Zarlor 2
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 2001
Levels: 28
Author: John Brandon
Related games: Anime
Zarlor 2 is, if you will, the Foxy Dimensions of scrolling shooters.
The shooter is of course one of the key genres to which Game-Maker would seem to lend itself yet, due to a conspiracy of minor issues, never quite works as one would hope. Any designer will have to deal with Xferplay's wonky and inflexible scrolling, control limits that prevent the player from both moving and shooting at once, difficulty in getting monsters to behave in responsive and consistent patterns, the limits of square 100x100 tile maps, limitations on how one might design a weapon upgrade path, and probably many other lesser issues.
As with John and Robert Brandon's other games, Zarlor 2 approaches these hurdles with a shrug. There's an idea that John wanted to capture here; never mind the logistics. So as with the Foxy series, he set about designing a flood of resources -- mostly ships. There are more ships here than in Star Control, all with different primary and secondary weapons, all of which steer a little differently. (There is even a ship made for two people to control, yet another effort toward multiplayer design.) The intent was to balance the ships so that each exhibited certain strengths and weakness compared to the others, but the project never went as far as that.
What we have, then, is a selection screen and the opportunity to take one of twenty-some ships on a test flight over one of a few backdrops. As with other Brandon Enterprises productions, the material that we have shows good promise. The ships are distinctive and interesting, and most are fun to control. As John never got much further than the characters, however, there is not much of an object to play.
Add in some memorable levels and tasks, and Zarlor 2 could be one of the more entertaining shooters on RSD's engine. The spin-off experiment Anime shows just how neat Zarlor could be, with a bit of attention. For those looking to beat the odds and craft a functional shooter with these tools, Zarlor 2 is worth a wander and a fiddle and a thought or two.
Contents
Story[edit]
N/A
Instructions[edit]
On numerical keypad:
- 4, 6: Fly left, right
- 8: Speed up
- 2: Slow down
Z,X,C: Shoot or trigger your ship's special powers.
Each ship has its own properties and unique powers; some even use unlisted keys for their weapons and features.
Credits[edit]
Designed by
Engine and Tools by
Compiled by
Background[edit]
John Brandon:
- Zarlor Mercenary was an excellent and impressive top down shooter for the Atari Lynx.
- For some reason, I was still playing it in the mid-late 1990s and wanted to make a sequel to it.
- A cool thing about Zarlor is that it had a choose character screen. Since I loved making graphics, I went hard at work at making a TON of characters for this game, even creating a fairly graphically impressive choose character screen.
- I tried to give each character a distinct look and personality, and of course they would all have different ships too! And as a bonus, I even started working on a 2 block tall "4 player" ship - which was going to have so many controls scattered haphazardly throughout the keyboard, that 4 players would be necessary to be a crew to control the ship.
- I guess I had some loose idea that the characters were on different sides in a war as the choose character screen seems to be divided in half with 2 logos (evil guys on the right, good guys on the left btw). This was always a loose idea that I hadn't reached a strong conclusion or plan for since I never developed a detailed story, and was definitely one of these ideas I just came up with and acted on in the middle of development. It would have been cool to maybe have different levels or level-order and game enemies per whichever side of the conflict you were on, but this was never an idea of mine at the time as the game never got far enough along in development for me to ever have a concrete idea about that kind of thing.
- As for the ninjas at the way bottom of the character select, I threw those in because I liked the idea of hidden characters. They also represent the good on the left, evil on the right, balance of the choose character screen as well. The bars of varying heights below the character avatars are just for show - they were to imply different strengths or weaknesses of the ships which I did give some thought to, but the game was never developed enough for me to try and balance the characters or make them reflect any strengths or weaknesses. I don't remember which was which, but the three colors were going to correspond to hit points, weapon strength, and speed. Man, this game was going to be ambitious and complex!
- Zarlor Mercenary had a shop where you could buy weapons between levels, and I thought that was the coolest thing. Even though I had no idea how I would implement that into a GM game, I remember making blocks for the shop and the shopkeeper, so via cargo cult methodology, I had an idea to put in shop "levels" between the gameplay levels, but never implemented this short of making graphics.
- This was such a cargo cult shmup. I knew I had to have the trappings of a shmup; top down view backgrounds, enemy ships that flew in formations towards you, and my ship had to fire bullets or lasers and look cool, but I threw all that stuff in and figured that shmup style playability would magically morph out of those elements and make the game fun to play. I still like some of these character designs and ships, but I would say that my imagination probably played a big role in regarding this as a playable game back in the day.
- At any rate, the game was never fully integrated with all the graphics and levels and choose character screen I worked on.
- Unlike most shmups, it was difficult to find a way to end the level. Most shmups end based on a timed event like a boss fight, but I didn't know how to do anything like that in GM, so you just fly around a repeating level, dodging and shooting at enemies which mostly have an AI which tells them to go forward. I have no idea where the exits in the levels are.
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]
- Zarlor 2 (226.4 kB)
