Flying Guts
You have to remember when Game-Maker was popular. This was the period of Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong Country, and CD-ROM multimedia games like Night Trap and The 7th Guest. In that brief period before everyone fell in love with the polygon, the mass media and industry consensus was that schlocky digitization and sex and gore were the future of the medium. Thus we have the ESRB that we know and ignore today.
This was also the era of Doom, though whereas today we mostly remember it for its meticulous design and providing a template for the whole FPS genre to come, its original touchstones were its ultraviolence and its contribution to “virtual reality” — which somehow the media stirred in with the digitization and multimedia nonsense.
So impressionable youth as we all were, Marty Valenti decided to digitize himself and throw himself into a world comprised of Doom samples and textures. He really put a lot of work into his theft; he unwound the Doom .WAD file, found all the best imagery and sound effect, then meticulously converted it all to a format and resolution comprehensible to Game-Maker. And then he got someone to take dozens of photographs of him in various stages of walking, running, and dying, cleaned up all the photos, downsampled and adjusted them again, and animated a character sprite out of them.
And it does animate pretty well. It also moves about as well as any platformer character in a Game-Maker game. Jumping mechanics aren’t the easiest thing to get right, and Valenti gets them spot-on. Even the control scheme is sensible, spreading the game’s five weapons across a series of two-key bindings: Z and X, A and S, Q and W, and so on.
For all Valenti’s effort, I’m not sure how much art there is to Flying Guts. He did a great job with the item sprites, but when you pick them up you get digitized quotes from Bill & Ted. The levels are designed pretty well, but thanks to his effort in stealing and showcasing id’s textures there’s almost no variety from level to level. And frankly the game’s gore component gets old within about ten seconds. Still, wow. Think of how this game would be at least as good (and probably better) with wholly original sounds and visuals, and marvel at the determination involved.
Most interesting, I think, is the protagonist. As far as Game-Maker goes, I think I’ve only seen three instances of a fully digitized player character: the Muybridge lady of Sheldon Chase’s games, the rather disturbing Time After Time and Reptalia, and Marty Valenti’s efforts. Of the three, Valenti’s are the best-executed (so to speak), and probably the most inspirational. Based on his efforts here, it would probably be feasible to design a whole Game-Maker game out of original photographed material. I don’t know why one would bother, but it could turn out pretty well.
