Trees

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Trees
TreeslTitle.GIF

Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 1996
Levels: 1
Author: Alan Caudel
Website: DummyDuck.com
Related games: Twister, argh!

What we have here is an incomplete yet masterly experiment in full-screen in-game animation. As shown in games like Adventure, from quite early on Alan Caudel was interested in bending the tools provided to create some rather astounding visual and technical effects. With Trees -- a proposed setpiece for Yurik Nestoly's Twister, argh! -- we have experiments in parallax scrolling (moving background tile rows one or two pixels at a time) and creating a fake "hero" car using a monster rather a character sprite.

TreesSprite.gif

The centerpiece of the tornado funnel cements the effect by drawing in the eye and creating a point of reference both for scale and for motion. Presumably if this had become a real level the monster car would have been replaced with a real character sprite, in constant apparent motion yet at all times static (or even being "blown" slowly to the right) and various windswept objects would start to whip at the car from left to right.

There is no game here. All we have is a single-screen animation, with another test animation of a rotating tree trunk, jammed in for effect. Still, as a point of reference, Trees is pretty informative -- and complete or not, it's a damned good use of RSD's tools.

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Twister, argh! Trees (Overview)
Twister series

Story[edit]

Chasing that storm, in Trees.

N/A

Instructions[edit]

N/A

Credits[edit]

Designed by Alan Caudel.

Background[edit]

Alan Caudel:

Yurik was a big fan of the movie Twister, and he started work on the side-scrolling truck driving game. That gave me the idea to try out that cutscene thing. I guess, maybe I intended on letting him use it in his game if he wanted to, but the game never got finished. I was really interested in doing big full screen animations. I think the little tree trunk on the side was meant to be turned into a monster block later, and maybe have trees that quickly passed by in the foreground.

Availability[edit]

Prior to this archive's online presence, this game is not known to be publicly available.

Archive History[edit]

After an earlier wave of rediscoveries, on July 13 2011 Alan Caudel provided another archive of previously missing Game-Maker material, including the following:

Links[edit]

Downloads[edit]

[[Category: Games needing maps]