Pipes (cly5m)
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: N/A (begun August 1993)
Levels: 2
Author: cly5m
Website: Autofish.net
Related games: N/A
Not to be mistaken for Roy Person Sr.'s Pipes or RSD's Pipemare.
cly5m's Pipes is a noble, if abandoned, attempt at a scrolling shooter within the Game-Maker engine. Pipes gets more right than most such endeavors, including well-organized enemies with changing attack patterns, item drops, and a variable perspective.
The first of cly5m’s designs is not a platformer or an adventure. There is little to explore. It’s not a whimsical fantasy. It doesn’t take pains to express a particular perspective or theme, or set an emotional tone. It’s just a space shooter.
As discordant as that seems from cly5m’s later designs, it makes some sense. Pipes is an experiment. Not an expressive experiment, but an experiment with the tools at hand. And if you’re going to experiment, you might as well simplify your canvas. So, okay. Let’s do a shooter.
For cly5m’s first game, Pipes demonstrates an advanced understanding of RSD’s tools, including multi-stage monster animations, item pickups, fixed scrolling, and directional gravity. The game design also shows some effort; monsters attack in formations, levels are broken into setpieces, and the perspective varies from level to level -- as with James Faux's similarly incomplete Ego Force.
The visuals are simple but clear and appealing, with the occasional touch of whimsy (in particular the helicopter-headed monsters). The controls are responsive enough. Curously, Pipes is cly5m’s only Game-Maker game to include sound effects. Again those are simple yet effective.
Right off, cly5m shows a mastery of the tools that other users took years to achieve, if they ever did so. Had he finished his work on Pipes, it would be one of the more sophisticated games designed with RSD’s tools – yet due to the choice of genre, it would always be rather stilted.
Contents
Instructions[edit]
- Arrow keys: Move the ship
- Spacebar: Shoot
Credits[edit]
Availability[edit]
Prior to this archive's online presence, this game is not known to be publicly available.
Archive History[edit]
For years, cly5m had maintained a page on his website with screenshots of unfinished and unreleased Game-Maker games. For a time, the occasional inquiry went unanswered. On May 20, 2011, cly5m responded positively to a new request, framed in the context of the pending revival of seminal independent game site Insert Credit. All four games were made available at that time, along with the entire directory structure of cly5m's Game-Maker installation.
Links[edit]
Sites[edit]
Interviews / Articles[edit]
Misc. Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Pipes (14 kB)
- Level 1 map (12.4 kB)
- Level 2 map (19.8 kB)
- Level 3 map (unused) (32.5 kB)
