The Game-Maker Archive: The Brussels Spout (Book 1)

October 6, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

I had known for a while of Sylvain “Pypein” Martin’s blog. It muses in depth on Game-Maker’s file formats, and tracks a project to port one or more Game-Maker games to the Nintendo DS. My problem was that the site is mostly in French, and seems to presuppose some understanding of its topics. I bookmarked the site and filed it away, and turned to more immediate problems. It turns out that all this time I had been overlooking a cornucopia of Game-Maker games and utilities.

Martin, his brother Pierre, and associate Pierrick Hansen form the core of a mid-’90s Belgian demogroup called PPP Team. Later on they would release some tracker music and projects coded in assembler. It seems, though, that they got their start with RSD’s Game-Maker.

I’m not sure how many games they worked on; many are unfinished, and some appear lost to time and computer failure. Depending on how you count, maybe 17 or 18 games still survive in some form. The games touch several genres, but mostly focus on and toy with the side-scrolling platformer mold. They include a few long-running or frequently referenced series, several one-off games, and a fair number of tributes or pastiches.

Though the earliest games freely borrow sprites and backgrounds from existing sources, the group soon graduates to completely original elements. Even within a series the sprites are rarely duplicated from one game to the next. By the time they start to import graphics from Deluxe Paint, PPP Team seems to have total control over its resource pipeline.

At this point it’s the areas without that control — for instance the music — which glare the most. RSD’s chosen music format is famously lacking in available tools, and their software is famously lacking in support for more sensible formats. More than other authors, PPP Team’s choice of temp tracks always feels temporary; you can sense the eagerness to replace the music with original pieces that never materialized. It’s frustrations like these that seem to have been the last straw, eventually leading the team to move on from Game-Maker.

Even as the team outgrew Game-Maker, “Pypein” turned his growing skills back to RSD’s file formats, to dissect and study them in hopes of salvaging some material for future projects. Although those projects never quite materialized, the research continued sporadically. Recently Martin’s attention has turned to porting some of his Game-Maker material to the Nintendo DS, so since mid-2009 he has posted a handful of Perl scripts used to manipulate Game-Maker’s tile, map, sprite, and organizational files. At the moment the tools are more or less a curiosity, most useful for rendering precise diagrams of game levels, but they lay an intriguing groundwork.

Overall PPP Team is both one of the more productive and focused Game-Maker designers. With such a large catalog to draw from, for now we’ll focus on the highlights.

Biokid

Biokid is maybe the most representative PPP game. It’s an action platformer inspired by Mega Man, sporting an understated yet typical example of PPP’s shareware/Commodore-influenced level design. Since most of the levels use the same fairly monochrome tile set and small collection of enemies (each with its own carefully mapped behaviors), it may be easier to abstract and predict the thought processes behind the design — where corridors lead, and why; where to find false walls and booby traps.

The controls are also representative. Most of PPP’s games are designed to be played more or less one-handed; the action keys are all oriented around the directionals in the numerical keypad. Slash shoots left; minus shoots right; asterisk shoots up. It takes a while to adjust to, especially the moving and shooting at once, but Biokid is probably the best game to train on before moving on to more complicated projects.

The Mega Man influence extends only to some vague elements of the character and enemy design — nothing that screams out. Well, that and the title. Generally Biokid stands on its own as a well-animated, well-designed, if rather short, action game.

Blork Carnage: The Adventure of Jack Booster

Another PPP action platformer, this one inspired by Apogee games such as Duke Nukem. Indeed, here more than in any of PPP’s other games, the shareware flavor shines through. The way the character moves and animates; the style of level design; the tone to the background graphics and overall presentation — it feels like something you might have downloaded from your local BBS in mid-1993.

Blork Carnage is a fairly tough game, with one-hit kills and a few nigh-impossible jumps (jumping being an occasional sticking point in PPP’s games). This is one of PPP’s earliest games, and as such it’s fairly simple and straightforward, rather like Biokid. It also is the origin of several background elements and a sort of mascot character that will pop up again and again.

4 to Save Toon Land

One of PPP’s half-completed experiments, 4 to Save Toon Land is one of the more ambitious Game-Maker games I’ve seen. There are at least two elements that strike me: its approach to storytelling, and its multifaceted approach to level design.

On the former count, the game starts off with a cursor that the player can scroll across a lushly illustrated backdrop. As the player scrolls, the images and some accompanying captions gradually paint the scenario. Houses begin to burn, malevolent figures loom, and plight is established.

Eventually the player is supplied a choice of four characters, each with unique abilities and dimensions. From what I gather, the main reason they abandoned the game was the headache of accounting for four separate perspectives when designing the levels. What they did finish, however, they composed very well. You find passages that tall characters simply can’t fit through, blocks that only some characters can break, and various other tricks to ensure that each character can wind its own path and find its own secrets.

If you can imagine a sequel to Clash at Demonhead produced for the Sega Genesis, maybe around the same time as Kid Chameleon and Alisia Dragoon, that’s sort of the game’s tone. If it were finished, 4 to Save Toon Land might have been the best thing ever done with Game-Maker. As it stands, it’s a neat demonstration of how much potential still lays untapped even in such a limited framework.

Cosmo War

I’ve mentioned the many and tortured attempts at a scrolling shooter within Game-Maker’s engine. No one ever really succeeded; the closest anyone got was by taking out the shooting and focusing on fast-paced dodging.

Although Cosmo War is no exception, it is notable for its particular techniques. Namely, large enemy ships are designed as background elements. As background elements, they can fire projectiles at the player’s ship. Of course, as background elements they are immune to the player’s atacks. Oh well. Might as well try everything.

Apparently the game is inspired by Epic Megagames’ Zone 66, and it has some connection to Blork Carnage. It’s worth a look, certainly. Compared to other GM space shooters, which try to ape Japanese designs, Cosmo War feels more like an homage to the Bitmap Brothers. As with most of PPP’s work, its tone is distinctly, if ineffably, European.

In the second half of this article we’ll look at PPP’s two big franchises (as it were), and how all of this stuff ties together.