Virtual Apartment

Virtual Apartment'

Release type: Freeware
Release date: February 14, 1997
Levels: 5
Author: Alan Caudel
Related games: N/A

Structurally, Game-Maker owes a debt to Mad Libs. The whole system is basically a set of blank containers that feed into a parsing engine. It's like you took The Legend of Zelda and edited out all of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives, then just agreeably parsed whatever someone tossed in their place. As a result of its technically exceptional engine and the often strange suppositions that went into its design, all Game-Maker games have a certain feel because the engine is always looking the same places, in the same way, to fill the same holes.

However, the engine covers enough ground that uniformity is not a given. Of particular note is the neglected suite of interstitial multimedia controls that comes with Game-Maker 3.0. At best, people might render a nice .FLI animation or two and toss them between levels; possibly pretty up the instruction or story menus. The fact is, though, in its final release Game-Maker allows for a whole multimedia presentation twice in association with every level node: one coming, and one going. Combine this with the slightly under-developed functionality of Graphics Image Reader, and you have the glimmer of a lateral application for the tools that would make Data East proud.

Recall what else was going on in 1994, game-wise. The big, broad movements, that is, that looked like potential futures in the making. Yes, you had Doom, and the nascent 3D of a few Sega arcade games. You had the ever-swinging pendulum of VR to contend with, which made breathless waves in mainstream news outlets but had yet to materialize as a practical idea. And then you had the bane of the hardcore gamer's identity, multimedia. If Doom and its kin seemed like the revolution Gamers needed to happen, the likes of Myst and The 7th Guest were the looming threat to propriety, much as with casual games in the mid-2000s.

Nevertheless, multimedia was big. It had the buzz, it had the showiest new technology in its corner, and it had a few really good arguments on the table. After a few years to allow CD-ROM to settle in as a format, 1994 was a breakout moment. Myst came late '93, but '94 was its first full year, and the year that it toppled every previous record for a PC game. The face of game design was changing so quickly, it was impossible to know where to look -- but it was hard to keep one's eye far from the storage capacity, the audiovisual allure, and the sheer glamour of CD-ROM games. This is why Game-Maker 3.0 has those multimedia containers, tacked on like a Nintendo hardware feature, seemingly with the idea that someone will figure out what to do with them later -- and it's why RSD put such emphasis in its debut on CD-ROM.

The ants are loose, in Virtual Apartment

Virtual Apartment (aka Q) is close to alone in its (experimental and abbreviated) ambition to make something of this set of circumstances. So Game-Maker has multimedia transitions, and space is getting to be a non-issue, and we have these graphical import functions that no one uses that much. Let's follow this to its logical end.

The game is a series of digitized still frames, with a cursor sprite (and the odd monster) laid over top. Touch the right link locations in the frame, and move to the next frame. It's almost a bare-bones sketch of Integrator's structure, absent of discrete game content. Rather, it's that lattice, provided by Integrator, that serves as the game logic. What is an adventure game but a web of branching paths, with progress measured in one's ability to uncover and follow the correct paths toward one's end goal. Console-style action adventures distract the player with arcade action and avatars to move around, but structurally they're not much different from a graphical or a text adventure; Zork or Myst. Integrator is probably the most important and powerful of RSD's tools precisely because a game's structure determines its identity, and Integrator is where that structure is defined.

What lends Virtual Apartment a sense of coherence and a conceptual link to the multimedia boom of the period is in those interstitial flourishes now provided within Integrator. To move from frame to frame isn't just to fade out, then in again; it's to kick in a .FLI animation digitized from a video camera feed as Alan Caudel, the game's designer, walked around his boring hotel room. If the structure is what defines a thing, context is what explains it. Here, the transitions from one frame to the next are what turn an otherwise empty set of links into an environment, pairing the rote act of navigation with a sense of a journey and providing the exercise a sense of meaning.

Well, such as it is. There is little here beyond a proof of concept; take a few steps forward, avoid the ants, and maybe explore a dead end along the way. Yet, Virtual Apartment does come close to proving it -- if one should care to put in the energy to get that concept working. With this sketch of a game, we now have one further design template. Here is yet another thing that RSD's strange little engine can do, and do just about as well as it does anything. There are perhaps more ideal tools, if this is the kind of design you need to pursue, but that's hardly the point, is it. The point is, yikes. What exactly are the limits of this platform, and the simple logic that drives it? Will we ever hear a certain answer?

Story

VIRTUAL APARTMENT!!

You are Me! You are in the Collegiate Village Inn! You are stuck in one room, and have no way out! You must make your way to the fountain of CVI and dunk your head in it until you drown! If you do, YOU WIN!!

This is by far the MOST POINTLESS game I have ever seen in my life! I'm sure you'll agree!

ENJOY!

Instructions

Controls:

Use joystick or keyboard!

• up=up
• down=down
• left=left
• right=right

Move the arrow around the screen. Try to find your way around!!!

Credits

BY: Alan Caudel!!!

Availability

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

Archive History

On March 14, 2018, Alan Caudel uncovered the long-lost Adam '96, alongside the highly unusual Virtual Apartment.

Downloads

• Virtual Apartment (2.9 MB)