Invasion of the Blobs!

Mike Perrucci's Invasion of the Blobs

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.

Links

• Mazeguy's postmortem

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