We’ve covered PPP Team’s major franchises, and their often experimental one-off games. To polish up, and possibly to set the stage for another whole realm of discussion, we’ll look at their third branch of development: the tribute games.

The PPP Team members wear their influences like long johns; sometimes they’re under the surface of their normal clothes, and when they’re certain that no one is looking, that’s all they’ve got on. We have discussed some of the apparent shareware and Commodore references in their original games. Amongst the five surviving tribute games we find a broad and instructive spread of creative input, from classic arcade games to 1990s shareware to 16-bit Japanese platformers to Japanese anime and manga to the techniques of existing Game-Maker games.

Perhaps noteworthy is how fully the team embodies the games that it chooses to pastiche. Some creative whims aside, they replicate the originals as closely as possible within the limitations of RSD’s game engine. Where they meet technical or conceptual barriers, rather than force the design they simply go in a new direction that follows from the original both in logic in spirit. One gets the sense that these tributes are where PPP Team really found their footing as designers; whenever they were uncertain what to do next, there was always another influential game to dissect and put back together.

F1 Eater Mania

The Game-Maker vault is littered with Pac-Man tributes of various aptitude and originality. PPP Team sidestepped the issue by, deliberately or not, making a clone of Namco’s Rally-X (1980) – which, granted, is basically Pac-Man with cars. There are a few differences, though, and in F1 Eater Mania those differences are compounded with alternating forced-scroll stages that call to mind Sega’s Monaco GP (1979). Or, one supposes, Matthew Groves’ Jet Driver.

The game is bare-bones and comes off like a weekend experiment. As in other dot-hunt games, collecting a full board of blue blips opens the gate and lets you out. This being Game-Maker, counters never reset; die with three dots left to go, and all you need is three more. Curiously, the green “power pellets” increase the player’s HP – meaning that for every pellet you can crash into one opponent without totaling your own car. That’s one way to do it.

It’s genial and it plays well, with a minimum of avoidable glitches or design problems. Aside from the counter issue, the only thing that stands out is Game-Maker’s lack of a context-sensitive idle state. Not much to do about that except ignore it.

Commander Xeen

Xeen also is stripped-down in the manner of Biokid or Blork Carnage, which may on reflection be a bit of a PPP calling card, with for most of the game a single regular enemy type, a minimum of counter work (even extending to HP bonuses), and fairly straightforward level elements. What makes it amongst PPP Team’s better games is the way that those elements are combined into an environment, and the accurate-feeling look, tone, and flow that they create.

Both the decor and the architecture of the levels subconsciously lead the player forward like stripes in a Half-Life corridor. In the early levels, light and shadow created by block patterns draw attention to and propel the player along the intended path. Platforms placed just outside the player’s jump height, multiple key colors, hidden passages, and Keenesque useless-yet-tantalizing trinkets also attract, divert, and frustrate the player’s attentions at appropriate moments, creating a psychology not unlike Tom Hall’s original designs.

Speaking of jumps, there are a few quirks of design. In Commander Xeen, vertical jumps are higher than diagonal ones. Not the most intuitive decision, but as far as RSD’s engine goes, the jump physics are about as clean as variable jumps get.

The other main mechanic is weirder. To shoot, the player needs to collect gun icons. The game is generous and enemies are few, so running out is rarely a problem. Yet when the armory does empty, Game-Maker’s quirks get in the way again. Due to limits on button-mapping, the character uses different buttons and animation sequences to shoot left and right. Each of these animations is married to a different counter. Although the gun icons refill both counters, the act of firing only diminishes one counter at a time. Thus if the player fires to the right more often to the left, soon there will only be left shots, er, left.

These hang-ups are minor. The high vertical jumping does have parallels in games like Super Mario Bros. 2, and the level design does seem to take the different heights into consideration as an advanced technique. If you remember that you can rocket straight up, several tasks will be easier than the layout at first suggests.

The game is short, satisfying in its rewards, and gentle in its punishment. You only have a single hit point, so avoidance and caution become big elements of navigation, adding a bit of strategy and mild puzzle solving to some areas. When you do die, the game plays a few awkward notes and the character looks a bit sad; then you start the level over. Although as with every Game-Maker game you can save and load at will, here the design compels the player to tough it out and just try again.

Pengo Adventure

PPP Team’s first game arose as many first projects do, as a collage. Pengo Adventure is a tribute to Donkey Kong, assembled with a mix of borrowed parts and original elements. The character is RSD’s own Penguin Pete, lifted from a design tutorial largely intact. The backgrounds are both minimalist and fiddly but mostly original, save the odd decoration. Sounds are a mix of borrowed material and original samples.

Although the game has its charms — in particular the premise of penguin romance and the atmosphere in some of the later levels — and you can see the budding style that would later declare itself in games like Badman 2, Pengo is just awkward to play. As Sylvain Martin has observed, RSD’s engine does not handle ladders as well as it might. There are ways to make it work, but it’s annoying – and when you’re paying tribute to Donkey Kong, you want the ladders to be perfect. So that’s a pretty inherent problem. A more manageable issue is player control.

As adorable as he might be, Pete’s control mapping has always been a problem even in his own game. Taken out of context, with few to no changes, Pete has trouble just leaping from platform to platform. What PPP Team really needed to do was either design a new character from scratch or to ditch Pete’s character file and rebuild it with a mind to their planned game concept.

Still, for a first game, Pengo Adventure explores just about every aspect of Game-Maker’s design options. It exhibits intertitles and introduction screens, full sound and music support, and just about every basic block feature. Even here there’s an understanding of contextual background properties, and the way to get around certain collision issues by swapping static monsters for background tiles. By many users’ standards, this would be a fairly advanced game. So, not a bad way to start.

Twinnbee Land

In Japan, Konami’s Twinbee series has long been the bouncy, juvenile counterpart to Konami’s flagship shooter Gradius. Outside of Japan, the series is fairly obscure. There’s Stinger for the NES, and then in some territories there’s a curious spin-off game for the Super NES, Pop ’n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures. Unlike the rest of the Twinbee series, Rainbow Bell Adventures is a side-scrolling platformer in that refined and codified 16-bit mold. To hear him tell it, this game is also one of Sylvain Martin’s biggest influences.

Thus, with a few logistical tweaks, we have Twinnbee Land. Whereas in the SNES game the sprites are kind of enormous, here they are tiny. The SNES game has rolling terrain with plenty of diagonal surfaces, allowing characters to bowl along; here we have a maze-like level design with huge jumps across open spaces. The game takes more liberties as it goes on, with odd character transformations – first the ship grows in size, then turns into a huge Mazinger-style mech. Combine this absurdity with the deliberately cutesy voice samples, and perhaps you can take Twinnbee Land as an affectionate satire.

The game is actually rather long, and is dotted with fairly complex boss fights in the vein of the Badman games. Naturally enough, many background elements are borrowed from PPP’s earlier efforts. Sometimes they fit well; sometimes not. The character floats about half a tile above certain platforms, for no discernable reason.

Of particular note is the jetpack, which – rather like Xeen’s vertical jump – allows the player to rocket upward much farther than a normal leap will allow. It’s a little awkward to use, and one forgets about it, which is as well for such a powerful feature. As with Xeen, this command often lends the level design another layer.

Unlike Xeen, the design itself is often confusing. The geography tends to lead the player away from goals rather than toward them, and the properties or behaviors of background elements are not always clear, occasionally leading the player into inadvertent traps. Combine this frustration with slightly awkward control mapping, and at times it feels like the game is deliberately undermining the player’s efforts, as in games such as I Wanna Be The Guy.

The question of tone is central to Twinnbee Land. It seems like a straight tribute, until it starts to get bizarre. It seems inviting until it starts to pull the rug out from under the player. It’s unclear exactly what the game wants to do. Whatever it presents, it seems to immediately subvert in some way, whether deliberately or not. There’s even an animation where the character holds up a nudie picture for the player to see. Why? Well, presumably to subvert expectations. Which seems to sum the game up.

Dragon Ball Z 2: The Death of Vegeta

Of all of the surviving PPP Team games, this is probably the strangest. Pascal, a friend of the founding members, was a huge anime nerd and also a beginning user of RSD’s tools. With his dubious illustration skills he roughed out a couple of games based on Akira Toriyama’s famous manga and TV series. When he showed the Team his second game, they took the game into their fold and adapted it to their developing house style.

As Pypein has it, they were at the time unseasoned to anime in general, never mind Akira Toriyama’s particular illustration style, so they ran the game through a Badman filter. The result looks and feels very much like a stock PPP Team game – and very much unlike Dragon Ball. Thus, Pascal thanked them and took the game back. He undid most of their work and decided to remix his original sprites with new backgrounds scanned in and colored from the manga. This was an arduous process, to which Game-Maker was less than ideally suited, and so Pascal soon abandoned the project.

Thus there are two versions of the game; a cartoony European-flavored one, and a much rougher-looking remix that ends after one or two levels.

As for the game itself, apparently it’s an adaptation of a specific story arc from the manga. The sprites are appealing enough, and the backgrounds are atmospheric. The controls are a little strange, with a stilted repeating jumping animation, a dash move that’s about the same speed as walking, and special attacks that don’t always work as they are meant to. The game is largely silent, aside from the rare anime voice sample or occasional borrowed music file.

DBZ2 is far from PPP Team’s best work, but it has some interesting properties. One assumes the game was a learning experience for everyone involved.

There are still at least eight missing games, and apparently a large chunk of Badman III, probably lost to time. For now, though, that’s PPP Team’s catalog. Pypein, aka Sylvain Martin, would go on to develop his own code, and is currently working with the Nintendo DS hardware. His brother Piet would go on to sequence his own music, much of which is now available under the artist name Cyborg Jeff. It is thanks to some of Pypein’s later efforts that we have some of the images used in the course of this column. Thanks also to Sylvain for his time in recounting his long-dormant memories.

You can download this final batch of PPP Team games at this link. Remember to run the games in DOSBox, and to turn up the clock cycles as far as they’ll comfortably go.

Jeremy LaMar (aka SnigWich) is renowned as one of the best designers of the ZZT/Megazeux community. Before Bernard the Bard, though, he cut his teeth on a series of games that earned him an intense and loyal audience.

LaMar produced his Blinky games with Recreational Software Designs‘ Game-Maker, then moved on to other design platforms. Some while later, the games found their way to a games section on AOL, where unbeknownst to him they became cult favorites, subject to fan fiction, dedicated websites, and tribute videos.

Following his MegaZeux work, LaMar retired from game design, changed his name, and returned to his original calling as a cartoonist. We tracked him down to chat about his body of work, both known and missing, his experiences with various game design platforms, his other creative projects, and, following a long hiatus, his planned return to game design.

Your Blinky series seems to have attracted something of a loyal following — rather unusual for a Game-Maker game. If it’s all cool, I’d like to ask you a few questions about the games, your experiences with Game-Maker, and your broader creative and professional life.

I agree that the popularity of the Blinky games is very strange, especially considering the number of DOS games around at the time. Honestly I don’t even remember uploading these games, but somehow they spread and attained a sort of cult following. There was even some very baffling fanfic written about the characters at one point, but I don’t think the site exists anymore. It’s not like they’re even very good games, especially the frustrating jumping mechanics of Blinky 3… I really can’t explain why these games keep popping up!

Normally I’d try to separate myself from something I created so many years ago, and under a different name no less… but the continued and persistent popularity of Blinky 2 and 3 really has to be addressed… so ask away, I’ll provide answers as best I can!

I saw a couple of references to that fanfic, but as you say the site no longer seems to exist. Did you save a copy of it? It’s a bewildering development, and seems worth preserving somehow.

Actually, turns out the Wayback Machine had it. Check out the other two Blinky stories as well. It’s really strange stuff. I’m still not sure what to make of these, but evidently somebody was a big fan.

That is indeed fascinating. For the other two fics I’m just getting about a paragraph of text. Is that all correct, or am I missing something?

Nope, that’s all there is. I couldn’t begin to explain those fanfics.

Going by what you’ve said elsewhere, I take it none of your Game-Maker work still survives in your hands?

Sadly, no.

Tell me more about the original Blinky, and how it came about. I understand that the first sequel is more or less a remake.

The very first game was the first thing I did with the Game Maker utility… as a result, it had a lot of flaws. Gameplay was nearly identical to Blinky 2.

In the second game you do some slightly complicated things with the engine, like the one-way cliffs, the multi-segmented bosses, and those spore clouds. How many of those tricks are in the original?

Almost none, to my recollection. The only boss was the final boss, Shnookwad, but I’m pretty sure he was just a normal-sized monster that took multiple shots to kill.

It sounds like the second game is much more advanced than the original. How long would you say passed between the first two Blinky games? Did you work on any other projects between the two, to practice or develop ideas?

It was definitely a lot more polished. Blinky 1 was the first thing I ever did with Game-Maker, so it was pretty rough around the edges. I’m not really sure how much time passed between the first and second games… probably not a lot, to be honest. Couple months at the most.

I think it was only a couple months between finishing Blinky 2 and the beginning of work on Blinky 3. Blinky 3 was one of those projects I picked up and put back down several times, however. I always had several games going at once. I remember it sat unfinished for quite a while before I decided to just sit down and put together the last couple of levels, and finish the damn thing.

It’s interesting that you went for such different game concepts with the two surviving Blinky games. Return of Blinky clearly owes a bunch to Link to the Past. Was Blinky 3 influenced by anything in particular?

Not that I recall. I think I just wanted to make a side-scrolling platformer, to see if I could pull it off under the constraints of the program. Trying to play it now, it’s an exceedingly difficult game… and the between-level art is just horrendous. I remember I was using an extremely limited paint program at the time, but it’s still pretty embarrassing. Still, it seems like the Blinky games hold some nostalgia value for other people as well, so I’m glad they’ve been recovered.

So where does Blinky come from? Did the characters previously exist?

The characters were created specifically for the game. I used to draw little comics all the time as a kid, most of them really off-the-wall and fairly nonsensical… Blinky had his start there. Not sure why I settled on the color scheme I did, or why the doughnut obsession, I guess it just seemed like a good idea at the time!

Do any of the characters have a life outside of the games?

There was a little comic I had drawn that more or less followed the games, but they’re long-lost by now.

What was your design process like? Did you tend to plan projects out extensively beforehand, or did ideas arise more as a result of experimentation?

I did very little planning ahead of time with my Game-Maker games, mostly I just sort of made things up as I went along. It was a lot of experimenting and spur-of-the-moment decisions. I may have drawn out a map ahead of time for how the levels link up, but that’s about it.

How many games did you make in all, if you can recall? The latter two Blinky games are polished enough that it seems like you must have spent some time experimenting.

I had over a dozen unfinished games, and a handful of finished ones as well. One involved driving a tank, another had a jetpack guy… I even had the first level of Blinky 4 finished. It was a side-scroller like Blinky 3, but had a greatly improved jumping engine.

Jetpack games seem like a popular theme for some reason. I take it that must have been side-scrolling. What about the tank game? What was that, top-down?

Yeah, Jet-Pack was a side-scroller. The tank game was top-down, and was sort of like a Space Invaders style game, pitting you against waves of enemies before you could progress to the next stage. As I recall the last enemy would drop a key that let you progress.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more games like that. It’s kind of unusual to find Game-Maker games that use the built-in rules and counters to do more than establish face-value properties. Did you hit on any techniques that you never worked into a full game?

Nothing too noteworthy that I can recall.

Did any of these games have titles?

Not that I can remember… they were probably pretty generic titles like “Tank Battle” or something.

How did you come across Game-Maker? By the looks of it, you were using version 3.0 — so that’s pretty late on in its timescale.

I believe it was a Christmas present one year.

Did you interact with any other Game-Maker users?

The only interaction I ever had with other users was among my own groups of friends. The Blinky games were never designed for a larger audience, so their apparent popularity is definitely surprising. I had downloaded and played a handful of games created by other users, but was never really part of the community at the time.

What do you remember about the games you found? Did you learn anything from them? And do you recall where you downloaded them?

I found a bunch on some BBS… I remember Peach the Lobster and a couple others. It was interesting to see what other people had done with the tools.

So your friends also used Game-Maker to some extent? What can you tell me about that?

I’m pretty sure none of their games ever made it online. At least, I’ve never seen any. We’d create games and pass them amongst ourselves, but most of them were not even finished.

Did they have their own copies of Game-Maker, or was this more of a shared resources thing?

I don’t recall… it was most likely a shared resource.

How much influence would you say you and your friends had on each other’s design process? Was there any kind of collaboration or competition going on?

We definitely learned techniques from each other, but I’d say I spent a lot more time with the program than anybody else I knew. I did some collaborative work with Megazeux, but not with Game-Maker.

About this AOL Kids area, where it seems most people encountered Blinky – do you have any idea how this worked? How did the games get on there?

I’m really not sure, I think there must’ve been a way to upload games, but I never really spent any time in AOL Kids. I honestly don’t recall if I had uploaded them or if somebody else did, but either way the Blinky games somehow made it on there, and evidently a lot of people had played them.

I know your ZZT/MegaZeux work is also pretty popular. Did that come before or after your time with Game-Maker?

I recall working with ZZT around the same time, and sometime after as well. Later I got into Megazeux, and it was very much the same situation as with Game-Maker; A couple of my games made it online, but I had a great deal of unfinished work that never saw the light of day.

Does that material still exist somewhere?

It would’ve been nice to have saved those old games, and all the missing material from my ZZT/MZX days. I’ve lost of lot of data to various computer crashes and hardware mishaps over the years… suffice to say, I’m very careful about backing things up these days.

How would you compare the experiences of working with ZZT/Megazeux and Game-Maker?

I was much more of an active part of the community during my MZX days. I’d say I spent a lot more time with ZZT/MZX than Game-Maker. Being able to code objects opened up a lot of possibilities

Are you still involved in game design now?

Yes, but not in a professional capacity. There’s an indie project that I’m creating the graphics for, but it’ll be awhile before it gets off the ground. I haven’t created anything game-wise since my Megazeux days.

Can you say anything more at the current stage? What flavor of game is it? The other team members — have they worked on anything else before?

It’ll be a Web-based RPG set in a post-apocalyptic earth, and it involves big robots. It’s just me and another guy, and neither of us have put something like this together before.

Is this a console or PC-style game with full avatars and exploration, or is this more of the Facebook-style stats-and-inventory game? Is this for a single player?

Closest genre I can lump it in is a roguelike. Basically a turn-based dungeon crawl with many random elements. It’s a “light” roguelike in that there’s no permanent character death. It’s essentially single player, but the economy will be global… You’ll be able to buy from or sell to other players. In execution it’ll be sort of like
Kingdom of Loathing.

What platform are you using for this? Flash?

AJAX… essentially PHP and Javascript. The goal is to have it be accessible from as many platforms as possible, and keep server strain to a minimum.

That does sound super portable. Do you have plans to specially tweak and adjust it for different platforms? I’m thinking of how a Roguelike might play on, say, an iPad.

The beauty part is that anything with web access that can handle javascript should run it just fine. It’d actually work wonderfully on an iPad.

I’ve noticed that lately you seem mostly to have circled back around to comics again. Was this something you rediscovered, or was it always going on in the background?

I’ve always had some comic projects going on in the background. Mechageddon is going to feature a lot of comic-related content… when I get around to doing some finished work, anyway. I’ve definitely been interested in getting back into game design lately, especially after the frustrations of trying to compete in the webcomics arena.

A friend of mine keeps joking that we should create Blinky 4… but that’d just be ridiculous.

Jeremy LaMar is perhaps best known under the handle SnigWich, for his Megazeux games such as Bernard the Bard – often ranked amongst the best games ever produced under Gregory Janson’s engine. More recently, under his new name Otto Germain, he has returned to his roots as a cartoonist. Before any of that, he was renowned for his RSD Game-Maker work – and he never even knew it.

At some point two of LaMar’s early Game-Maker games, The Return of Blinky and Blinky 3, made their way to a section of America Online known as AOL Kids. There, they gained a small yet fervent cult following. In the following years, a Blinky wiki and fanfics and video tributes would spring up around the Web. Even years after the AOL Kids area vanished, LaMar’s fans kept up the devotion. At least one poster to a DOS games forum claimed that the Blinky games inspired him to pursue game design.

When you consider the obscurity of most Game-Maker games, indeed of Game-Maker itself, this level of enthusiasm is remarkable. To be sure, LaMar’s games are amongst the most polished produced with RSD’s tools, both in terms of the design sensibility and in their mastery of the materials available to them. One does wonder, though, how much circumstance and exposure play in a game’s fortunes. One also wonders what other small communities might even now be obsessing over even less likely games, and to what extent those players might be inspired to greater things.

The Return of Blinky (1994)

The original Blinky, LaMar’s first Game-Maker project, is now lost to time and computer failure along with half a dozen other games. Its essence lives on, though, in The Return of Blinky. This first sequel, which LaMar classes as a near-remake, is heavily inspired by Link to the Past, with its exploration-based design and pseudo-3D cliffs.

Blinky, the pink dinosaur, sets out to save Funky Forest from the evil Schnookwad. He does this primarily by wandering through forests, caverns, and factories, tossing doughnuts at enemies, and bribing his cat (also named Doughnut) to clear a path.

LaMar got the basics down just fine – admirably, even. The presentation is clear and appealing, reminiscent of a late-era Sega 8-bit game. Controls are simple and very responsive. The actual design, from level to level, flows smoothly with few moments of outright confusion. Where the game excels, though, is in the flourishes – the conveyor belts, the amorphous spore clouds that the player can whittle away, but only so far.

Game-Maker’s biggest limitation and greatest potential is in its monsters, and here LaMar uses them about as well as PPP Team at their best. Feeding the cat a doughnut briefly focuses its attack pattern. Aside from the spore clouds, there are complex multi-segmented threats like Zelda-esque snakes and Mario-style firebars. Every four levels the player faces an enormous boss, often with long multi-segmented limbs and complex attack patterns.

As with Badman 2, even the ending credits are something special, with a monster roll against a miniature scene of victory.

The Return of Blinky is earnest, well-judged, and well-implemented. It is works well not just as a Game-Maker game or as a shareware game, but as a children’s game – amongst the hardest of games to get right. It does make sense that if any Game-Maker game were to develop a cult following, it would be this one.

Blinky 3 (1995)

The next sequel is a bit more convoluted. At some point, he said, LaMar stopped development and let the game sit on the shelf for a while. That makes sense, in that Blinky 3 is perhaps more ambitious than it is joyous. It’s still amongst the upper echelon of Game-Maker games, and an impressive work on several levels; it’s just that you can feel the work behind the design.

Unlike its predecessors, the third Blinky is a side-scroller. Rather like Sonic 3 (or indeed Badman 3), the game offers a choice of characters – Blinky, Doughnut, and a new character named Chum – each with unique abilities and a distinct path through the game. Furthermore, the levels are tightly wound together with several branching paths.

LaMar also hit on an interesting quirk, whereby for any given level neglecting to establish a character in Integrator causes the game to simply carry over the existing character. The knock-on effect is that once the player chooses a character, the game is free to direct that character into any level without need to establish a separate instance of the level for every possible character. It’s a simple trick, yet it greatly cuts down on the headache of advanced level design.

There are plenty of other neat little tricks, like LaMar’s solutions for melee attacks or using text files over static images to generate dialog – and it’s these tricks that stick in the mind. The game itself is respectable. Unlike The Return of Blinky it’s tougher than it needs to be, and sometimes more frustrating than it is rewarding. Still, full points for trying something new and then finishing the job. It may also be notable that Blinky 3 appears to be the more fondly remembered of the two games, and indeed for years after AOL took down its kids section it was LaMar’s only Game-Maker game to remain in circulation. It’s only within the last year that someone found a backup of The Return of Blinky and began to redistribute it, to relatively muted fanfare. The third Blinky is what everyone seems to remember.

Before he lost all of his data LaMar also completed some small work on a fourth Blinky, which was to have followed in the model of Blinky 3, except with improved controls.

If you enjoy the two surviving Blinky games, you might also check out SnigWich’s Megazeux portfolio. After a long gestation Germain is also considering a return to game design, and has a few plans on the table. That, however, is a topic for another article.

You can download the two surviving Blinky games here.

There were three main ways that Game-Maker users communicated. Either they knew each other in person, which was nothing unusual but could lead to larger and more nuanced projects than an individual could tackle, they communicated through the post, which was slow but both mysterious and intimate, or there were the BBSes.

Before the Web caught on (or even existed), the big deal was local dial-up boards. Most of them were text-based, and most were fairly slow. You would connect, check your personal messages, see if anyone had posted any new discussion topics or responses, perhaps fiddle with a multiplayer door game or two — and then you would head to the file area.

Most boards had a ratio: you can download so many bytes for so many bytes you upload. A bad ratio was close to 1:1. Somewhere between a 2:1 and 4:1 ratio, the file area would come to life. Users would be just motivated enough to keep sharing material, yet wouldn’t feel pressed to dump just any junk on the community. This is the environment where shareware thrived; when the Web took over, the whole shareware model went into whack.

If you found the right board, BBSes were also the perfect environment to share and discuss Game-Maker games. Mark Janelle ran the Frontline BBS with RSD’s semi-official blessing. Other users ran their own boards or carved out corners of existing communities.

A problem with BBSes was their dial-up nature. Unless the board was very local, you were in immediate danger of old-school long distance phone charges. If the board was in the same state but not in the same county, you were particularly screwed. So despite Janelle’s and RSD’s efforts there was never a unified Game-Maker community. Rather, the community consisted of countless islands of independent development, that would occasionally cross paths and trade ideas.

Although it was located in the middle of nowhere — specifically Kennebunkport, Maine — which must have made a daunting long-distance charge for most users, the Frontline BBS was the most prominent place for these paths to cross. That makes sense; it was the only board referenced in the Game-Maker box. The board therefore carried some valuable artifacts of shared Game-Maker culture. Whether or not those artifacts are in themselves excellent is sort of beyond the point. What’s important is that they are formative and sort of iconic to the Game-Maker experience.

These four games, by two authors, are amongst the first Game-Maker games that many users will have played, aside from RSD’s demo games and those users’ own creations. Unfortunately not all of them still exist in precisely their original form, but one takes what one can get.

Viki: Escape from Videoland

Our first artist is a fellow from Singapore named Ronnie Toon. He’s still designing web games under the Ron Marie Services banner. It’s unclear just how many games he designed with Game-Maker, as most of his older work has succumbed to the elements — in his case heat and mold. The first of his two surviving games hints at a subsequent explosion of design.

Viki is a grab bag of design. Each level explores a completely different concept, and the documentation announces a follow-up game expanded from each individual level concept. The concepts range from an inscrutable rocket pack stage to a Penguin Pete style melt maze to odd action puzzle design that takes advantage of Game-Maker’s distinctive collision and clipping bugs.

Strange and odd are operative words here, as the design in Viki is often sort of bewildering. Viki was Ronnie’s first game, and for that it is a bold collection of experiments coherently wrapped together. Yet it also is interesting to see his raw instinct, without the distraction of careful analysis or experience. Why does the rocket pack level consist entirely of waiting around for a gate to open? Why does the only obvious solution to the third level require glitching out the game engine? What exactly is the main character, Viki, and how does this game represent a cross section of Videoland? Perhaps the channel-surfing level design explains the latter. Either way, there is much in this game that will likely remain a mystery.

The shareware version includes only four levels, and promises another two upon registration. If they ever existed, it’s unlikely that they do now. Going from the documentation, level five would have involved a place called Space City, and level six was set on Crazy Island. Ominous.

Kirk Voodia

From exotic Singapore we leap to exotic Pennsylvania, and a very young man named Kevin Vance. Now a coder of random and varied applications, Vance cut his teeth on Game-Maker in grade school. His first project, Kirk Voodia, is a similarly raw look at game design as creative expression. Yet whereas Viki is an example of flat-out weird design decisions cloaked in (for the time) a lush, professional presentation, Voodia hides a pretty solid sensibility behind one of the roughest presentations you’ll see.

Rough, yet also original and honest. Despite a character that continually changes proportions, and at best is a glorified stick figure, there’s something coherent about the game. The art looks like a grade schooler’s scratchings, and that’s what it is. The story is a grade schooler’s (apparently self-insertion) story about an ordinary kid with a lightning gun, swept up into a dangerous situation in a curiously decorated warehouse. The whole thing comes off like a fourth grade writing assignment, brought to life.

And curiously enough, it’s actually kind of playable. There’s a half decent, and essentially fair, level structure, complete with secret exits and bonus stages. The character’s movements are so dramatic — the jumps are so high, the squats are so low — that they feel rather fresh. There are several distinct weapons. Although they continually seek the character’s position, monsters move slowly enough to respond to. Honestly, for what it is, the game ain’t half bad. And it’s also totally genuine. If my kid had designed this, I would be proud of it.

Hi-Tech Demo

Although he busied himself with countless games, Vance’s only other known surviving Game-Maker project is a collection of background tiles, intended as a gift to the Frontline BBS community, bound together with a rough demonstration game. In their original form, most of the blocks consisted of simple shapes and flat colors. After downloading, I somehow felt compelled to spruce up both the game and the tiles, while retaining as much of their original personality as possible. I added shading and character animation, and I threw in a handful of monsters to spice up Vance’s levels. My reasoning was that the game was free, and meant to be stripped apart for use anyway, so it couldn’t hurt to improve on the game itself.

In retrospect perhaps this wasn’t the wisest plan; I failed to foresee that my altered version, enhanced strictly for my own amusement, might be the only surviving version of Vance’s game. Perhaps the editing is itself a notable artifact of the time; it’s not for me to say. Regardless, the game is still essentially Vance’s. Aside from the monsters, all of the changes are cosmetic and all are enhancements rather than straight-out replacements. The geometry and actual color choice always remains intact. And as with Kirk Voodia, the design is pretty okay. It’s challenging yet fair, and the levels are fairly enjoyable to hop around. Nothing sophisticated, but that’s the charm.

Santa is Back!

Ronnie’s only other known survivor is a Christmas gift from 1993 — a freeware single-screen platformer that lays bare the perilous and confusing journey that Saint Nick undertakes to collect his presents for Christmas morning.

As with Viki, Santa is Back! is an unusual game in several respects. The most obvious and important of those is the game’s format. Aside from John’s Archaeological Adventures, you don’t really see many single-screen platformers on RSD’s engine. There are probably many good reasons why not, as Santa is Back! shares many of the same problems as Ludlam’s game — bouncy and unreliable moving platforms, edge-of-screen weirdness, difficulty in effectively exploiting the screen real estate. The novelty does make up for many of the quirks, as at least the game is trying something different.

Typically when we think of single-screen platformers we think of arena or hop-’n-bop games like Bubble Bobble or Tumblepop. Instead, Santa is Back! calls to mind ancient and half-remembered DOS and Apple II games. The focus is less on jumping than on ladders and dodging. That, and simply on making sense of what’s going on from moment to moment. The difficulty in discerning enemies from decorations, the twitchiness of the controls and colission, the erratic level structure, and the downright weird way that levels are linked together, can make play feel almost arbitrary. Yet as with those ancient games, it feels like it should and must make sense, as cosmetically the game feels so well-assembled. The disparity creates a certain cognitive dissonance that makes the game creepier than probably intended, and all the more memorable for it.

As this is likely your first and only opportunity to play these games, you can download them here. Consider it a very eccentric and dusty Christmas gift from DIY Gamer to you. Boot up DOSBox and if you’ve got any fresh young eyes bobbing around your knees, try giving them a crack at the games. Get ‘em before they’re cynical, and just maybe they’ll strip away some of your own years.

Back in July we unearthed two previously unknown Game-Maker games, Roland Ludlam’s space racer Hurdles and Matthew Groves’ free-roaming space shooter Space Cadet. We then tracked down and interviewed those two authors. Roland Ludlam is currently working on a WiiWare project and Matthew Groves is considering Android development; each was generous with his time and memories, and with some prodding each was generous enough to find and forward some other long-neglected projects for us to record and archive. The former scrounged around on an old backup of a backup, and the latter mailed us a collection of 5-1/4″ floppies to extract.

From each party we received two games: one fully developed and substantial, and one experimental or unusual. We’ll start with the “big” games, and then once we’re primed we’ll turn to the really interesting stuff.

Mystery Mansion

Both of Matthew Groves’ rescued games share several traits with Space Cadet. They call on many of RSD’s sample resources to build their environments and monster collection. They employ simple sprites, tiles, and backdrops consisting of flat colors and basic, yet well-defined, shapes. They betray a fondness for PC and arcade games over an obvious console lineage. Despite that, they feel very reminiscent of games for early-1980s Atari hardware.

In particular, Mystery Mansion feels a bit like an Atari 5200 version of Gauntlet — perhaps crossed with an ASCII dungeon crawler like Nethack or Groves’ preferred design tool, ZZT. Despite its simplicity and borrowed tiles, the game is very playable. Its controls are crunchy and responsive, and the levels make an interesting, Roguelike use of space. Of especial note are the diagonal hallways and long narrow corridors connecting open rooms.

As in all of Groves’ games, the original character sprite and behavior largely makes up for the borrowed incidentals. Here, Barry the Brave is cleanly rendered and fairly well animated. When he stands still, quarter notes spiral his head as he whistles to himself. When he dies, he slowly melts into a puddle of blood and tissue. It’s unexpected and gory, and kind of cool.

With registration, users are promised a sequel entitled Mystery Caves. This game did at one point exist; the author no longer has a copy. No one registered, so unlike the three shareware games no copies are in the wild. It may then reasonably be considered lost.

John’s Archaeological Adventures

As Ludlam described in the interview, this is his tribute to George Broussard’s Pharaoh’s Tomb. Ludlam took his share of liberties, some of them artistic and some of them — thanks to Game-Maker’s infamous quirks — logistical. The result is an unusual and rich single-screen puzzle-platformer.

The game is unusual in at least two obvious respects. For one, there is only a small handful of Game-Maker based puzzle games. (Of those, most are missing, incomplete, actually unmade, or merely rumored.) Granted, this is an action puzzler and it rarely gets more complex than key-and-door mechanics. Still, it’s novel to see the engine used this way.

The other strange bit is the single-screen level design. Each level is scroll-locked in all four directions, meaning each screen is a meticulous construction where every tile is important. Only one other locked-screen Game-Maker game comes to mind, and that’s a slightly weird (though memorable) Christmas game from Singapore. Of the two, John’s Archaeological Adventures is the more carefully designed.

A further point of acclaim is the character animation. For such a small sprite, Ludlam made the best use of every frame — a tendency that we’ll see in his other work.

The game has its problems — mostly technical and unavoidable, partially aesthetic. Game-Maker’s trademark bouncy monster collision becomes a problem here, as it does in every game with a moving platform. Hop on a platform, and just hope you don’t spring off or through it either through your own momentum or through the platform’s movement.

Another issue is with Xferplay’s strange edge-of-screen issues, where within a few pixels of the screen edge all animations cease, all sprites vanish, and clipping becomes highly unpredictable. In a scrolling game, the character (one hopes) will rarely reach the screen edge, so the worst consequence is occasional sudden monster pop-in. When the screen is locked, though, navigating its edges becomes a whole new adventure.

John’s Etcetera consists of three episodes. The first is shareware; the second and third are available to registered users. It is unclear whether Roland Ludlam still retains copies of the later episodes; if he doesn’t, again the chances are that they’re gone forever.

Jet Driver

Now we’re entering the weird and glitchy zone. Glitchier.

Whereas Matthew Groves’ Space Cadet and Mystery series were conceived and completed as discrete trilogies, Jet Driver seems like it was more of an ongoing process. The shareware version contains five tracks, and registration gets you a bunch more plus a bunch of new graphics and sound resources. As above, if it’s not in the shareware version then it’s probably gone.

Although Groves describes Jet Driver as a sort of early draft of Grand Theft Auto, perhaps a more apt description would be Spy Hunter without the shooting, or Bump ‘N Jump without the jumping. You can drive in four directions, or hit “B” to brake. Touch another vehicle and you instantly explode, Pole Position style. Run over children, and be rewarded with a sound clip of screaming.

Thanks to Game-Maker’s set map size, the tracks are all short. Some of the tracks take a swerve far enough to the side to allow the map to loop. Since Game-Maker’s sense of momentum is fairly limited, and the ability to combine moves is perhaps even more limited, driving isn’t as smooth as it might be. Thus those curves can be a bit of a problem to navigate. No one’s fault; the game is an experiment.

Jet Driver is awkward and experimental, and there may be reasons why it resembles no other Game-Maker game. Yet it’s also fascinating, and designed with the same clean style and genial spirit as Groves’ other games. And again, hey. Someone’s got to push the boundaries.

Mech

Roland Ludlam spent ages fiddling with Game-Maker’s powerful visual design tools and comparably little assembling those elements into complete games. That’s understandable; the best part of Game-Maker was always the design. The worst part was always the actual game engine.

Mech is less a concentrated and aborted attempt at a game as a test run for a new set of background tiles and for perhaps the most carefully and intricately animated character in a Game-Maker game. Ludlam expressed his frustration with the engine’s limitations: “Mech is just a demo — one level and I think a boss. It was sort of experimental and then I lost interest in it. It features 2 (count em!) 2 weapons, and also incredibly twitchy controls. So for Mech, there are actually 4 firing buttons. 2 for grenades, and 2 for lasers. Terrible.” Actually there are three (wonderfully animated) weapons, resulting in six attack keys. In another game that might seem excessive. Somehow when the main character is a bipedal mech, the controls make a kind of sense.

Although the levels are just sort of there — beyond a point the main level is clearly unfinished, and the boss level isn’t even completely playable — they’re also interesting and clever. Ludlam makes a good use of space, and of a very unusual palette comprised mostly of dusty pinks. You stride across a sort of painted desert, avoiding land mines that blast an actual hole in the ground, until you reach a waterfall. Descend the waterfall and avoid falling on sharp rocks at the bottom, and travel through a cavern full of acid. The cavern eventually loops under the waterfall, which feels not so much awkward as revelatory. “Oh, so that’s where I am!” you think. At the end of the cavern, dive into a deep pool. This takes you into an underwater passage full of fish and other appropriate creatures.

The next level, dedicated to the boss, looks potentially very clever. Since the character can’t shoot properly and therefore it is impossible to attack the boss, it’s unclear exactly what Ludlam had planned. Still, what’s there is neat — a huge, multi-segmented biomechanical creature embedded into an overhang.

If Ludlam had bothered to expand the prototype into a full game, Mech might have been one of the most striking designed with RSD’s toolset. As it is, it’s a tantalizing glimpse of what a person might do with the tools, given the right kind of talent.

Since you will not find these games elsewhere, you can download them all here. If you like what you see, by all means track down the authors and let them know. Many thanks to both of them for their time and effort in contributing to this research.

A few months ago we detailed some search methods for discovering unknown Game-Maker games in the wild Web; as examples we detailed two games: Roland Ludlam’s rather wonderful Hurdles, and Matthew Groves’ modestly charming Space Cadet. Since our interview with the one author went so well, we now turn our sights on the second, Web developer and aspiring Android coder Matthew D. Groves.

Hello! Are you the Matthew Groves who designed the Game-Maker game Space Cadet?

Wow, that’s something I haven’t thought about in a loooong time. Yeah, it’s me. I’ve lost all my copies, so if you have one could you send it this way?

Sure! You can download it here.

Oh my god, this is so cool. I haven’t seen any of that stuff in years! You are very generous with your review of Space Cadet. Even at 13 I had a sense for the limitations of Game-Maker, and looking back now, it was just not a good game. But thank you anyway.

Well, hey. It may not be the most ambitious or technically astounding thing around, but it does show a good sense of humor and judgment, which is more than you can say of many games. I don’t suppose that your other games still survive, then? Did you ever get around to the sequels?

I did, in fact, actually make Space Cadet 2 and Space Cadet 3, but no one ever paid the registration fee (not surprisingly). I also made both of those Mystery games, Mystery Mansion being shareware and Mystery Caves being the registered only. I also made a game called Jet Driver, which was, ironically enough, a very very primitive form of a Grand Theft Auto style racing game where you can run over pedestrians and what not, and I released that as shareware too.

Oh, and uh the Mystery games were very similar to Space Cadet. Overhead shooters, but the theme was that you were some sort of supernatural action hero in a haunted mansion with monsters and ghosts and what not. I believe at the end of Mystery Mansion, you found a secret entrance to a series of caves, which was the next game.

So I take it Mystery Caves was similar to Mansion, but with different backgrounds?

Mystery Caves was the same sort of game with different monsters and backgrounds (rocks instead of bricks mainly, because it’s a cave).

I also remembered that my dad and friends would often sell stuff at Hamfest and computer show flea markets, and I brought along a dozen copies of my shareware games to sell for $1 each (this was very common at those types of events). I think I actually did sell a few copies, so I did make a few dollars after all.

Did you sell Caves and the Space Cadet sequels at your garage sales too, or just the first episodes?

The sequels were sold mail-order only, and I never sold a single copy.

One other tidbit: CD-ROM shareware discs were common back in those days, just discs full of shareware games for like $10 or so, and Space Cadet and Mystery Mansion were both featured on one of those discs (I want to say “Game Head” volume 4 or something like that). I wasn’t paid for it, but I remember being very proud of it at the time.

Do you recall exactly when you designed Space Cadet? Presumably it was between 1991-1996, but could you narrow it down?

I actually still have my original Game-Maker box, so I dug it out to see what I could find. I have a couple letters of correspondence from Recreational Software. One of them is dated June 15, 1993, the other is February 15, 1994, which would put me at ages 13-14 when I did these. There’s also a receipt still in the box (why did I keep all this stuff?) dated 4/29/93.

What sort of correspondence did you have with RSD? Someone else recently suggested that the box contained a slip or letter soliciting responses from users. Do you recall how you encountered Game-Maker in the first place?

I believe I sent them a letter suggesting some new features, at least that’s what the response letter seems to indicate. I remember I had attempted more ambitious adventure games with dialog, inventory, voice acting, etc and what not, but Game-Maker was just not having it, so all I could think to do was send them a letter.

Did you have any contact at the time with other Game-Maker users, or encounter other Game-Maker games?

I remember finding a bunch of other Game-Maker games at some point, maybe when I first got an Internet connection, maybe on a BBS somewhere (maybe I convinced my parents to let me call the RSD BBS?), I forget, but I never had any contact with those authors. I remember I was hoping to learn some tricks on how to overcome Game-Maker’s limitations, but never really found anything.

Do you remember anything about the games that you stumbled over?

No I don’t really remember anything about them, other than I think they used some of the assets that came with Game-Maker (which I think everybody probably did). I burned through a lot of shareware in those days, so nothing is really springing to mind.

I notice that you’re still in software design in some form. Have you at all pursued game design since your Game-Maker years?

I am a programmer now, though I mostly lost interest in writing games as I matured and learned what professional game development was really like (and I also had no interest in moving to New York or LA or wherever). I mostly work on web applications and web sites, though I have been toying with mobile phone development, and I have an idea for an Android game that I’ve been toying with.

How far have you come with the Android design? Is it anything you want to talk about publicly?

I’ve only just recently gotten an Android phone, and I’ve been playing with some development tools (MonoDroid and PhoneGap), but as far as the game goes, it’s really just an idea at this point, and nothing more. Nothing earth-shattering, just a rehash of some other games that I enjoy. I would probably get a normal “app” done first, and then consider doing a game. I actually have an old friend from a previous job who is a great artist and designer, so it’s possible we could work together on something but it’s far far too early to say anything more than that.

so what led you back into game design (provisionally as it may be)?

Well, I just got my first Android phone, and I get hyped up whenever I get new gadgets. Though I’ve been very disappointed with the dev tools, Windows Phone 7 is so much easier to dev for (but I like Android as a platform better).

What’s frustrating you about the tools?

Well, I’m not a Java developer, but the Android SDK is Java-based. I have no desire to really learn Java, so I’m using other tools like PhoneGap and MonoDroid, but those tools are still in early versions, so they aren’t quite there yet. Sometimes there’s an error, but it doesn’t really identify what the error is, the debugging doesn’t work, or some feature really isn’t fully supported, etc. It’s a similar story for iPhone and Objective-C: developing is a painful process, not to mention I don’t own a Mac or an iPhone. Windows Phone 7 has the best dev story by far, in my opinion, but who knows if anyone will actually buy a Windows Phone, right?

And I suppose it’s more efficient to write directly for the phone’s specifications, rather than layer something like Flash on top of it. What attracts you about Droid in particular, compared to the other mobile platforms?

Well, a lot of reasons. I’m not an “Apple” guy, I really don’t “get” it, I guess, but I imagine that’s related to my thriftyness (or cheapness as my wife would say). I just don’t understand paying that much for a phone or PC, even if it never crashes or has some fancy industrial design. Windows Phone 7 is attractive, but ultimately it will be a similar thing: overpriced phone and/or contract with expensive data plan, plus it’s playing a lot of catch-up with the other OS’s in the market.

I’ve been using a Windows Mobile phone for years now, but its just too slow and outdated. Virgin Mobile just came out with these super cheap $25/month plans with no contract, and a mid-range spec Android phone to match. I’ll save close to $80 a month with Virgin (which covers the non-subsidized phone price in 4 months), and I’ll have all the features I need. So I guess it just comes down to me being a cheapskate.

I hear you about the apple thing. I always feel claustrophobic in their environments. So aside from Game-Maker and this new project, have you done any other game design?

Game-Maker actually wasn’t the first game-making program I used. I also bought QuestMaker, which was a Sierra/LucasArts style game-making program, but I had lots of trouble getting it to work very well, so I never released a game with that. I believe I found both of these programs through magazine advertisements, though maybe QuestMaker had a shareware demo or something. It must have been Compute magazine, which was my favorite magazine. I might even have that magazine sitting around somewhere too. I also wrote a couple games for ZZT, which had a *very* extensive gaming “editor” with it’s own object-oriented programming language. I did a lot of that sort of stuff, which is probably closer to “modding” as it’s called today than it is programming. Though ZZT definitely involved programming.

How would you compare your experience with Game-Maker to those other design tools?

Out of the ones I mentioned, ZZT gave me the richest experience as a designer/developer. The fact that the canvas was limited to ASCII characters and colors actually worked in my favor, since I’m not really much of an artist. The programming language, dialog options, level designer, etc, were very rich. Game-Maker was probably the best one I used with real graphics, and I had a lot of fun just playing around with pixels and sound effects. QuestMaker was pretty weak, and I don’t recall it being much fun.

I can actually see a bunch of ZZT in Space Cadet. Something about the use of space, and the flavor of exploration involved. What effect, if any, do you think your experiences with these tools may have had on your later software work?

Well, gaming was certainly a big part of what attracted me to computers and computer programming in the first place, but other than that I don’t think ZZT or Game-Maker really influenced my work today. If you mean what effect did ZZT have on my Game-Maker games, well I think I tried once or twice to “port” stuff I had done over to Game-Maker, but never really got anywhere. Other than that, the style of game was slightly similar (in that they involved shooting sometimes), but other than that pretty different.

What traditional videogames would you say had the biggest influence on you? You were fond of Space Quest, apparently.

Oh, probably the same stuff everyone played back when I was a kid. Sierra/LucasArts style games were my favorites (including Space Quest, of course) on PC, and I played a lot of NES/SNES games too (Mega Man, Mario, Zelda, etc). I played/modded a lot of X-Wing on PC, cuz I’m a big Star Wars nut too. Doom, Wolfenstein, all that stuff. I played pretty much anything that could run on my old 386 PC.

So cool. A pretty rounded picture, then. Do you have any final thoughts about your experiences with Game-Maker?

My only final thought is that while it’s kinda embarrassing to have these games around again 15+ years later, I had a lot of fun making them and using Game-Maker.

Following the interview, we received in the mail a bundle of floppy disks containing all of Matthew Groves’ surviving Game-Maker material. Amongst that material are two of the games we discussed. Following some adventures with ancient computer hardware, we managed to extract the data for preservation. Come back later this week to see the results.

The Martins and their burgeoning demo group known as PPP Team seized Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker with a ferocity and a measured European flavor of design. Over two or three years they assembled upwards of 24 games, each more ambitious than the last. Since they were developing with an unlicensed copy of Game-Maker, most of those games were strictly for their own entertainment — which may to some extent explain the energy that went into them.

There are three branches of PPP Team software. In our previous article we discussed their one-off, often experimental titles. These games tend to be both character driven and strongly inspired by Commodore and shareware design sensibilities. One of those games, Blork Carnage, introduces a character named Jack Booster. This game and this character serve as the roots for the second of PPP Team’s branches — their defining franchises.

If the one-off games housed a wealth of interesting whims, it’s PPP Team’s series that received the bulk of their effort and originality. Of those, both the most significant and the most varied series are spun off from the Duke Nukem styled Blork Carnage. A third, early series also showed itself during the team’s Game-Maker era, to further build off one of those spin-offs. We’ll start with the series that more or less equates with PPP Team, in terms both of iconography and of their design sensibility.

Badman

Our eponymous hero is basically a chubby, inept satire of DC’s Batman — or at least that’s how he started off. Badman’s first role was as an incidental enemy in Blork Carnage. Yet after doodling the character for a while, he captured the Martins’ imaginations and rather like Fonzie on Happy Days, he soon became the center of PPP Team’s attentions. Other ties to Jack Booster include the overall art design and the antagonist Seb Valenti (who served a more nebulous role in Blork Carnage).

The first Badman game is a rough assembly of materials — some borrowed, some original — into a fairly genial Tim Sweeney flavored action platformer (complete with music lifted from Jill of the Jungle). Maybe with a whiff of Mighty Bomb Jack. Notably, Badman avoids feeling like a typical Game-Maker game. The character’s movements are perfectly married to the level design, and both the character and backdrop strive less to show off than to achieve a certain consistency of style and tone. Each level has its own fairly original theme. Instead of ice and fire worlds, we have blue skies and desert caves, a rooftop stage, a Japan world (where Badman trades his gun for a samurai sword), a Lego dungeon, a haunted castle, a prison camp, and — well, a Peach the Lobster zone. Very little in this game was just slapped together; you get the sense that every tile, every monster placement was agonized over.

With Badman II: He’s Back Again!, the series really finds its identity. All of the visuals are original, and indeed both clean and distinctive. All of the sprites, including the character, have received an upgrade. Then after the presentation ropes you in, you start to appreciate the scale of the thing. The game includes sophisticated boss battles, involving moving and shooting villains and complex solutions. There are all manner of hidden secrets, including a warp zone. And finally we find the most clever credit sequence we’ve seen in years, calling to mind the Zelda inventory roll and all those NES instruction booklets that named and illustrated all of the game’s monsters and their personalities. For all of Game-Maker’s limitations, Badman II is about as good a demonstration as you’ll find of its latent potential.

If Badman II was sort of the Sonic 2 to Badman‘s Sonic the Hedgehog — new sidekick and all — the unfinished Badman III: Badboys Are Back! is PPP Team’s Sonic 3 & Knuckles. This game is ridiculously huge — so much so that its 42 level nodes account for only the first world and a half or so. Even in its unfinished state the game is so vast and complicated that it’s difficult to take in. Again the visuals have received a total upgrade, this time with the benefit of Deluxe Paint gradients (lending the game that Sonic 3 flavor of 3D shading). Now the game gives a choice of two characters, each of whom can interact with and navigate the levels very differently. Badman himself controls much more smoothly, and has more abilities. PPP Team included some in-game cutscenes, and even managed to compose a bit of original music. Overall Badman III gives an imposing sense of command and professionalism. Had they ever finished the game, PPP Team would have created a monster the likes of which rarely even saw a commercial release. This is proto-Cave Story material here.

Panzer

If Badman progresses like Sonic, Panzer develops more like Ikari Warriors. Accordingly the Panzer series is maybe less iconic than Badman. What it shares with that series is a refusal to be bound by the normal Game-Maker tropes and limitations. Panzer goes further, though, in refusing to be bound even by its own format.

In a broad sense Panzer 1945 feels like your typical overhead view tank game. What makes it unusual from a Game-Maker perspective is its Robotron-style controls. One wonders, given the key binding limitations, why more games didn’t hit on this control scheme. Granted in this case they’re all cramped over by the numerical keypad, making fast reactions rather difficult. Yet once you get used to them it’s impressive how much nonsense four-way firing can resolve.

Finally we see a fast-paced action game with nuanced player responses. Furthermore the exploration-based design melds a sense of danger with one of ownership. When you clear an area, it stays clear — yet there’s no telling what the next screen will bring, and whether you will find all your progress undone. Though on paper it may sound dubious, in practice you get some of that unfolding physical mystery of the Zelda overworld crossed with the action of an arcade title. Granted there’s only the one level, and the graphics and sound feel very tentative, as if the designer was unsure whether to fully commit to the game. Still, what’s here is pretty enlightening.

Panzer 2019 takes the series in a different direction entirely. It may not be obvious, but ostensibly the tanks in these games are all piloted by our friend Jack Booster. Following his trip back to 1945, Jack slips back to the future and swaps his ride for a futuristic single-trigger cannon. The new tank zips smoothly along the neon and chrome style backdrops, blasting monsters and aliens with a tap of the space bar. As refreshing as the first game feels from a Game-Maker perspective, 2019 is a relief from the aimless plodding of its predecessor. You’ve got a corridor, you zoom down it. You’ve got a crossroads, you make a decision. You’ve got a threat, you hit fire. It’s all very simple now. And as far as Game-Maker based shooters go, they don’t get much better.

Panzer III takes another sharp turn to the left, and switches to an apparently Metal Slug inspired side-scrolling format. As with the third Badman, the game is perhaps overambitious and left unfinished. Whereas with Badman the problem was more of hardware failure and required effort, with Panzer III it’s an unfortunate (and for PPP Team rare) clash of concept against the engine’s limitations. Basically Panzer III depends on diagonal surfaces that RSD’s engine cannot supply, and no amount of tweaking or fudging can blur those edges. What the game does bring us is our first glimpse of Jack Booster in the driver’s seat, and an appealing flat-shaded cartoon style. Maybe a tank isn’t an ideal character for this design, but it’s a very nice setting. Which brings us to our final entry for the day.

Calimero

I’m not as clear on this as I might be, but I gather that the first Calimero game, Calimero against the Black Empire, was the Martins’ first ever attempt at a platformer, developed in BASIC some four or five years before they discovered Game-Maker. The game involved a black-feathered bird wearing half an egg as a helmet.

Later, at the height of their Game-Maker career, they chose to take advantage of a design cul-de-sac and insert the character into the skeleton of Panzer III. The result, Calimero II, comes off as sort of a cross between Wonder Boy and Sonic the Hedgehog, with maybe a bit of a Codemasters flavor. Although again they chose not to pursue the game to completion, the game does exhibit several advanced — or at least fascinating — techniques. To facilitate a Sonic-style vertical spring, they employed a complex lock-and-key system that momentarily flipped the gravity on all the background blocks. The character can throw apples along a wave pattern, and can do it quickly enough to establish a sort of an unbroken wave beam.

Jumping is an occasional issue in PPP Team’s older games; the levels demand a precision that the character animations barely supply, forcing the player to repeat certain jumps over and over. Calimero takes this frustration to a new level; often it’s unclear whether certain jumps are possible, and the answer only supplies itself when one realizes there there are no other routes. With a bit of adjustment, and some improved jumping behavior, this game could have really gone somewhere. You can feel that this game was never a priority, though — not in the same way as the above series.

Epilogue

Although we’re done with PPP Team for the moment, you will notice a dangling end. I said that these series form the second out of three branches, which leaves one more branch to go. We’ll get to that, presently. When we do, you’ll understand why it sets apart from the others.

In the meanwhile you can download the above games here. Try them out in DOSBox. If you’re running Windows 7 or Vista, you may have a few sound issues. If so, I’m afraid I don’t know how to resolve those. There’s probably a workaround. There usually is. Go ask one of your IRC cronies.

Following our interview with Orb author Joshua Turcotte, we turn our information thresher to another isolated game, the closest that Game-Maker ever got to a respectable scrolling shooter, Hurdles. The game is short on presentation and deep in ingenuity; it does what it sets out to, and then moves on. To contrast with that focus, its author Roland Ludlam is something of a polymath: hacker, musician, illustrator, photographer, poet.

Most recently, Ludlam has co-founded a small game design company, Studio Walljump, with the aim of producing a new puzzle-music game for WiiWare. We caught him with a dual-edged interview; come for the moldy game, and get a preview for the bargain.

Taking a shot here, and assuming that this address works. Are you the Roland Ludlam who designed the Game-Maker game Hurdles, about fifteen years ago?

Roland Ludlam: Hi, yup, you found me! I have to tell you that was probably the last e-mail subject I was ever expecting to see. It’s not every day someone dusts off a 17-year-old shareware game that takes about 2-1/2 minutes to complete. I was always way more focused on designing level tiles than on actually finishing anything.

Brings back some good memories, though — I used to adore Game Maker. I must have dozens of unfinished games collecting dust on a 512MB hard drive somewhere.

Ha, that’s swell! I’ve been pulling together as much information as I can about Game-Maker, and tracking down and talking to as many old users as I can. I know it was ages ago, but do you remember how you first encountered Game-Maker?

RL: I asked for Game Maker for Christmas when I was 12 — it must have been in a catalog I had lying around or something. No idea which one at this point. At any rate, it was one of my favorite Christmas presents of all time for sure. That was (I think) the original version of GM. Several years later I purchased Game Maker 3.0, but most of my time and energy was spent on the first one, because at that point Windows was starting to take over and I eventually moved up to using Klik & Play, which was a totally killer game dev. environment for Windows. A lot harder to draw level tiles for 640×480 though.

So you used Game-Maker through all its phases of development. Just clarifying the point — did you move on to Klik & Play when it became clear that RSD was no longer going to be supporting Game-Maker, or was the transition already happening by the time that 3.0 came out?

RL: For me, the switch to Klik & Play was motivated more by frustration with Game-Maker’s logic & flexibility than anything else. I was feeling more and more like the kinds of games and ideas that I had were just flat out impossible with GM. The upgrade to 3.0 was welcome and improved things a little, but it still felt very 1-dimensional to me. It’s funny — one of my other “complete” game maker games was a remake of Pharaoh’s Tomb by Apogee Software, which was my favorite shareware title (so much so that I registered it!).

That’s really interesting. I haven’t seen many puzzle games made with Game-Maker. How closely did you imitate the original?

RL: Truthfully it was incredibly difficult. The size of the tiles in Game-Maker and the inflexibility to change that made it pretty hard to do things like spikes with decent collision detection. It was kind of fun, though. I ended up making a game that played like the original Pharaoh’s Tomb, but didn’t actually mimic the level design exactly. It was probably way too hard though. If I can dig it up, I’ll send it over to you so I can get sued by Apogee.

Anyway, it was a serious endeavor in GM to figure out how to restrict the screen so it didn’t scroll — Pharaoh’s Tomb was based around fixed one-screen puzzles. But more than that, there really wasn’t any provision for writing sophisticated logic or control setups with GM. Klik & Play had a very intelligent and powerful logic writing system based on events and reactions, and truthfully, I credit it with properly introducing me to how programming works.

Klik & Play’s biggest weakness was that it didn’t support scrolling very well (at least not when it was first introduced), so that was unfortunate. But it had much more sophisticated collision detection, excellent audio support, mouse control, the list goes on and on. I must say I always enjoyed developing graphics and level artwork much more with GM, though. The simplicity of the palette / tile editor was just the right amount of structure. Klik & Play was a major purchase for me — I think that I actually saved my money and ponied up $50 for it. At that point I was very sure of what I needed to move ahead, and the features that I had read about in the catalog I had were exactly what I was looking for.

After Klik & Play, I started programming in Flash, and then moved onto DarkBASIC and Blitz BASIC 3D some years later. Blitz BASIC 3D is probably still my favorite environment for game development — it is the most powerful, straightforward framework. Once you’ve made the jump over to being OK with writing some code, anyway. The prototype for Liight that we pitched Nintendo with in order to get our WW license was actually written in BB3D, and it was really sweet!

I’ve got to ask, how do you pronounce Liight? Just as if it had one “I”? l337? Licht?

RL: Nick always just says “light”, so that’s it I guess.

Tell me a bit about Liight — the basic concept, and where it came from.

RL: Liight was a collaborative work that I undertook with a high school buddy of mine. We were chatting on the phone one day and he mentioned to me that he wanted to prototype a game idea that he had and then try to use it as a jumping off point for starting his own games studio and trying to get it onto a console. He didn’t realize that I’d been programming as a hobby using Blitz3D for quite some time, and I offered to help him out, hoping we could work together some.

Liight is a puzzle game that focuses on color, forcing you to combine colored spotlights together to illuminate sensors with the correct (or no) light. It seems very simple at first, but gets punishingly hard in the later levels. Nick designed the game, the graphics and the original idea, and I implemented it and provided some feedback about things and ideas. One of the best aspects of the game is the integration of music. Each sensor on the map is assigned a loop of music, and when you solve them the music is added to the mix. So as you solve a puzzle, you’ll eventually get a really good techno groove going. It’s a neat effect.

I’d say that Liight is all about a sort of soothing, fun playing experience that combines really slick visuals and sounds. Rather than anxiety provoking puzzle games, or twitchy action games, it’s more of a sensory experience. It’s also incredibly original — I don’t think there’s anything else quite like it.

I see that you’re including a sort of level editor with the game.

RL: We did add the ability to create puzzles — actually we started with building the editor feature so that Nick could even use it to design the levels that are present in “Solve” mode. Using WiiConnect24, you can share your puzzles with friends too — I hope people do that!

Lastly, we added an arcade mode called “Nonstop” which is like the polar opposite of “Solve” mode. In Nonstop, you are given a steady stream of sensors that drop onto the board and you have to light them correctly for five seconds before they disappear. If too many build up, you lose. Nonstop focuses on scoring — by lighting multiple sensors at once, using all your lights, chaining things together, you can build your score very quickly. In my opinion it’s completely ingenious, and I hope that people will spend some time figuring it out.

I’ve seen some players play for ten minutes straight just staying alive, and wind up after that time with a score of 10,000. And then you watch someone play for points who ‘gets’ it, like Nick, and he’ll have 200,000 points in the first 25 seconds. After ten minutes he might have 2,000,000 points. The subtlety and difficulty of nonstop mode, combined with it’s fast-paced heart rate raising gameplay should really appeal to hardcore gamers, whereas the puzzle mode of Liight is much easier for all types of gamers to enjoy.

What was the process like, of prototyping and pitching the game to Nintendo?

RL: The prototype flew together — Blitz3D is a fabulous language for writing games and is almost too easy. We ended up going overboard and even added Wiimote support using Bluetooth and GlovePIE, which can translate the Wiimote instructions into joystick / keyboard / mouse actions. So the prototype played exactly as we anticipated it would on the Wii hardware. Nick had formerly worked for NOA, so he had some good connections there and pitched them on it. They were really positive about it and ended up granting us our dev license.

What did Nick do at NOA?

RL: Nick worked mainly as a interface designer. He did a bunch of menus and interface designs, including helmets & huds for Metroid: Prime, etc. I don’t know if he still does, but after he left he did some contract work for them on various projects and stuff.

From a development perspective, [Liight] presented some really unique challenges, and that was really my favorite part of it. The engine that drives it and makes it work was so much fun to design, because the lights themselves all needed to be able to cast shadows and accurately illuminate objects and determine what they had illuminated. After that was all working, I ended up re-architecting it several times because of performance as well — I found that certain operations on the Wii were much more expensive performance-wise than on the PC, so I spent weeks lying awake at night trying to figure out different ways to handle the light effect.

The way we landed on is really smooth and looks great, I think. It was also several times faster than the initial version! I’m probably boring you now, but I could go on and on about Liight — it’s been so incredible to work on a project like this, and I have been so impressed with Nick’s ability to take a simple idea and turn it into something so professional and fun to play. If you haven’t already, you can read more about Liight on WiiWare World (Nintendo Life) too. I hope you’ll get to play it after it’s out!

So what influence, if any, has your experience with Game-Maker had on your later design work?

RL: I would say the biggest influence and take-away for me from GM was getting involved and investing serious amounts of time into graphics and tile creation, animation, etc. At that time there really weren’t very many good tools (that were inexpensive) for doing that sort of thing, and without programming experience, I wasn’t about ready to start coding my own game in C. I designed literally thousands of tiles and tile sets, etc., many of which were never even used for anything — it was just fun to do. As to actual game design takeaways, I don’t think there’s anything specific that I would cite. More the fact that I learned that I enjoyed making games much much more than I ever did playing them! Still do.

Beyond RSD’s demo games, did you chance to study anyone else’s Game-Maker games?

RL: Afraid not! Maybe one or two that I might have stumbled on, but none that I can remember. Both GM and Klik & Play were pretty much lone-soldier projects for me. Part of what I find so much fun and engaging about working in Blitz3D is the community. It is incredibly active and helpful. I actually continued to solicit help with programming questions and approaches in the B3d boards during the Wii project long after I’d stopped working in B3D simply because there were so many smart and helpful people there!

Back then there wasn’t really any opportunity for community around it other than local BBSes, which is how Hurdles somehow found its way out into the world.

So you were a part of BBS culture. I figured as much, given the amazing FILE_ID.DIZ included with Hurdles:

HURDLES: Outstanding New Arcade Game!! Written by 13 Year Old Wiz Kid, Roland Ludlam! 256 Color VGA Graphics, Excellent Soundtrack, With Sound Blaster Support! Best New Game!

Did you ever dial up the Frontline BBS (which served as a sort of semi-official
Game-Maker distribution site)?

RL: Ha ha! That .DIZ file was written by the sysop to the local BBS. I interacted a little with a few of the sysops in the area and on a whim, asked if I could upload my game to the user area so that other users could play it. He was delighted and prepared that file. Little did I know it would then make its way onto shareware CDs. I think he eventually uploaded it to the Internet as well — he was the first person I was aware of having an Internet connection. He used it to download the latest shareware games so that we could get them.

I don’t believe I ever logged onto the Frontline BBS, but I would have liked to, if I had known about it. I was sort of on my own as far as GM was concerned — I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone else who used it (until now). You’re making me want to dig up some of my old projects for a little nostalgia. That will be fun!

Was Hurdles the only game that you distributed at the time?

RL: I think so. I might have released a few others, but at that point, BBSes in my area were closing left and right because of the Internet coming to town, so all of that activity sort of started to go away. I also began focusing much more on graphic design and web design, and it was years before I developed games again!

It’s a curious game, as it plays very much like a shooter — except without the shooting. Which makes it feel like a sort of side-scrolling F-Zero or OutRun. If you can recall, where did the design come from? Was it another response to the engine’s limitations?

RL: OK, so here’s the confession: the Hurdles idea was stolen completely from the speeder level stage in Battletoads from the NES. I’m (still!) a huge NES fan, and have to say that NES games are my favorite games. Battletoads had this great area where you did exactly what I tried to mimic in Hurdles for a short while. I loved it and thought it deserved to be expanded into more than just a tiny sub-stage.

Unfortunately, I was totally bummed about the fact that Game Maker’s map size only allowed for a short level in Hurdles before it would wrap around on itself. If I had my way the levels would have been much longer. Oh well! I put the points in because after I finished it initially, I found that people would just cheat and buzz through the level on the top or bottom and avoid the obstacles. Rather than try to prevent that and make them die, I decided to provide incentive to ‘do it right’.

Something that just occurred to me is that you could have introduced a sloping section to allow the level to wrap around to the second “floor” (if you will).

RL: I totally made a level that did exactly that! But ended up tossing it out for some reason. I think it might have been possible to see the previous area you’d passed through down below or something. At any rate, it was a good idea. Now it seems so weird that that was a limitation of the game engine. But as you’ve said, part of the brilliance of GM was that it drew enough boundaries that even kids (like me) could use it and learn to make it work. And I think that problem solving is always the most satisfying aspect of programming or creating anything, so you might as well sell it as a feature!

I’ve also got to mention the sound test, which on the one hand is an awesome touch. Then one realizes that all of the music is borrowed (thanks to RSD’s weird choice of music format), so it’s… kind of funny to see this gallery for it.

RL: Wish I could remember this. I think I did it mainly as a joke. I was just tinkering with GM and wanted to try to fake a mouse pointer, so that’s what I did it for. I know the CMF’s were cheesy, but as you said, we weren’t left with many options. If it’s any consolation to you many of my later projects (not using Game-Maker) contained original scores — I love to make music too, and feel like it’s one of the most important parts of video games (and often overlooked).

It really is. So I take it you never figured out the CMF file format? I think I only know of three or four people who ever managed to write original music in that format.

RL: I don’t think I ever invested much in the CMF format. I was mainly using MOD trackers back then, and they were so much better than CMF I wasn’t really interested in figuring out more for the CMF format.

What sorts of scores did you write? These were to later games of yours?

RL: I write lots of music — I’ve played guitar and written songs, played in bands, and so on since almost as far back as my Game-Maker days! But I had so much fun writing electronic music for Blitz3D stuff too. I sometimes wish I’d tried to do that for work instead of programming & design.

Did Hurdles ever have a title screen or story? Because the version I’ve got is lacking those.

RL: Nope. I made a few other games that had stories, but Hurdles was just really about the arcade gameplay!

Have you been paying attention to recent trends in game design? A bunch of small-scale and indie games, like Passage and Braid and Pac-Man Championship Edition, have been stripping away the last 25 years of clutter, and studying how to express ideas through simple game mechanics.

RL: Yeah, I think that this new trend is so exciting. Not to mention stuff like Mega Man 9 for WiiWare. So cool. I can appreciate what people like about huge immersive games like Half-Life, but for me there’s nothing quite like playing a round of Contra, Double Dragon II, or The Adventures of Lolo. The list goes on and on! I think that there were so many great games for the NES — a lot of bad ones, but so many good ones. I play my NES more than my Wii.

I’ve been talking with one old user who has been working on porting some of his games to the Nintendo DS. Would you consider going back and tinkering with some of your old projects again? Even now Hurdles feels pretty fresh, and could maybe stand an update.

RL: Nick and I have talked about DS development and I would love to do some of that! I doubt I’ll go back to Hurdles, though. Nick and I have a few ideas for what’s next, but nothing totally solid yet! It would be pretty awesome to remake Hurdles in B3D though — and I doubt it would take long.

You can ogle at Ronald Ludlam’s current work at Studio Walljump. Alternatively, you can download his teenage work here.

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.

If you’ve been following our Game-Maker Archive series, you may recall a swell little Metroid-style adventure called Orb: The Derelict Planet. Thrown into an alien environment, you wander vast caverns, collect upgrades, and traverse hidden passages to deactivate an ancient, killer computer. As one of the better Game-Maker games, Orb has always been a mystery. It seemed to have been developed in a vacuum, and with an unusual amount of planning. It then appeared out of nowhere on the Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM, the only known game by its author. After a bit of detective work we managed to track down that author, the writer and illustrator Joshua Eric Turcotte.

Hey, shot in the dark. There seem to be several Joshua Turcottes in Maine, curiously enough. Are you the guy behind Orb: The Derelict Planet?

Joshua E. Turcotte: Yeah, actually… we’re talking about the little glass-encased eyeball dude bouncing around a dozen or so sidescroller levels, no?

Right. Metroid-style level design. Very effuse text files.

JET: Hah, not sure how to take that; I made that when I was in 10th grade, and rather quickly lost all my files after the shareware CD makers I submitted it to vanished off the face of the earth (trying to call them got me a college dorm room instead.) My mind would explode a little bit to discover there was a working copy floating around out there somewhere.

Well, cracka-boom.

Your game was on the v3.0 CD-ROM, in the shareware directory. For what it’s worth, considering we’re all quite different people now, I think it’s one of the best Game-Maker games I’ve played. I don’t suppose you’ve any remaining artifacts of the time?

JET: That’s something to see; I’m almost mortified at the ‘aaalriiight’ and ‘theres another one’ sound effects, but still I’d say its not bad for a teen’s work. And no, I wish I still had stuff remaining… I’ve lost entire 3DCG shorts from my college days, too.

I know, right? There was a time when the mere presence of digitized sound seemed impressive. “ELF NEEDS FOOD BADLY” and all. I know it was ages ago, but do you have any recollection of your experience with Game-Maker? How you came across it, if you had any contact with other users, and so on?

JET: You know, I’m not sure… I recall they were based out of New Hampshire, though I don’t know if that had much to do with how I found them. I don’t even remember how the program worked, anymore. (memory is not my best strong suit.) I know I used a lot of graph paper to map out the entire project, even down to goals, benchmarks, etc, and used these to deliver the product in pretty much exactly 10 months. Thereafter I started working on a sequel which I abandoned after the first level in favor of ‘another world’ of fiction which I STILL tinker with to this day.

There is an ancient chest at my parent’s house that may contain mythical remains of productions past (including ORB, perhaps) but I did just find an oaktag folder here (work’s yanked be down to D.C. against my better judgement.) that contains another complete mapping out of an unrelated game concept called Cube; some 25 or 50 4-room levels inside of each of which is a puzzle to be solved given objects available. I may have even detailed that before ORB, and yet here it is.

Old design sketches and diagrams are good stuff. For my part, I found Game-Maker in an ad in the back of Videogames & Computer Entertainment.

JET: I suppose it is possible that I saw it PCM, but they might have gone out of business before then, I cannot recall for sure. It’s also possible that I saw some other demo/half-game made using game-maker on those old night-owl shareware CDs that I tried to get ORB put out on in turn. I recall seeing another game on the shelves once called O.R.B., though it really had nothing at all to do with mine. Made me think of it, though.

I think something just clicked, that I didn’t pick up on before. You’re saying that Orb is set within what is now a sort of larger mythos? Also, you were surprised that the game was still bouncing around out there. Were you aware that the game was included on the Game-Maker 3.0 CD?

JET: Actually no to both counts; ORB predated the new mythos, I’ve just been working on the new mythos ever since; it kinda takes various human mythologies and weaves out a plausible history to given then their ‘kernels of truth’ before extrapolating forward into our future, etc… With Earth In Mind and To Gather Stars are set in this “universe”, but one might not know that, since they are set so far apart from one another.

With Earth In Mind got written but is in dire need of real editing (before I add more by way of sequel) and TGS needs a new design doc something fierce. It takes hints from ye olde Starflight, and I see it being delivered via flash or HTML5 such that it can be plugged into Facebook or updated casually smart phones and the like (while being secretly educational and being the first real product in the setting that’s been on the back burner since ORB.)

I recall [RSD] asking if they could use my game, I just did not know how that turned out. Better than I thought, it seems… I sorta wish now that I’d handed the whole thing over to them as freeware instead.

Okay, I see. This Cube game — did you ever get around to inputting that, or did it only ever exist on paper? And how did the RSD thing come about? Did they contact you? Were you already in contact with them?

JET: Nope, never got around to inputting; it’s just miraculous to me that I still have all the designs for it kicking around in an oaktag folder, especially after so many moves… there it is, intact. Looking back I’d probably find many of the ‘puzzles’ to be more or less, you know, young-teen level, but even so.

As for [RSD], I don’t recall; I know they asked, but I’m not sure if it was after I’d contacted them about something else, or maybe even submitted it unsolicited or based on a general printed invite (if you’d like to ____ send it to ____ sort of thing.)

That’s interesting. Now that you mention it, I may recall a leaflet or letter suggesting that users send in their work if they’d like RSD to eyeball it. That would clarify some things. How extensive is the Cube documentation?

JET: Cube‘s documentation details a grid of 20×20 rooms, with 4 rooms per ‘level’ (looking a bit like Tetris pieces on the map.) Each level has a puzzle, some items, etc… and some of those carry over from level to level. So there’s a map, there’s a handwritten page for every level, every object is detailed, there’s even lists of graphics and animations needed. I’m not entirely sure this was designed with Game-Maker in mind, though it might have been.

That sounds pretty detailed, then. If you remember, was the design process for Orb at all similar? Orb’s design especially reminds of Metroid II, for the Game Boy, where you spend a huge amount of time rolling around confined spaces with the spider-ball power-up. Do you recall what games, if any, may have influenced the design?

JET: Orb was similar, yes… minus embellishment and maybe corrections along the way, I had the whole thing laid out and a series of goals that I met in about 10 months. Worked out rather well. And yes, I did have Metroid for the Game Boy (I don’t recall if it was II or not, but the opening scene with the ship on the ground seems awfully familiar to me. I do also recall the music for the ending sequence of the game was kind of haunting… wish I had it kicking around.) Other than that, I don’t identify with Metroid really… The influence had to be rather immediate. My strongest influence comes from ye olde 1986 game, Starflight, really.

When you say it had to be rather immediate, you mean you must have just played Metroid recently for it to have stuck in your head?

JET: Yeah, I had to have played that game somewhere in the same ballpark of time… or maybe not. I seem to recall having bought the Game Boy back when I still lived in the Bangor area, which would be 1991 or previous. But ORB would have gone underway in 1993.

I think the amount of planning comes through in the finished game. There are a few oddities that I’ve always wondered about, though. Why the eyball in a glass orb? And what’s the deal with the plant roots that the player can climb on, with a little difficulty? It’s almost like a secret solution to vertical navigation.

JET: I don’t recall why the eyeball; Probably came from frustration with the size of sprites in the game. Roots may have been either planned for in some spots or added later when the game physics just wouldn’t allow someone to make a crucial jump. I recall somewhere in the later levels there was one spot that really gave me a haaaard time when playing it. It was possible, but it took a lot of tries to get the jump just right.

From what you say, it sounds like you did in fact finish the full game, beyond the shareware demo. Did anyone ever register?

JET: Yeah, the whole thing was made. Pretty sure it ended up with 12 levels. The last boss was some giant computer thing with conveyors pulling the character one way or another, and clamps and spikes and such so that you had to concentrate as much on staying alive as you did on having to hit just the right part of the machine that would set off my little ‘chain-reaction’ large-(multisprite)-monster solution.

That sounds pretty great. Muti-sprite monsters were a fun kind of headache. It’s always neat to see how different people get around a system’s limitations. Aside from the demo games, did you have exposure to any other Game-Maker games besides your own?

JET: The one with the guy swimming around shipwrecks came with GM when I got it.

Barracuda, yeah. I thought I remembered that coming with Game-Maker, on a separate disk. I wasn’t sure, though. I take it you didn’t make use of the Frontline BBS? It was based in Kennebunkport, so it probably would have been a long-distance call. The guy behind that game was also in charge of the BBS.

JET: Nope; I was net-ignorant back then. No, to answer an earlier question, I never got anything back from the game. I set off a copy to [RSD] and a copy to what was then called ‘Night Owl,’ a shareware CD maker… that was the last I heard about ORB till you. Like I said, I’d almost rather have sent the whole package off as freeware.

Hey, I might as well ask — before I dredged all this up again, when’s the last time that you thought about Game-Maker, or Orb?

JET: I don’t think I’d thought about Game-Maker since I got into my new ‘universe’ really; though I probably thought about ORB maybe once or twice a year since then. I saw another game hit the shelves once with a similar name, so I couldn’t help but think of it then… Early 2000s, I’d have to guess.

Have you looked at any other design tools, like Mark Overmars’ Game Maker? (No hyphen.) That’s a kind of hot thing in the indie development scene these days.

JET: I’ve really not spent any time looking at any game design engines lately. In some ways, probably because I expect my requirements to be so different that no engine is up to it. TGS 1st draft I doubt will be all that amazing LOOKING, but if one thing has become evident in recent years, game mechanics trump graphics. If it takes off an earns its own revenue, then I can worry about making it look like EVE Online or something like that. First, gameplay.

We do seem to be passing a threshold where people are finally getting over the visuals, even adopting low-tech presentations to affect a certain style. Have you been paying attention to the sort of deconstructionist designs that have been popping up lately, like Pac-Man Championship Edition and Braid?

JET: Granted, I do like visuals… EVE for example is very pretty… but it also has good game mechanics. I keep going back to things like Civ3, though, due to mechanics more than visuals. Game’s gotta be fun, first. And no, I’ve really not paid anywhere near enough attention to anything related to my aspirations, largely because the day job takes its toll. If I ever want to wrest myself of it and do this stuff full time, though, I probably should delve more, rather than just daydream, doodle, and occasionally tinker. TGS, for example, needs the ORB/CUBE treatment in terms of design documentation.

Portrait provided by Katherine Morgan. You can browse some of Joshua Turcotte’s portfolio at Deviantart.