games I’ve played, and also employs one of the most comprehensive storylines. Even the credits are uncommonly verbose:

This game wouldn’t be possible without my computer and a half ruined Microcassette recorder, a few good tapes, an excellent SoundBlaster system, a few new pens, a lot of graphpaper, and my very fat Norwegian Elkhound named Thor who was for most of the monsters in this game, and for a few of the sounds in the game, my inspiration. The rest of the monsters Merry, Pippin, and Isis… in order two loud parakeets and a pest of a cat, are responsible for. GAMEMAKER is, however, more responsible than any other for this master piece, and deserves due thanks from I as well as from any who enjoy playing this game.

Indeed. Anyway, the visuals are clean and attractive. The level design is actually pretty good, if about as confusing as the original Metroid. From the amount of original effort that went into this game I’d like to see what else Josh Turcotte got up to.

The Descent

2010-06-07T03:00:50Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'As we discussed earlier, Game-Maker consisted of two basic elements: the actual executable file that functioned as the actual “game”, which called upon all of the user-specif…'

As we discussed earlier, Game-Maker consisted of two basic elements: the actual executable file that functioned as the actual “game”, which called upon all of the user-specified graphical and sound and design elements to give itself a face; and the Game-Maker package itself, which consisted of a bunch of VGA design utilities tied together with a text mode wrapper. Game-Maker also came with a wealth of demo material, most of it by the lead programmer and his brother; some of it public domain material, gathered from who-knows-where.

Whereas Game-Maker provided powerful, well-designed utilities for drawing, defining, and organizing graphical elements — tiles, sprites, maps — the sound side of things was always kind of shrug. It wasn’t until the last few versions that the software supported Sound Blaster audio, and formats it supported were… curious. Any digital samples had to be in .VOC format, and any music in the very peculiar .CMF. Whereas even now it is possible to find audio applications that support .VOC, there never really were any popular sequencers or conversion utilities for .CMF.

So what you’ll often find is Game-Maker games with original, brilliant visuals and subversive design that borrow most of their sounds and all of their music from the demo libraries, or even from other Game-Maker games. If the original author complained, the derivative author would issue an update and give him a credit. It was a different era.

By comparison, The Descent has original music and often rather amusing sound effects — and nearly all the visual elements, from the character to the background tiles, are ripped out of the demo games that came in the Game-Maker box. It’s really strange. I guess David Barras didn’t consider himself much of an artist.

Of course what matters is not the materials you have; it’s how you use them. And David Barras was very clever here. The game is droll and odd and a bit subversive. You’re a tall guy wandering through a dungeon, collecting treasure and shooting monsters — mostly floating eyeballs — with a very noisy handgun. The level design is often deceptive, and includes a few forced checkpoints so that you don’t have to worry so much about saving. There are odd touches like paintings that may be treasures, or that may turn into gaping mouths that bite you as you walk past. And then there’s the spellbook.

I’m not sure why it’s there, though its presence — as does the presence of many things in this game — feels ironic in a way that I don’t quite understand. It’s the only item in the game that you can pick up. When you do pick it up, you gain the ability to cast a spell. When you cast a spell, your character slowly intones his incantation. With Barras’ slight southern drawl, it comes out like “ALAIYAT SYET ZIT-SIT”. Of course if you reverse the wave file, you’ll find what he meant to say was “LLEPS A SI SIHT”.

Mortal Harvey

2010-06-07T02:58:36Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with '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…'

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?

Ego Force

2010-06-07T02:58:11Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with '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…'

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.

All Quiet

2010-06-07T02:55:46Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'Assigned a book report on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Matt Bell asked, and was granted, special permission to instead adapt the book into a videogame. As it happ…'

Assigned a book report on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Matt Bell asked, and was granted, special permission to instead adapt the book into a videogame. As it happens, the game fails to capture much beyond a basic WWI setting. The player starts off in a trench as it begins to fill with mustard gas, and is forced to go “over the top”; as he works his way across the battlefield, the player will encounter barbed wire, mortars, more gas, and machine gun fire that seems to follow the player around like angry bees. The player’s only defense is a single-shot rifle, and it’s not really enough to get far. If the game does express one thing, it’s a certain futility.

Yuphex

2010-06-07T02:55:04Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'The title refers to the second planet of the Yuphlaxian star system, one of the worst possible targets for a holiday. The player controls a squat, through spry, reptile who finds…'

The title refers to the second planet of the Yuphlaxian star system, one of the worst possible targets for a holiday. The player controls a squat, through spry, reptile who finds his vacation on the verge of ruin due to an unexpected supernova. The task is to find several pieces of shielding, so that the player can dive into the nearby sun and defuse a bomb.

Yuphex is basically a character platformer, with standout design and a few neat elements. Especially notable are the space ship sequences; rather than a straight level-to-level progression, the game offers some freedom of exploration on an overworld map and an endgame inside the sun itself. The platforming also avoids much of the usual frustration in a Game-Maker game, as the reptile rockets out at forty-five degree angles, allowing plenty of room for aerial maneuvering.

Anyone developing a Game-Maker platformer would do well to dissect this game in Character Maker for a tutorial in overcoming Game-Maker’s limitations in control design. Likewise, the visuals display an attention to detail yet a simplicity that lends the game a sense of place found only in the top-rung Game-Maker games. The only thing I’d add to the backgrounds is that I’d change up some of the overt repetition.

Paper Airplane

2010-06-07T02:54:37Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'Guide an airplane through perilous obstacle courses, in various industrial settings — warehouses, power stations, ventilation shafts. Initially takes only a touch to wreck your…'

Guide an airplane through perilous obstacle courses, in various industrial settings — warehouses, power stations, ventilation shafts. Initially takes only a touch to wreck your plane, and there is some clever action puzzle solving to be had. Much of the action involves air drafts — a practical use of Game-Maker’s directional gravity variables. On the backend, Game-Maker users will also notice how carefully Matt organizes his monster and background tiles by level, so as to allow plenty of space in each tile set. More ambitious designs are often hampered by Game-Maker’s strict limits on tile counts; between the clean designs and fresh tile sets for each scene, Paper Airplane demonstrates how to work with the limitations rather than just struggling against them.

Penguin Pete

2010-06-07T02:53:03Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'This game is wholly credited to Joan Stone, of unknown relation to Gregory and Oliver, Jr. Their mother? Sister? A spouse, maybe? She was also responsible for many of the monster…'

This game is wholly credited to Joan Stone, of unknown relation to Gregory and Oliver, Jr. Their mother? Sister? A spouse, maybe? She was also responsible for many of the monsters in the above games.

Whereas Nebula is the strongest game of the bunch, Penguin Pete is the most ambitious. It’s a large game, consisting of several maze levels linked from a complex and dangerous overworld. The protagonist has more moves than the game effectively accounts for, suggesting an even more ambitious design that was slightly cut down.

The main view is of a large ice field; ice islands are connected by a maze of shifting, submerging bridges. Walruses, bears, wolves hassle our penguin; each requires a certain kind of attack to defeat. None is clearly signaled, meaning a bit of fumbling trial and error. There is the occasional hole in the snow; hop in, and search for a chunk of demolished submarine. Some of the mazes are overhead-view; some are simple platformers; one is an underwater level.

The game is harder than it needs to be, and a little too complex for its premise. One of the great things about Nebula is its simplicity. There’s practically nothing extraneous to it. Some of Pete’s moves don’t even work all that well. I commend Joan for trying a Mario-style hop attack, but it should have been cut — as should have the jumping moves in overhead-view levels.

Still, hey, there are a ton of neat ideas in here. I love the level progression, and the mazes that involve blindly burrowing into the snow are a bit of genius. They’re simple, and that’s why they work so well. The game is also attractive and, as with the other sample games, endearing.

Sample

2010-06-07T02:52:35Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'The game is well-named. It is basically a final lesson in combining all of the elements you’ve learned in the tutorials into a functional game. And indeed, it’s a simple game…'

The game is well-named. It is basically a final lesson in combining all of the elements you’ve learned in the tutorials into a functional game. And indeed, it’s a simple game; it all takes place on a single map, and its elements don’t really cohere all that well — and yet it’s fascinating and evocative, and its influence on end-user games approaches infinite.

Sample is an attempt at an action-adventure exploration game, using a two-block-tall character. The effort is hampered by an awkward sense of perspective and the inability in Game-Maker to set foreground objects, for the character to walk behind. So when you walk into, say, the top of a tree or the top of your house, you bang your shins on it instead of just walking past, partially obscured from the camera.

And yet the sense of space, and the use of space, are both charming and clever. Within that one map you will find several mazes, swamps, forests, traps, gardens, and a sort of a village. For such a small area, there seems no end of surprises to find or new areas to lurk around in. And as the game takes place all on one map, there’s never any loading. It’s all one seamless adventure — and one that may take a while to complete.

It is significant that the background tiles pop up again, in some form, in nearly every Game-Maker game made. Furthermore, find me a game with a two-block-tale male protagonist, and I’ll find you a sprite edit of our protagonist here.

Nebula

2010-06-07T02:52:06Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'Of the sample games, Nebula is both the best and the most consistently upgraded of the bunch. Whenever a new version of Game-Maker appeared, with new features, it was Nebula that…'

Of the sample games, Nebula is both the best and the most consistently upgraded of the bunch. Whenever a new version of Game-Maker appeared, with new features, it was Nebula that leaped to incorporate and demonstrate those features — leading to some significant changes and additions to its design.

Nebula is a completely original game, and every bit of it serves to illustrate how to make a proper platformer with this toolset that isn’t really built for that kind of a game. The visuals are stylish and stylized, and just plain well-designed. When you touch ceiling spikes, they start to drip with fluid the color of your protagonist. The geometrical patterns in the background tiles break up the normal sense of repetition, and there’s a comprehensible sense of level design at work. There are two difficulty modes; in the easy mode, tricky chasms are bridged by tenuous platforms. And just in case you lose your way, energetic green arrows keep you moving.

Significantly, the game’s three major levels use the exact same tileset; the only difference is the palette. In level two, green and blue are swapped; in level three, red becomes prominent. There’s an overworld connecting the three levels, with its own character animations and its own controls. Monsters behave regularly and predictably, and largely fit the game’s environments. The only thing I can say against Nebula is that when RSD added Sound Blaster support, the game acquired a scathing bell sample. Whenever you get one of the most important collecting items in the game, that bell rings out — tempting me to just skip the items altogether.

Nebula has more to teach about game design than all of the other demo games put together. And certainly more than I learned, back in the day.

Pipemare

2010-06-07T02:51:42Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'The Game-Maker box is scattered with genuinely intriguing snapshots of potential games; between ordering the software and receiving it and figuring out how to use it, I used to g…'

The Game-Maker box is scattered with genuinely intriguing snapshots of potential games; between ordering the software and receiving it and figuring out how to use it, I used to gaze at the box and wonder how those games were supposed to work. I was reminded of floppy disks full of old shareware, or wandering into an arcade and marvelling at all the novel games, with their unusual mechanics and art styles, that I might never see again.

One of the key pictures was of the tile editor, and the tiles on display were from Pipemare. This game is the definitive Game-Maker game; it’s the sort of game that the software was made to facilitate. Furthermore, it’s the origin of most of RSD’s iconography, from the main character sprite to the pointy-headed monsters.

Pipemare is a top-down exploration maze action game thing; you play as a happy ball with four feet that rotate around the circumference like a walking machine. If you pick up a hamburger, you get fat. If you pick up a hat, you wear it. You can shoot lasers and drop bombs. You avoid or destroy monsters, pick up treasures, fix leaky pipes, and search for the exit. Everywhere you explore, you disturb the water — making it easy to see where you’ve already been. It comes off a bit like a disjointed early Commodore or Amiga response to Pac-Man.

The game is colorful, distinctive, well-drawn. It’s short; only a couple of levels. And yet it exudes atmosphere and charisma in a way that few end-user games ever managed. Frankly, I’d love to see a remake for the Nintendo DS — perhaps with a level editor.

Invasion of the Blobs II: The Evolution Revolution

2010-06-07T02:50:06Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'The sequel is a completely different game. Instead of a top-down action adventure, it’s a platformer (mostly). The player character is different; the game is set ten years late…'

The sequel is a completely different game. Instead of a top-down action adventure, it’s a platformer (mostly). The player character is different; the game is set ten years later, and now you play as the girlfriend to the original protagonist. The game mechanics are different. The story is larger and more ambitious, as is the game design. Every level feels like a brand new experiment. The resulting game uses just about every advanced technique I’ve seen in a Game-Maker game, and makes about the best use of them that I’ve seen.

There’s an element of world-building in Invasion of the Blobs II. As I said, it expands the timeframe, the active cast of characters, and their relationships. Something that strikes me is that every stage seems to both lead logically to the next and from the previous stage. Often the previous stage is visible through an open doorway, and the tag leading to the next stage is hovering in the corner. For instance, after traversing a locker room you enter a behind-the-scenes area filled with leaky pipes. You plug the leaks with blob enemies, pass through, and climb to the roof. When you’ve reached the end of the roof, you leap off and grab the tongue of an enormous blob hovering in the sky. Startled, the blob begins to rocket backwards in space.

This leads us to one of the most technically interesting stages in a Game-Maker game, a sort of Space Harrier tribute which seems possibly inspired by some of Eclypse Games‘ work. If so, it uses the techniques in a totally new way.
Other clearer influences include RSD’s Pipemare (in the custom intro screen) and Nebula (in the elegant mode selection menu), rounding up the demo game circuit.

There’s a ton of neat stuff in here, from particle effects to background objects that you can kick around. Yet as with the first game, it’s the small things that impress me here. For instance, combat. The construction of Game-Maker makes melee attacks very difficult to realize. To harm a monster, a player sprite has to somehow birth a monster of a higher power level. Although it is technically possible to birth a monster that looks like an extension of the player sprite, it’s a pain in the neck to get right. And even when it’s almost perfect, it never quite works the way that it should. Through what must have been painstaking trial and error, though, this game gets it right. The protagonist attacks mostly through high and low kicks. I’m also struck by the amount of thought that went into the range and use of the attacks.

Also uncommonly for a Game-Maker game, the visuals are obviously imported from an external painting program — allowing more flexibility and consistently in the backgrounds and sprites. I’d use the then-industry standard Deluxe Paint; Perrucci used Neopaint. Same thing.

Invasion of the Blobs!

2010-06-07T02:49:32Z

69.113.160.116: Created page with 'The first IotB is an overhead three-quarters view action adventure game; exactly the kind of thing that Game-Maker was designed for. And indeed, at a distance it feels like an ad…'

The first IotB is an overhead three-quarters view action adventure game; exactly the kind of thing that Game-Maker was designed for. And indeed, at a distance it feels like an advanced remix of RSD’s demo games.

It’s almost like someone handed Perrucci RSD’s Sample, and said “Fix this.” The early stages contain the same flower-crushing action from Sample, similar kinds of background and design elements, in particular forest mazes and water barriers. Some of the later levels also seem to show a Penguin Pete influence. Yet all the elements are original, and perhaps cleaner than RSD’s. The background tiles sport nice gradients and perspective; there’s a neat shadow effect under raised objects like bridges. The smaller character is better scaled to the environment, and the monsters are consistent throughout. Each color of blob has a distinct movement pattern and a unique, creative death animation.

Outside the Game-Maker realm, some of the interaction of items and background elements feels reminiscent of Zelda, different objects allow different kinds of background interaction, such as burning of bushes. There’s even a SkiFree stage.

Despite some really clever bits, like the complex boss battles, it’s the subtle things that impress me, like the game’s understanding of the touchy way that active tiles affect the player sprite, and the way that Integrator interprets level ending flags. The game isn’t very difficult, though it doesn’t feel like that’s the point; it’s more of an attempt to try out as many techniques as possible.