NBA Jams!

NBA Jams!

Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 1995
Levels: 1
Author: Alan Caudel
Website: DummyDuck.com
Related games: N/A

Game-Maker is meant for adventure games, but it pays to do the unexpected. In NBA Jams!, Alan Caudel tossed together a hopeless tribute to Mark Turmell's classic arcade basketball game, NBA Jam. It was hopeless in that Caudel approached the project with no real expectation of success; Game-Maker allows little room for complex game logic or player controls, and any non-player sprites are highly limited in their behavior. Still, he put together a nice-looking court and character sprite. There's nothing to do, but the game looks all right.

Fast forward 20 years, and Caudel had more complex ideas on his mind. He revisited NBA Jams! with a more nuanced understanding of monster logic, and managed to hack together an imperfect yet admirable tag system, allowing the player and one CPU opponent to take turns stealing a ball from each other.

Stalking the court in NBA Jams!

The mechanism is a minor feat of hackery, involving convoluted monster chains. There's a basketball monster that stays with the player until killed, at which point it turns into an opponent running away with a basketball. There's a dot monster that stays with the player and kills any other approaching monsters; run into the opponent to steal the ball back. And so on. It gets trickier. And like any Game-Maker hack, there are some impressive glitches. Doesn't matter; it's still neat, and a good start for future hacks.

In the early version of the game there is a command for slam dunking a phantom ball; for the revisited draft, that move is disabled due to the fragile craziness of the new monster cycle.

Story

N/A

Instructions

• Arrow keys: Move your player in those directions.
• Spacebar: Dunk!

Credits

Game designed by Alan Caudel.

Background

I was a fan of NBA Jams at the time, so that's what I called mine. There's not much to it other than the character and the background. I knew I couldn't make a real basketball game with Game-Maker, I just wanted to see how close I could get. I knew it would have to involve a ball monster that animated bouncing up and down, and had a movement pattern relative to the player. Looking at the monster blocks, I made the ball with a red ring around it. I guess it blended in too much with the background and I wanted to make it more visible.

— Alan Caudel, email exchange, March 2012

In the one I sent you, the space bar starts the character animation of slam dunking, but I think that sequence might work better if it were done with a clear character block and a "character" monster block which did the slam-dunk movement, then returned to the character position. Again, not planning to actually do it, but it's fun to think about.

— Alan Caudel, email exchange, March 2012

I have been doing a little goofing around with this old game "BBall" a.k.a. "NBA Jams!".

What I've focused on here is the ball mechanism. I figured out a way for the player to have a ball which can be stolen by the opponent, and then you can steal the ball back again.

It's not perfect, but it works pretty well!

This could be used for other applications. Maybe like having a game of tag. The ball could be invisible, and you just have two people chasing each other. When you have the invisible "ball", the other character could be "it" and tries to chase you.

— Alan Caudel, email exchange, January 2015

Availability

This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.

Archive History

On March 2, 2012, Alan Caudel tracked down copies of Jet! and NBA Jams!, and sent them along for inclusion. On January 14, 2015, he sent along an updated version with some new mechanics that he had just put together.

Links

• Old version (YouTube)
• Play NBA Jams! online

Downloads

• NBA Jams! (new version) (77.5 kB)
• NBA Jams! (old version) (78.6 kB)