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The Game-Maker Archive—Part 11: Mark A. Janelle

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Although he only produced one game of which I have empirical evidence, Mark A. Janelle is one of the more significant figures in the Game-Maker story. A very serious fellow, Janelle was one of RSD’s first customers to make a shot at a professional exploitation of the Game-Maker software. He also managed the dial-up Night Owl BBS, which served as the semi-official Game-Maker community hub. Every copy of Game-Maker included a leaflet for the BBS.

After some recent discussions, I seem to recall some widespread connection issues. Either the BBS was only up during evening hours (as the name would suggest) or the number on the leaflet was incorrect. Either way, many people had trouble logging in. When one did log in, the place was a bit stiff and, again, serious. And being hosted in Kennebunkport, Maine, it was a hefty long-distance charge for almost anyone — even those who lived in-state, as I did. Still, it was a good place to make connections and branch off to other sub-communities and smaller BBSes.

My memory is a bit hazy; I think the Night Owl BBS may have changed names, or the Game-Maker section may have moved over to other boards. On that list of 1990s Maine BBSes, I recognize a couple of other boards associated with Janelle’s name.
As important as his BBS was to the Game-Maker culture, what even more people probably recognize is his game.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Good Games, Bad Design – Episode 1: What’s at Stake

  • Reading time:4 mins read

by [name redacted]

There are two basic ways that video games communicate ideas — through the actions allowed the player, and through the environment on which the player may act. The player’s every action changes the player’s immediate relationship with the environment, which in turn shapes the player’s potential for action. Let’s say you shoot an asteroid. Although the immediate obstacle is gone, now you’ve several smaller rocks to deal with, moving faster, in different trajectories.

The more you do, and the more feedback the game gives you, the more you adapt your behavior. When an action results in success or a reward, you tend to repeat it. When you get an unpleasant result, you tend to avoid repeating yourself.

A successful game environment does four things:

  1. it teaches about the player’s relationship with the environment;
  2. in doing so, it directs and focuses the player’s behavior;
  3. generally it obscures this manipulation from the player; and so
  4. through the invoked behavior it evokes in the player a certain mood or mindset.

If the player doesn’t know why he picks the routes and actions he does, yet in picking those routes and actions he comes to adopt the intended perspective, you have successfully communicated. Think of all the moments in Half-Life 2 where you think you’re being clever under pressure, and you’re actually choosing the only possible path — or how The Legend of Zelda keeps you on-track by making the woods scary and dangerous, so that you will tend to leave them until you’re stronger and more experienced.

Is level design everything? Only if your game has something to say. If you’re retreading old ground, and you expect the audience knows the routine, then you can toss them any old nonsense. Of course then few of the player’s actions will have real consequence, so the game will feel unresponsive and dull. Still, maybe if you add some flashy features or cutscenes you can distract the player for a while. If you’re afraid of putting people off, you can patronize them with elaborate tutorials.

There’s no fooling the outsiders, though. If your game fails to communicate on its own merits, then no one besides the fans will bother with it. And even within that audience the conversation will narrow and turn from big, nourishing ideas to minutiae — as if the differences between one leveling system and the next really matter in themselves. This heads-down view leads us away from meaningful representation, and toward thoughtless copying and repetition, abstracted and regimented genres, fractured markets, and eventually a whole medium that is impenetrable to outside eyes.

As in any human endeavor, sloppy or thoughtless design is perhaps more the rule than the exception. And that’s fair enough, when that design is a part of a lousy game that no one is likely to take seriously. More worrisome are the otherwise good, solid games that a student of design may well look to for inspiration. Games don’t have much of a critical history; their culture treats anything “good” as model of perfection that everything new should strive to imitate down to the pixel. It’s hard to break out of that mindset, and to look at design in terms of problems and solutions.

A solution, of course, only makes sense in context. In a game, each mechanism serves to illustrate to the player some concept, or to solve a logistical problem in the game’s premise. Anything that serves neither of these purposes is extraneous — and the key to communication is if you don’t need it, cut it out. It is in this spirit that some case models may be illustrative.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

The Game-Maker Archive – Part 10: The Integrator

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

One thing that Game-Maker serves to underline is the sheer talent that goes into game design. Especially by 1995 standards, Game-Maker makes it simple to whip up some graphics and sound resources, click a few flags, slap them together, and call it a game. Depending on your tools and the time you invest, you can get your game looking rather snazzy. Depending on the thoroughness with which you read the manual and study the program’s quirks, you can pull some clever tricks with Game-Maker’s engine. Yet a videogame is more than a bunch of sprites and levels and samples.

As Game-Maker’s own structure suggests, to a large extent a game’s content is just window dressing for the main executable to call up and sell itself to its audience. Unless there’s something more fundamental to justify and connect that information, it’s all just data. Facts. It doesn’t have a perspective; it make an argument. It doesn’t communicate a coherent idea.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Easy Lifting

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Indie game design being what it is, especially for younger developers the impulse to kife elements from your favorite games is almost irresistible. Witness Duke Nukem (icon of the shareware movement), which not only copied its catch phrases from Bruce Campbell movies; the 2D entries blatantly ripped art resources from Turrican and other Amiga games. Depending on your philosophy, you might call this reappropriation lazy, criminal, postmodern, or pragmatic. Frankly, theft is a fact of the creative process. The creative aspect depends on how far you take the theft, how well you reinterpret the material you’ve stolen, and how well you cover your tracks.

Game-Maker being set up the way it was, a certain amount of reappropriation was almost encouraged — particularly of RSD’s own sample games. Some of the results were more blatant than others. The male and female characters or the background tiles found their way into practically everyone’s games at some point or another. I had a few original sprites and tiles lifted, myself. Generally all it took was an e-mail to the derivative author, and I would get a credit and a virtual handshake. It was a pretty loose culture.

And of course that loose-fingered approach had little real effect on the quality of a game. Granted, the more borrowed elements generally the lower the bar. Still, it’s interesting to see what can grow from someone else’s seeds.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Sheldon Chase and the Woman Warrior

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Toward the end of Recreational Software Designs’ support of its Game-Maker development suite, Sheldon Chase became a kind of pervasive presence. Somewhere around 1995 or early ‘96, he hit on the notion of digitizing Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion photography for use as character sprites — sort of a retro Mortal Kombat effect, if you will. The result was a few drafts of a silvery, jittery nude model. After a bit of anti-aliasing and some animation tweaks, and finally some wardrobe assistance, he presented to RSD a stock female character for inclusion in future software updates.

Much as RSD’s Sample hero formed the template for uncounted male protagonists, Chase’s Muybridge lady became the starting place for legions of (often lurid) sprite edits. If for that reason alone Chase’s input would be notable. Yet his Woman Warrior games also exemplified several unusual and advanced techniques, as well as a curious borrowed aesthetic that sticks in the mind.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Three: Focused Fire

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

What can I say about Space Invaders that you don’t already know? Not a lot, I reckon, so I’m not going to go into too much depth on the facts. If you need more, there’s the Internet. Rather, I mean to frame the available information within the discussion we’ve been having, with an aim to highlighting its greater relevance.

You will recall we talked about Pong, and the easy introduction it provided into that alien space on the other side of the TV screen. Although there wasn’t much meaning to be had, the passive control the game provided over that one packet of information, bouncing around its tiny gameworld according to discernible laws acting on their own, allowed the player to mentally map out the game’s reality.

There was a whole new, bottled system of cause and effect for the player’s mind to lock into and understand. And as minimally involving as the laws and interface were, they were novel and fascinating, and simple to digest — to the extent that Pong became a cultural sensation.

Then, as we discussed, four years later, Breakout came along and reframed Pong as a solitary experience, as a complex space, and as a distinct narrative. Now the player’s focus was entirely on the gameworld, rather than the gameworld acting as a catalyst for two players to entertain each other. In turn, the gameworld had more to focus on.

The player’s every action — as indirect as the interface remained — resulted in a tangible effect, or consequence, within the world. A tile would break, the board would be a little more open, and the surfaces to bounce off of would be a little different. The interaction was suddenly more meaningful, at least within the narrow scope provided. And then when the board was clear, twice over, the game was over. There was a distinct goal to achieve, entirely within the parameters of the game’s bottle universe.

Well, all those changes were significant. Different designers took away different lessons by how they balanced those changes in their heads, and ran off to extrapolate further — leading us to at least two distinct schools of game design and a new focus on a single player’s causal relationship with the gameworld, as compared to videogames as a mere game or social tool.

For now let’s jump the Pacific, and ride the narrative train for a while.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

The Game-Maker Archive: Mark Hadley

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

I’m always impressed when an artist takes some kind of a stance with his work — be it technical or political or social or personal. Well, let me buffer that. I’m impressed when an artist has something to say, and choses to use his chosen medium to explore that idea rather than just get caught up in the trappings of the medium for its own sake. If you give me, for instance, a really excellent, polished shooter that plays like a remix of four other games I’ve already played, then okay — that’s some decent craft there, but to what end? It’s not saying anything. Then if you give me something simple and awkward, that tries its hardest to translate something unrelated into the language of the medium — say, the artist’s obsession with physics or an overactive curiosity about the man who sells hot dogs down the street, then I feel like I may get something out of the work. Maybe not a whole new perspective on life, but maybe a few angles I hadn’t noticed before.

I don’t mean to big up Mark Hadley’s games too much, but I find it curious that his games try to have a sort of a point to them beyond simply being another videogame. Given the limitations of the software, whether they succeed is almost beyond the point. The effort is what counts.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Mike Perrucci

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Most of the Game-Maker material I know, I’ve known about since high school. When the program was new, there was a thriving development community. When RSD stopped supporting Game-Maker, interest dwindled, the community dissipated, and it became difficult to find any mention of the program. Occasionally, though, I run into a developer who missed the wider loop and just kept on developing in private. The most productive of these isolated cases is also one of the more talented Game-Maker artists of all, Mike “Mazeguy” Perrucci.

Although Perrucci’s two finished games are an apparently simple overhead-view game and its sequel, there’s much more going on than you catch at a glance. For one, the guy never repeats himself. Never mind between games; within each game, no two levels are remotely similar. Typically each stage can boast not just distinct backgrounds and enemies but different mechanics and often a slightly different character sprite, with different animations and abilities to suit the level’s theme.

Where these games really excel are in their creative use of background animations and monster birthing — two of the most powerful, yet least exploited, Game-Maker traits. Between the two, there’s almost no end of effects that you can fake — as aptly demonstrated in Perrucci’s second game.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Two: Brick-A-Break

  • Reading time:2 mins read

By [redacted]

Though Pong, which we covered last time, opened the window to a new world, that world was a void. You had some basic physical rules, and you had a packet of information bouncing around in a box.

The bulk of communication was supplied by a second player. Pong exists in a weird medium that offers the player the vaguest hint of another reality — a persistent, active set of laws that react upon the player’s every stimulus — then anchors that experience back in reality. It’s sort of like shaking hands through a curtain of water.

You pass through, and get a fleeting sense of, this alternative medium. That’s nice, and it gives you a sense of the basic laws of water. But compare to snorkeling along a coral reef, and the whole alien world that water opens up by virtue of those laws.

For about four years, no one significantly built on Pong. You saw things like four-player Pong, and Pong with two paddles, and a vertically-oriented Pong that passed itself off as a Volleyball sim.

Atari did experiment a bit with Gran Trak 10 and Tank!, but somehow it took until 1976 for Bushnell and Bristow to hit on a one-player version of Pong. And that pretty much was the missing piece that gave us two distinct schools of design, the home PC, and thereby the information revolution that allows a person to research articles such as this.

As these things go, Breakout was pretty well-named.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

The Game-Maker Archive: Samples and Demos

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker didn’t just throw its users in cold with its development tools and game engine; packed with the core software was a wealth of sample material, largely composed by the programmers, Gregory Stone and Oliver, Jr. Fair enough, this material was a starting place for many, perhaps most, users’ first games.

Yet as simple and illustrative as the material was, it often was more compelling than the end games derived from it. So in effect, in purchasing Game-Maker users bought themselves a collection of rather neat little games and then the tools to rip them apart and rebuild the games in their own image — in concept not all that different from some indie games you’ll see these days, if a bit more elaborate in the toolset.

It would be constructive to peruse these games if just to provide context for of our past discussion (such as last week’s The Descent), and to provide basis for future commentary. Again, though, some of these games are darned good. All of them are charming, and by definition they’re all amongst the most original Game-Maker games you’ll find.

There are seven basic demo games. Three of them are overt tutorials (one of them named Tutor); four are complete and deliberate games of some sort, and the origin of the most of the materials used in those tutorials. It’s those that we’ll be going over here.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: One-Hit Wonders

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker offered aspiring pre-Web designers the world over their first taste of game development. And for its era, it was darned powerful: VGA graphics, Sound Blaster sound, infinitely huge games. There were some strict limitations and quirks, but at the time there wasn’t much else like it — and it sure beat breaking out Lode Runner for the hundredth time, plus the graph paper and pencil to record your levels.

Although the software was cheap and easy to use, and there was a thriving community around it, it seems most users were content to finish at most one or two games, then to move on. As a result you have a handful of big, influential voices — the artists who made a handful of complete, original games — and a peppering of neato one-off games by people you never saw again. And often it’s those oddball games that stick in the mind the most.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Eclypse Games

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Eclypse Games was basically a guy named James Faux, aka OmegAkira. He lived and attended high school in New Jersey, and he ran a Game-Maker dial-up BBS called SiNiSTRY, which I think was also the name of his personal rock band. The board was only available irregularly, as he ran it off his primary phone line. I can’t quite remember where I first found his work; perhaps on the official RSD BBS in Rockport. Eventually I found myself calling his BBS at all weird hours, to cut down on long-distance charges.

Significantly, Jim was a musician and he was one of the few individuals outside of Epic Megagames to figure out what to do with the .CMF music format that Game-Maker relied on. So if nothing else, his games tended to be all original: new ideas, new techniques, new graphical elements, new sound effects, new music. A few of his earlier games do use the familiar stock tracks, though that tendency soon diminished.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part One: Echolocation

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

We are all inhabitants of our own reality. On the one hand we’re kind of like sponges, absorbing everything around us and integrating it, whether we care to or not. On the other hand, deliberately or not we shape our worlds to reflect our own inner structures.

Whatever we may carry into a situation, experiences physically change our neural pathways. Repetition, familiarity, reinforces a link, like sketching over a line again and again until it becomes solid. Likewise, the way we position furniture, leave piles of papers or empty cans, what we choose to clean and how, what projects we leave unfinished, what we ruin, what we fix, what we wear down; how we choose to break up and break in and use the space given to us, it all imprints our environments just as emotions crease our aging faces.

In effect, our inner and outer worlds build up a feedback loop. As we carve out our place in the world, we settle into the spaces we carve, reassuring ourselves with their familiarity while we use those bold lines, so often scribbled over, to brand ourselves inside and out. This, we tell ourselves, is how the world works.

This is why videogames are so interesting; they are, in effect, bottled external worlds, into which we can momentarily plug our inner worlds to see what happens. Each game is a little feedback loop, allowing the player both to imprint his actions into a world, to leave his little mark — even if only in a high score table — and to absorb, from a simplified sketch with no social or practical consequences, a new way of being, a new way of doing things.

Some people are more concerned with leaving their mark, others more with expanding their horizons. Some give more, some take more. The point is that in their essence, videogames encapsulate this dynamic between the two. They are a study in cause and effect; the easier those worlds are to affect, the more useful a response they give, the more the player owns actions and consequences alike, the more satisfying the experience.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

The Game-Maker Archive: Matt Bell

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Though I’m not sure if he concerned himself with the broader community, Matt Bell’s Paper Airplane is perhaps the most widely-distributed Game-Maker game, and Yuphex is one of the most sophisticated. Matt’s games are defined by a meticulously clean visual style and a talent for both subverting and capitalizing on Game-Maker’s design quirks. It’s not that his games are purely experimental; that same sense of cleanliness and discipline extends to his design concepts, lending his games a strong feel of professionalism.

Matt began his Game-Maker work in high school, as was common to most of the designers I encountered. Most of my our communication was through the post, and carefully packaged 3-1/2″ floppies. From what I remember of Matt he was fairly reserved and didn’t mince words, which shows itself in his art. Offhand I am only aware of three of his games, which I will discuss below. If anyone can fill the gaps, please consider this an interactive discussion. All the better to unearth some indie game history.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Original Game-Maker

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Long before Mark Overmars’ popular design tool, Recreational Software Designs‘ Game-Maker (note the hyphen) opened the horizons of Shareware-era PC gamers, forged friendships and dial-up communities, and cluttered the upload directories of bulletin boards as far flung as Russia and South America. There were several dedicated BBSes, including the official RSD board in Kennebunkport, Maine. For those outside of calling range, there was always the USPS and 3-1/2″ floppies. And then development ceased, and slowly Game-Maker faded.

Game Maker was first released around 1992, as a set of VGA mode DOS utilities tied together with a text mode selection menu. For every game produced, the main program file, containing all of the important code, was the same. To distinguish one game from the next, the program file would call on a .gam file, in which the user would compile all of his content through a rather elegant system of brainstorming lines and form fields. The rest of the tools — tile editors, character and monster editors, a map editor, a sound editor, and so on — served to develop that content.

In retrospect it was kind of brilliant; from the program’s perspective all of the important information that made a game unique — visuals, sound, controls, rules, design, structure — was simple window dressing, to call in and process like so many documents. And design was nearly that easy.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )