Glubada Pond

A-J Games' Glubada Pond

It’s clear that this game was inspired both by Taito’s Bubble Bobble and by Novotrade’s Ecco the Dolphin. It’s also clear that the developer was both fascinated with monster mechanics and eager to bend Game-Maker toward different goals and play structures, beyond the standard inventory-based action-adventure games.

The usual Game-Maker structure involves finding power-ups and defeating monsters as you travel a map in search of an end point. Here, the developer tried a more classical arcade structure. Instead of searching for a destination, how about we clear the level of enemies to move on. Sounds simple enough, right? The idea goes all the way back to Space Invaders — or Breakout, if you want to get philosophical. The game also draws on the hop-’n-bop structure of games like Mario Bros. or Tumblepop, where you disable enemies before knocking them out for prizes.

As usual, the developer's ambitions led to wrangling with the engine’s eccentricities. And as usual the wrinkles they could never quite smooth out determined the game’s identifying quirks. Limits in character idle sequences meant that a character couldn’t just stay put when done moving, so the fish faces the audience and wiggles back and forth. The end result is odd and a little creepy, but certainly memorable.

Since the only way for a player to progress is to touch a designated exit tile, the game can’t directly tie success to monster deaths. The solution here is for each monster to leave behind a tiny bubble; collect all the bubbles and insert them in a vending machine, and the machine opens, allowing access to the next level. A problem is in the power levels of enemies.

Any item left over from a monster death would also, technically, be a monster; it would just be a monster with positive rather than negative qualities. If the monster had a lower power level than the character, it would die on contact, passing to the player its positive qualities — such as increasing a counter. It wouldn't do to make every monster of a lower power level, as the player could simply ram them to defeat them; the point here is to shoot bubbles at them to disable them. Yet if one of these higher-level monsters were to touch the reward bubbles, it would defeat those bubbles and cause them to disappear.

This was a dangerous situation. If there were only so many monsters, and thus only so many reward bubbles, what would happen if some of those bubbles vanished before the player could collect them? Basically, the player would be stuck. One solution might be to overload the level with monsters, or even allow them to respawn, and only ask for so-many bubbles to progress. That isn’t ideal either, as Game-Maker has no option to reset counters either on character death or on leaving an area. So if you were to die, or rack up bubbles in an early level, you would build up a backlog that you could trade in later to zoom right through the levels.

The developer never really worked out the problems, so in that respect the game is flawed. It is possible both to get stuck without bubbles and to mine bubbles for later. Despite the inelegance, the game finds its own flow and basically works. The faults almost open up a strategic element. It’s a strange game, though.

Some of the menus were created or altered by RSD's Gregory Stone.

Downloads

• Glubada Pond