Difference between revisions of "Dead Awakening"
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Latest revision as of 18:34, 22 June 2021
Release type: Freeware
Release date: October 31st, 2002
Levels: 3
Author: Sean McNulty
Website: Untitled Studio (archive.org)
Related games: N/A
Melee and hand-to-hand combat are not a natural fit for RSD's engine. You can make them work, but "work" is the operative word. Most developers never try, or give up quickly, or not for lack of effort stick with a solution that doesn't quite work. Combine this with Game-Maker's often strange collision handling, the limitations on character states and monster behavior, and a bit of eccentric scrolling, and a good close-combat action game can be hard to find.
With Dead Awakening -- an Evil Dead tribute by way of Namco's Splatterhouse -- Sean McNulty took account of the engine's peculiarities, aimed low, and hit the target. Not dead center, but close enough to prove his point.
In this game the character always faces, and attacks, to the right. That's okay, because it's a walk-and-punch game. Pretty much all of the action moves in one direction, chopping through a march of horrors, while the character leaves carnage in his wake.
The knock-on effect is that you don't really see the seams in the way you would in a more ambitious project, one concerned more with getting in its ideas at any cost than in cooperating with the tools at hand. Your character always idles to the right, because he's always facing to the right, because why would he turn around? The game only needs one attack animation and one key binding, because it only needs to cover one eventuality.
Two-block-tall monsters continuously spawn from appropriate nooks, be they holes in a cabin wall or graves in the deep forest. Whack a monster, and unless there's a glitch the whole thing will melt down. Touch the spawn point, and shut it down. Again this works well, as the game never has to contend with unknown variables. There is no jumping; the character only walks on a fixed level, and so both blocks of his height will meet all monsters and spawn points evenly. The destruction of the spawn points adds to the sense of progress and forward momentum, which makes the simple walk-thwack design rather enjoyable.
Level three switches up the action by moving to a top-down drive-and-dodge game. This is maybe a little less successful, as mixed with some imprecise controls and deliberately bastardly obstacle placement, Game-Maker's collision issues come to the fore. It's a good try, though.
It's curious. With its flat colors and simple design, at a glance Dead Awakening hardly grabs the attention. It would be easy to skip, and dismiss. Yet it's actually one of the more viscerally entertaining Game-Maker games, and in dialing down its ambition to what actually works it's one of the more clever and successful uses of the engine.
Contents
Story[edit]
Justin and his friends went up to a cabin in the woods for Halloween. They heard of the cabin from a friend of a friends, one of those "some guy" tips. Either way, they went to the cabin.
Everything was going good, they were all a little scared, and it seemed like a good Halloween night. But at 3:00am, something happened.
Everyone was asleep, and in their sleep, a demonic presence crept over them. Luckily, Justin woke up in time to avoid being cursed. He went to the aid of his screaming friends only to find them as... zombies!
Now the whole underworld is broken loose, and Justin must make his way to safety!
Instructions[edit]
This is a one-way side-scroller. You can go left, but there is no turning back! The final stage is an exception.
Once you pass a zombie spawner, it is blocked off.
Spacebar = attack
Right arrow = go right
Use F2 to view Justin's stats and use F5 and F6 to save/load.
CAUTION: Sometimes, it takes more than one hit to kill a zombie...
BUG: Sometimes it gets a little crowded and when you kill one zombie, its falling corpse hits the legs of another zombie making the zombie a floating torso. This does not cause any real problems though.
Credits[edit]
Game made by: Sean McNulty
All music by: Matti Minkkinen
- main.cmf - Original Winter_of_Lapland.mid
- cabin.cmf- Original Untitled.mid
- woods.cmf - Original Crown_of_the_Ages.mid
- car.cmf - Original Dragon_inthe_Storm.mid
- end.cmf - Original Ruler_of_the_wind.mid
Dead Awakening was made with Microforum's Game-Maker
Background[edit]
Sean McNulty:
- This is a little Halloween gift from us here at ___. In the game you play Justin. He and his friends were visiting this abandoned cabin in the woods as a Halloween fun thing. Anyways, you can read the storyline further in the game itself. Armed with a bat, an axe, and a car you must kill zombies to escape from the cursed woods! Yes, inspired by Evil Dead.
- So download Dead Awakening and have a happy Halloween! (If it's still Halloween!)
Availability[edit]
This game was distributed on its author's Website. Other means of distribution are unknown.
Archive History[edit]
In late 2011, a Google search for "Micfoforum" and "Game-Maker" turned up a very old (and since dismantled) site for Sean McNulty's "Untitled Studio". That site contained screenshots of the Game-Maker games Dead Awakening and Chad's Crazy Adventure, and two possible Game-Maker games, Demonika and Monkey Mission: Project Replevin. All download links were broken. None of these games were available.
With some more detective work, on December 30, 2011 McNulty was tracked down to the (since dismantled) Driving Board forum, and an old thread where he posted and discussed the game Dead Awakening. The game was recovered there, and McNulty was then contacted on the 3D Move Maker forum.
Links[edit]
Sites[edit]
- Shroud of False (site of Matti Minkkinen)
Misc. Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Dead Awakening (195 kB)
- Level 1 (Cabin) map (10 kB)
- Level 2 (Forest) map (22 kB)
- Level 3 (Bridge) map (114 kB)
