Droid
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 1999
Levels: 3
Author: Robert Brandon
Related games: Void Raiders
Droid is a top-down marble maze that seems to exist largely to explore the behavior and potential of Game-Maker's background blocks.
The play tries to navigate a ball from the start point to the end point; along the way, the level tries to engage the player with basic logic: solid and semi-solid walls, gravity, momentum, animation, monster birthing, lock-and-key sections. The ship from Robert's future game Void Raiders (and Joshua Turcotte's Orb before it) is there to menace the player. In principle it's all very straightforward.
There are concerns, however; the game is glitchier than it seems like it should be. Somewhere amongst the character motion, the precise organization of blocks and block properties, and broader decisions in level design, the player will often find the ball somewhere it seems like it shouldn't be -- inside a wall, or outside the apparent play field.
Some of these moments may be deliberate, as when the level opens up to give the player full liberty of movement around the surrounding map. Other times may be not-bug-but-feature moments where Robert saw how the game was working despite his best efforts, and chose to just go with it. Combine those, however, with the obvious clipping errors, and the overall experience can feel pretty disorganized.
Consider also the player's laser projectile and the chromatic chaos of all of the clashing background gradients, and Droid gives off the sense of an uncooked stew. There's a ton of stuff in here, little of which seems to acknowledge its surrounding elements. If the game feels chaotic, it's because each part is moving on its own, for its own value -- and what happens as a result is up to the engine and whatever happens to have been placed next door.
For a first-draft experiment, this is not necessarily an unwise approach. Were Game-Maker's physics more reliable, tossing a bunch of noise at the engine might even be an ideal starting place. You could see what worked, what didn't, and what unexpectedly led to what else, and then step in to refine the experience. With the engine we've got, the editing phase will be more involved -- and given its abundance of errors, not necessarily intuitive.
Droid is a worthwhile try, and in its ambition fairly similiar to other test-the-waters games like Blipp in: Power Panic!. It gives a basic sense of what works and what doesn't in RSD's engine, though due to its signal noise it doesn't always illustrate why. It must have been a learning experience, and for future designers it may be worthy of study for all the reasons described.
In the case of Robert, that experience seems to lead to the similar yet more considered experience of Void Raiders...
Contents
Story[edit]
N/A
Instructions[edit]
Arrow keys:
- Roll your orb
T/F/G/H:
- Fire directional energy beam Up/Left/Down/Right
Enter:
- Release orbital spheres
1/2/3/4 (plus special items):
- Secret moves
Credits[edit]
Designed by
- Robert Brandon
Engine and Tools by
- Recreational Software Designs
Edited by
Background[edit]
John Brandon:
- Made by my brother. A decent and challenging top down maze game where you play as a black ball/orb. (Maybe a palette swap from Bounerim?)
- I see space ship graphics copied from Orb, but I also see a good amount of self created artwork. Looks like there are several levels and it is actually possible to get through them and "complete" the game, my brother was always more complete with his projects and had more patience to do less enjoyable tedious things like using the integrator.
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]
Downloads[edit]
- Droid (171.3 kB)
