Zark
Release type: Demo game
Release date: 1995
Levels: 4
Author: A-J Games
Related games: The Patchwork Heart
Whereas Glubada Pond gets caught up in mechanics, and Crullo gets caught up in the design tools, Zark gets caught up in genre. After Crullo, A-J Games chose to stretch Game-Maker's boundaries again. Game-Maker really wasn’t made for shooters, especially scrolling space shooters, but that never stopped anyone.
Based on some earlier experience, the developer knew what really didn’t work; it just wasn’t sure what did. One way to create a constant scroll was to ensure that the player’s ship always moved right. Even when backing up, it would move at a lower speed than when moving forward. Since under this scheme it does little good to prevent scrolling back to the left, so the developer lets the player flit around and explore at will.
Weapon pick-ups are another problem. With Game-Maker you can’t just exchange one weapon type for another on the fly; you can only upgrade from one to the next. That is, if you load all the weapons onto the same key — which is the standard. So instead, Zark uses a numbered system. Each number represents the number of shots the ship will emit at a time. They spread in various directions and patterns, depending on the number. This works out well, except in that fast-moving monsters tend to skip across the screen rather than moving smoothly. Any shots are classified as monsters. Thus, any fast-moving shots have a good chance of skipping past a target even if you shoot it head-on.
This may be the first time that A-J Games experimented with large, multi-block monsters. When the player destroyed a weak point, it would unleash a high-power “explosion” monster that would swirl around and destroy all the other boss parts, which would themselves unleash swirling explosion monsters. It worked pretty well, if you could ignore the occasional engine bug that would cause an explosion to randomly spawn a boss segment. Not sure why that happened.
Some of the menus were created or altered by RSD's Gregory Stone.
Contents
Story
An evil race from Alpha Centurai is approaching your base on Venus. The stupid planet just got terraformed, and now an alien race is coming to demolish it. Great, just great.
Wanna' hear more? You've been chosen as an ambassador. Ambassador? What the heck do they think they're doing? These alien things are coming with guns and who knows what else to destroy the place. Ambassador? More like a blimmin' leader of a suicide trek into the enemy filled void. Space is dangerous 'nough without any aliens!
Well, you take the most powerful ship on Venus and prepare for trouble.....
Instructions
NUMERICAL KEYPAD
Up
|
|---|---|---|
Up-left-| 7 | 8 | 9 |-Up-right
|___|___|___|
|---| |---|
Left-| 4 | | 6 |-Right
|___| |___|
|---|---|---|
Dwn-lft-| 1 | 2 | 3 |-Dwn-rght
|___|___|___|
|
Down
The space bar shoots.
Credits
Graphics, Game animation, blah, blah, etc., were done by Eric-Jon Waugh.
Menu animations were done by Gregory Stone.
Edit the game freely.
Maybe an ice round or an asteroid belt would be nifty. Or a swoop over Mercury.
Links
