Category:Roger Levy

A somewhat frustrated former user, who struggled both with Game-Maker's boundaries and with regular catastrophic data loss. Regardless, some material still survives.

Background

Roger Levy:

I've got a couple playable demos, [but] they are so rough - sadly a large amount of more impressive stuff was lost in multiple hard drive crashes and ruined floppy disks due to living near a radio tower when I was a kid.

A rough sprite

The first original character I made when I was learning GM was a little boy named Kevin, who wore teal PJ's. The game I was trying to make for him was an obstacle course of extreme obstacles like guillotines, giant mechanical hammers with spikes on them, acid waterfalls etc, inspired by Lemmings, which I also tried to emulate graphics from such as meticulously animated water, lava, fire, and a lemming character before Kevin.

I wanted a custom animation for each deadly obstacle, but didn't realize while doing it that I could only have one death animation, so I gave up, but now I know that I could have probably made the animations part of the background somehow.

Moopie

Some point later I tried to make a vertical shootemup, got bored and then started a Metroid clone with elements of "organic world" games like Contra and Abadox. I had painstakingly made some pretty badass tiles and the start of the character. Instead of bubble doors I had interlocked tusks sticking out of the walls that would open when you touched them. Then I think there was a hard drive crash.

Then I made a complete short game with a friend about a red balloon that floating upwards always and you dodged and killed things. Together we also came up with Fluffy the Squirrel, a squirrel in a hazmat suit (I didn't know how to draw a hazmat suiit when designing him sooo haha that's why it doesn't look like one.)

Fluffy the Squirrel

Then I played Yoshi's Island and was inspired to make an action adventure game, and came up with Andy in Asunderland about a blonde boy in jeans and a T-shirt that gets sucked into a wormhole that appears in his back yard randomly, and everything in the dimension on the other side is pretty trippy.

The version [that survives] was way before another crash. I had made a world map for the first world, hacked intro screens for each level (LEVEL 1-1, LEVEL 1-2, etc - it was drawn like chalk on a chalkboard and looked very nice), and a plan for what each world was going to be and kind of a story involving these "coin-head" characters with X's for eyes.

Links

Sites

• Purple Ghost Cat
• rogerlevy.net

Social Media

• Re: How did you get to where you are today? (TIGSource forums)
• Twitter feed