Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: March 8, 1996
Levels: 2
Author: Alan Caudel
Website: DummyDuck.com
Related games: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars
Not to be mistaken for Ian S. Frazier's Star Wars (Frazier), Yurik Nestoly's Star Wars (Nestoly), or Alan Caudel's Return of the Jedi.
So here's the strange thing. With Game-Maker, nobody gets scrolling shooters right. It's not for a want of effort or ingenuity; people try everything: horizontal, vertical, even some clever forced perspective tricks. However clever you may be, if you approach Game-Maker with a preformed idea about what you want, it's not going to work exactly the way you picture. Game-Maker is its own environment, with its own systems and quirks, and there's no forcing the issue. With that in mind, I suppose if you're going to experiment you might as well go nuts with it -- as you're just as likely to find joy as with a modest proposal.
So. Nuts, huh? Well. If neither a horizontal nor a vertical shooter works... how about an isometric one? Throw caution to the wind; let's go diagonally!
Mad as it sounds, it works. As often he does, here Caudel abandoned the project after just two levels -- one diagonal and one horizontal -- but what an experiment. And what an improvement over his earlier Return of the Jedi.
Granted, Caudel isn't working from a blank page. The first level of his game is closely modeled on Atari's 1984 Return of the Jedi arcade cabinet. And likewise Caudel and Tyner modeled an earlier version of the idea in the more Zaxxon-styled Star Avenger III. In its way, this second Return of the Jedi is a revision along the same lines as Godzilla or Adventure -- but there's nothing wrong with improving a concept.
There are so many things to discuss here. There's the novel use of the character sprite, with the upper block the main body of the speeder bike and the lower block its shadow. Since you'll only ever run into things head-on, why not add a bit of style? There's the decision to work with a diagonal track, which immediately sidesteps the problem of map size. Whereas without some weird branching paths a vertical shooter will loop after 10 screens and a horizontal after 6-1/4, a diagonal track... well, it's hard to be mathematical but let's say you get your worth out of a map file. It's like endlessly wrapping a ribbon slantways around a present. Eventually you'll just have ribbon.
So, magically, we have space to build a track. And there's no reason why we can't set our ship on a diagonal course, or to have it shoot diagonally. By establishing enemy bikes as fellow racers, we get around some issues with monster intelligence and allow them to just travel on the same vector as the character, as moving obstacles. It all slots together rather brilliantly, and Caudel could well have introduced a dozen variations and built a whole substantive game out of this isometric racing framework.
If there is a problem, and at times it threatens to become one, it lies in Game-Maker's lack of a way to set multiple planes -- so that, from the player's perspective, sprites can go behind and be partially obscured by objects. For any game working with a skewed perspective, this is a tricky limitation. After a point it's hard to justify why a character is unable to walk behind a tree or a house, and in the fast-paced context of a racer/shooter, a fault of perspective can be fatal. Unfairly so.
In the case of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Caudel hacked together enough workarounds to paper over the problem. For this one course it's not hugely distracting -- but any further development of the idea might quickly lead to trouble.
The second level is more standard, but still interesting. Here we've a space ship that rushes the Death Star. It all looks a bit Gaiares. What kind of works in a way you don't often see is that Caudel gave the ship three different lasers: one to shoot forward, one diagonally upward, and one diagonally down. This agency over the direction of fire more than makes up for the slight clunkiness in tactile control and level interaction, giving the player more than the usual sense of control over what's going on from moment to moment. It's a good design choice, that could be well employed in a full game of the sort. I'm not sure that we need both styles of shooter in a single game, but hey. He's trying stuff. There's no reason to fault that.
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi is incomplete, but like all the best Game-Maker games it shows a new way to do things, freeing the shackles of future development. If you want to do a shooter, maybe here's a way to do one! Maybe you can complete what Alan started here.
It's also just neat to see.
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Story[edit]
N/A
Instructions[edit]
Level one:
- Press left and right to dodge obstacles.
- Press up to speed up.
- Press down to slow down.
- Press the space bar to shoot.
Level two:
- Press up and down to dodge obstacles.
- Press left to slow down.
- Press right, PgUp, or PgDn to shoot.
Credits[edit]
Game designed by Alan Caudel.
Availability[edit]
This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.
Archive History[edit]
On October 20, 2010, Caudel posted a comment to a YouTube video of Peach the Lobster, under the name dummyduckrulz; following up the conversation, on June 29, 2011 he provided a link to a collection of games recently uncovered by Adam Tyner. This initial archive included:
Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (149 kB)
- 2Bike (older version) (79 kB)
- Level 1 map (old version) (125 kB)
