Anime
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 2001
Levels: 1
Author: John Brandon, Robert Brandon
Related games: Zarlor Mercenaries 2
Not to be mistaken for Recreational Software Designs's Animation.
Anime is a promising sketch for what a top-down shooter might be, in the Game-Maker engine. The game is a tiny fragment from the production of Zarlor 2, basically consisting of a character sprite and a single map. The map is sort of interesting, in that it is super-pixelated, built entirely of 20x20 blocks of color. As a stylization, this has some novelty and appeal -- and for a genre where the background is of so little consequence, why not go abstract?
The character sprite is where the real promise lies. Our space ship can fly in the four cardinal directions, and has three functions: a twin laser, a wide beam, and a turbo booster. What is interesting here is the way that the three functions work with the engine's limitations to create some workable, if imperfect, effects.
One problem with RSD's engine is that you can't combine two actions at once -- so there's no running while shooting, for instance. You can get around this if you avoid using any animation frames in one of the actions, e.g. if the shoot function consists solely of monster birthing frames -- but if you want any kind of visual reference for your action you'll need to choose between moving and firing. Anime blurs over this problem by giving the player's ship momentum when firing and when idling or moving left or right. As a side effect, the ship's lengthy firing animation means the player loses control of the character for a second -- but at least the ship keeps moving.
The wide beam causes the ship to jerk to a halt, so that it can focus a constant stream of energy forward, toward an enemy. The turbo booster causes the ship to lurch forward at a rapid clip, while leaving a neato trail of decaying fire in its wake -- essentially the opposite animation to the wide beam. Both are rather neat effects.
There are no enemy bodies, no goals. The world of Anime is just a test ground for an unused game system. It's not a perfect system, but it has more potential than most Game-Maker shooters, and its stylization is very distinctive. With a few tweaks and some objectives, this could be a real winner.
Contents
Story[edit]
N/A
Instructions[edit]
Arrow keys: Move your ship
Z: Twin lasers
X: Wide beam
C: Turbo booster
Credits[edit]
Designed by
- John Brandon
Engine and Tools by
- Recreational Software Designs
Edited by
Background[edit]
John Brandon:
- Barely developed top down shmup, spinoff from the Zarlor Mercenaries 2 project, not seriously worked on for any length of time.
- Since I rediscovered Anime, I've been scratching my head on what Rob and I had in mind with the graphical style of the maps - flat colored blocks in a motif that is somewhat akin to ultra magnification on some low resolution pixel art (although looking at the map zoomed out just shows some abstract "root-like" designs). I think it may have been an experiment to see if we felt that this new minimal art style would be sufficient, to see if the game "worked" and the background felt complete. Rob mentioned a few months ago that he really liked that we tried this style, even if we never developed it further. I think I'll choose to read into it and declare it to be our version of Rez, a minimalistic digital suggestiveness.
Availability[edit]
Prior to this archive's online presence, this game is not known to be publicly available.
Archive history[edit]
On January 21st 2010, Rob Brandon pseudonymously responded to a Reddit thread with a passing comment about Game-Maker. When pressed about his history with the software, he replied that all of his games were stored on a couple of defunct computers, either inaccessible or destroyed.
Over 31 months later on August 23th 2012, John Brandon commented on a YouTube clip that he had found an archive of his and his brother's old games. The next day he composed a long e-mail describing the contents of a jumbled collection of gameware files, adding up to an ostensible sixteen games. All of the games were in pieces, many of them incomplete.
Over the next five months, through regular consultation, the games were all reassembled as well as the materials would permit. The games were reconstructed or otherwise recovered on the following dates:
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Links[edit]
