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''Game-Maker'' (aka ''RSD Game-Maker'') is an
MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...
-based suite of game design tools, accompanied by demonstration games, produced between 1991 and 1995 by the
Amherst Amherst may refer to: People * Amherst (surname), including a list of people with the name * Earl Amherst of Arracan in the East Indies, a title in the British Peerage; formerly ''Baron Amherst'' * Baron Amherst of Hackney of the City of London, ...
,
New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...
based Recreational Software Designs and sold through direct mail in the US by KD Software. Game-Maker also was sold under various names by licensed distributors in the UK, Korea, and other territories including Captain GameMaker (Screen Entertainment, UK) and Create Your Own Games With GameMaker! (Microforum, Canada).G. Andrew Stone
"RSD GameMaker"
/ref> Game-Maker is notable as one of the first complete game design packages for DOS-based PCs, for its fully mouse-driven graphical interface, and for its early support for
VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can now ...
graphics,
Sound Blaster Sound Blaster is a family of sound cards designed by Singaporean technology company Creative Technology (known in the US as Creative Labs). Sound Blaster sound cards were the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system pl ...
sound, and full-screen four-way scrolling. Primary distribution for Game-Maker was through advertisements in the back of PC and game magazines such as ''
Computer Gaming World ''Computer Gaming World'' (CGW) was an American computer game magazine published between 1981 and 2006. One of the few magazines of the era to survive the video game crash of 1983, it was sold to Ziff Davis in 1993. It expanded greatly through ...
''Computer Gaming World
"Issue #114 (January 1994), page #209"
/ref> and ''
VideoGames & Computer Entertainment ''VideoGames & Computer Entertainment'' (abbreviated as ''VG&CE'') was an American magazine dedicated to covering video games on computers, home consoles and arcades. It was published by LFP, Inc. from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s. Offe ...
''. At release Game-Maker was priced at $89, and shipped on 5.25" diskette with seven or eight demonstration or tutorial games. Later releases were less expensive, and shipped on
CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...
with dozens of sample games and a large selection of extra tools and resources. After some consultation with the user base, on 12 July 2014 original coder Andy Stone released the Game-Maker 3.0
source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...
on
GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
, under the
MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...
.G. Andrew Stone
"Recreational Software Design's GameMaker product, released in 1994"
/ref>


Construction

Game-Maker consists of a text-mode wrapper, tying together a collection of
WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...
design tools. The tools produce proprietary resources that are compiled together and parsed with RSD's custom XFERPLAY game engine. The design tools include: * Palette Designer – for designing and editing custom 256-color .PAL palette files (for sprites, color #255 is clear) * Block Designer – for designing 20x20 pixel .BBL background tiles and .CBL/.MBL animation frames for characters and monsters * Character Maker – for animating and sequencing .CHR character sprites * Monster Maker – for animating and sequencing .MON "monster" (i.e., non-player) sprites * Map Maker – for designing 100x100 tile .MAP files (10 screens tall; 6-1/4 screens across) * Graphics Image Reader – for importing visuals from .GIF files, produced with external painting programs * Sound Designer – for designing PC speaker .SND files, assigning Sound Blaster .VOC samples, and formatting .CMF music files * Integrator – for compiling and organizing resources together into a playable .GAM file Game-Maker involves no scripting language; all design tools use a mouse-driven 320x200 VGA display, with a shared logic and visual theme. Users draw background tiles pixel by pixel in an enlarged window, and can pull tiles from the palette to arrange in a "sandbox" area. A further menu allows users to set physical properties—solidity, gravity, animation, various counter values—for each block. The user draws maps by pulling blocks from the palette and painting with them using simple paintbrush, line, shape, and fill tools. Characters can have up to 15 keyboard commands, plus idle, death, and injury animations. They can hold an inventory and money, earn score, gain and lose hit points and lives, and track several counters—often used for keys and similar functions. Monsters have simple animations and movements, and can also change behavior in response to the player. Playable games can be exported complete with a portable version of the XFERPLAY engine, sound drivers, and configuration files. All games record high scores and (in later versions) attract mode replays. All games also feature instant save and load, and support standard PC joysticks. In later versions of the software, games also can incorporate several formats including
ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
text data,
CompuServe CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its initialism CIS) was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the world – described in 1994 as "the oldest of the Big Three information services (the oth ...
.
GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...
files, and
Autodesk Animator Autodesk Animator is a 2D computer animation and painting program published in 1989 for MS-DOS. It was considered groundbreaking when initially released.
.FLI animations into multimedia presentations during menus and between levels. Although Game-Maker includes no tools for developing these files, the formats are standardized enough to allow the user a choice of standalone utilities. In addition, image data produced with outside programs such as
Deluxe Paint Deluxe Paint, often referred to as ''DPaint'', is a bitmap graphics editor created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts and published for the then-new Amiga 1000 in November 1985. A series of updated versions followed, some of which were ported ...
is easily imported and split into background tiles or sprites.


Game engine

Through RSD's proprietary XFERPLAY engine, all Game-Maker games run in 256-color full-screen VGA, at an eccentric 312x196 resolution (switching to the more standard 320x200 for menu screens). Game-Maker games are also distinguished by their eccentric 20x20 tile and sprite size (as opposed to the more standard 8x8 or 16/16 dimensions), populating a standard 100x100 tile (2000x2000 pixel) map size. Transition between scenes is achieved through a slow fade to or from black. All games share a common interface, with a menu screen offering six options: Play, Read Instructions, Read Storyline, See Credits, See Highest Scores, and Quit. Pressing F2 brings up an inventory screen, while F5 and F6 bring up save and load screens. Although most of these menus can be customized with .GIF backgrounds, their basic layout, labeling, and content are constant across all games. All games track player score, and display a high score table upon the game's end (whether through completion or failure). Later versions of Game-Maker allow multimedia sequences between levels, including .GIF images, .FLI animations, and ASCII text files. The engine allows one player at a time, with the screen automatically scrolling in any of the four cardinal directions when the character comes within 1/3 screen width or height of the screen's edge. All Game-Maker games lack an on-screen display (of hit points, score, lives, etc.), though much of this information can be tracked in the inventory screen.


History

Game-Maker developed from a series of modification tools for a top-down competitive maze game called ''Labyrinth'',Gamasutra
"The Making and Unmaking of a Game-Maker Maker"
/ref> designed by Andrew Stone in January 1991. Although the engine is different,Gamasutra
"Bonus Time with Andy Stone"
/ref> ''Labyrinth'' shared code and file formats with the later XFERPLAY engine and graphical resources with several later first-party games. Whereas ''Labyrinth'' grew out of Andrew's interest in ''
NetHack ''NetHack'' is an open source single-player roguelike video game, first released in 1987 and maintained by the NetHack DevTeam. The game is a fork of the 1982 game ''Hack'', itself inspired by the 1980 game '' Rogue''. The player takes the role a ...
'' and Piers Anthony novels, one of Andrew's first goals was to expand his tools and engine to permit side-scrolling
action-adventure game The action-adventure genre is a video game hybrid genre that combines core elements from both the action game and adventure game genres. Typically, pure adventure games have situational problems for the player to solve to complete a story ...
s. "In fact, making something like ''
Metroid is an action-adventure game franchise created by Nintendo. The player controls the bounty hunter Samus Aran, who protects the galaxy from Space Pirate (Metroid), Space Pirates and other malevolent forces and their attempts to harness the powe ...
'' was sort of the bar I set myself for version 1.0. Which is why I added the secret passage features, and gravity, early on." In July 1991 Andrew and his father G. Oliver Stone incorporated Recreational Software Designs to pursue Game-Maker as a business venture—with Oliver as president and Andrew as CEO. Through Oliver's business acumen RSD made deals with KD Software and GameLynk to distribute Game-Maker and host its online community. Through 1992-1994 RSD placed a series of full-sized ads (and some smaller sizes) in major computer magazines, and in 1994 they sub-leased a booth at the
Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...
in Chicago. At the time of Game-Maker's release the software was revolutionary both in concept and technology; although there were earlier
game creation system AHjbhb job u tv in ubjb, A game creation system (GCS) is a consumer-targeted game engine and a set of specialized design tools (and sometimes a light scripting language), engineered for the rapid iteration of user-derived video games. Examples incl ...
s, Game-Maker was the first general-purpose graphical GCS for the dominant DOS/Windows-based PC. Throughout the design process Andrew was adamant that Game-Maker's tools remain entirely visual, involving absolutely no programming from the end user. Its engine also supported full-screen four-way VGA scrolling, and later full-screen double buffered redraws, well before these were the standard. Several updates followed over the next three years, adding Sound Blaster support, improving the design interface, and refining the game engine—yet many features kept being pushed back. Although his brother Oliver Jr. spent a summer on the project, and wrote the code for the sound and Monster editor, Andrew handled the bulk of the coding and updates – a task that, thanks to the lack of standardized drivers or libraries at that time, became all-encompassing and difficult to maintain. Over the software's lifetime Andrew found himself so "waylaid by video driver and ngineproblems" that he was unable to focus as much as he wanted on adding and refining features. By the mid-1990s the advent of 3D video cards and the introduction of Windows 95 meant that to keep up with the marketplace Game-Maker would need great changes both in concept and in coding. Furthermore, the continued lack of standardization meant a large investment in coding ever more complicated drivers and libraries—work that would be thrown away as soon as standards were established. Despite plans for a radical professional-quality update, RSD ceased support for Game-Maker around
1995 File:1995 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: O.J. Simpson is O. J. Simpson murder case, acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman from the 1994, year prior in "The Trial of the Century" in the United States; The ...
. In a 2011 interview Andrew mused about Game-Maker, stating that by his own principles he was surprised he hadn't released the source code years earlier. Later, on 1 July 2014, Andrew posted to the Game-Maker Facebook page, asking for community input on releasing the code.G. Andrew Stone
"Facebook Game-Maker page, July 1st 2014."
/ref> On 12 July he posted the Game-Maker 3.0 source to
GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
, under the
MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...
, suggesting that although people were free to use the code how they liked, "if there is interest in preserving the old games you guys made then porting Game-Maker to modern OSes is the first step."


Release history

* Game-Maker 1.0: Includes one 1.44 MB microfloppy disk containing the full set of RSD tools plus the games ''Sample'', ''Terrain'', ''Houses'', ''Animation'', ''Pipemare'', ''Nebula'', and ''Penguin Pete''. Also included, beginning in version 1.04, is a separate diskette containing the GameLynk game ''Barracuda: Secret Mission 1''. All 1.X iterations of Game-Maker include a square-bound 75-page user manual and several leaflets about the use of the software. Later versions (1.04, 1.05) also include leaflets explaining recent changes and updating the user manual. * Game-Maker 2.0: Includes both 1.2 MB floppy and 1.44 MB microfloppy disks containing the full set of RSD tools plus the games ''Tutor'' (a replacement for ''Animation''), ''Sample'', ''Terrain'', ''Houses'', ''Pipemare'', ''Nebula'', and ''Penguin Pete''. Both versions 2.0 and 2.02 include a square-bound 94-page user manual and several leaflets about the use of the software. The latter version also includes a leaflet explaining recent changes and updating the user manual. * Game-Maker 3.0, floppy: A three-microfloppy (1.44 MB) package contains the full set of RSD tools, the in-house developed games ''Tutor'', ''Sample'', and ''Nebula'', and three licensed games developed by the independent designer A-J Games: ''Zark'', ''The Patchwork Heart'', and ''Peach the Lobster''. Both packages of version 3.0 include a square-bound 104-page user manual and several leaflets about the use of the software. * Game-Maker 3.0, CD-ROM: this package includes the contents of the floppy package, plus first-party games ''Pipemare'', ''Penguin Pete'', ''Houses'', and ''Terrain''; A-J Games productions ''Glubada Pond'', ''Crullo: Adventures of a Donut'', ''Cireneg's Rings'', and ''Linear Volume''; two games by Sheldon Chase of KD Software, ''Woman Warrior and the Outer Limits'' and ''Woman Warrior and the Attack from Below''; and the GameLynk game ''Barracuda: Secret Mission 1''. In addition, the CD-ROM includes a large collection of images, sounds, music, animations, and gameware elements, and a Shareware directory holding demo versions of fourteen games by various independent designers. * Create Your Own Games With GameMaker!: In 1995, the Canadian company Microforum rebranded and repackaged the CD-ROM version of Game-Maker 3.0 for release to a worldwide market. This version includes a spiral-bound user manual. The disc contents are the same as the original RSD release.


Game distribution

During Game-Maker's lifetime, users could distribute their games through the Gamelynk (aka Night Owl, later Frontline)
BBS BBS may refer to: Ammunition * BBs, BB gun metal bullets * BBs, airsoft gun plastic pellets Computing and gaming * Bulletin board system, a computer server users dial into via dial-up or telnet; precursor to the Internet * BIOS Boot Specificat ...
in
Kennebunkport Kennebunkport is a resort town in York County, Maine, United States. The population was 3,629 people at the 2020 census. It is part of the Portland– South Portland–Biddeford metropolitan statistical area. The town center, the area ...
,
Maine Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north ...
or through the Game-Maker Exchange program – an infrequent mailing to registered users, compiling submitted games to a floppy disc with occasional commentary from RSD president G. Oliver Stone. DIYGamer
"The Game-Maker Archive – Part 11: Mark A. Janelle"
Many user-generated games also wound up on public bulletin boards, and thereby found wide distribution and eventual salvation on shovelware CD-ROMS.DIYGamer
"The Game-Maker Archive – Part 13: The World Wide Haystack"
RSD's initial terms of use were rather restrictive. To quote from a pamphlet titled "Distributing Your GAME-MAKER Games" and dated 9 May 1993: The pamphlet goes on to detail standalone games, promotional games, and shareware and BBS distribution. For standalone games (which is to say, games that are meant as an end unto themselves), RSD asks a royalty of $500 for the first 200 games sold or distributed, then a small fee for each subsequent copy. The higher the number, the smaller the fee. For promotional software (distributed as part of a promotional kit), RSD asks $1000 for the first 1000 copies and then smaller fees for every copy up to 25,000. Beyond that, RSD asks no additional charge. Shareware and BBS distribution is a curious case. Although RSD prohibits free distribution, the license does allow a loophole for shareware so long as the author requests the user to pay a minimum registration or license fee of $5.00, then makes a quarterly payment of 10% of all collected fees. These restrictions were rarely enforced; as a 15 June 1993 pamphlet titled "Distributing Games" suggests, freeware games were common and tolerated despite the license agreement:


Open format

Despite the limitations on distribution, Game-Maker's design format is notoriously open. From its outset Game-Maker was designed as a collaborative tool, with the intent that users not only trade design tips but pick apart and freely sample from each other's work. A series of full-page magazine ads, run in the early 1990s, spends nearly as many words selling Game-Maker as a modification tool, along the lines of Galoob's
Game Genie Game Genie is a line of video game cheat cartridges originally designed by Codemasters, sold by Camerica and Galoob. The first device in the series was released in 1990 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, with subsequent devices released for th ...
accessory, as it does describing the software's design features, promising that users can "modify and enhance Game-Maker games". "Is a game too easy? Increase the speed. Too boring? Add danger, sounds and monsters. Too plain? Dress up the graphics, add animation. Too short? Add new levels." This "remix" philosophy stems partly from the Stones' own collaborative family dynamic, and – as with the insistence on an entirely visual, code-free interface – partly from concern about overwhelming the end user. " realized that it would be pretty hard for a ten to twelve-year-old to do it all himself so there were practical considerations." To that end Game-Maker games are distributed as an unprotected bundle of resource files, both specialized (i.e., Game-Maker's unique graphic and animation formats) and common (including CompuServe .GIF, Creative .VOC, Autodesk .FLI, and ASCII text files), making it a simple task to identify and edit most Game-Maker games. The decision was a defiant one on the part of programmer G. Andrew Stone, who argued that any user concerned about protecting, rather than sharing, his work should take on that burden himself. As it happens, one of the earliest games distributed with Game-Maker was GameLynk's ''Barracuda: Secret Mission 1'', a user-derived project that is most distinguished by its presentation whereby its file structure is hidden by
LHarc LHA or LZH is a freeware compression utility and associated file format. It was created in 1988 by , a doctor and originally named LHarc. A complete rewrite of LHarc, tentatively named ''LHx'', was eventually released as ''LH''. It was then rena ...
compression and the portable
Deluxe Paint Animation DeluxePaint Animation is a 1990 graphics editor and animation creation package for MS-DOS, based on Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. It was adapted by Brent Iverson with additional animation features by Steve Shaw and released by Electronic Arts. ...
player is tacked onto the Game-Maker executable to provide intro and exit animations.


Limitations

Through its history several aspects of Game-Maker's engine, design interface, and feature set have experienced scrutiny from its user base. One of Game-Maker's more notorious qualities is its exclusive use of Creative's proprietary .VOC and .CMF sound and music formats, and its absence of integrated design tools for those formats (or recommendations as to external tools), leaving users to work out their own solutions – or often not.Sylvain Martin
"My RSD Game-Maker years"
/ref> The use of .CMF was a last-minute decision; Andy had been working on a .MOD-style tracker format, but development was indefinitely delayed. As a temporary measure his brother Ollie plugged in code provided by
Creative Labs Creative Technology Ltd. is a Singaporean multinational technology company headquartered with overseas offices in Shanghai, Tokyo, Dublin, and Silicon Valley (where in the US it is known as Creative Labs). The principal activities of the compa ...
. Other common frustrations include a lack of multi-key mapping for character behaviors, such as pressing Z + a directional arrow to jump in the direction pressed (a problem stemming from a lack of standardized keyboard electrical layouts at that time); the extreme simplicity of monster behaviors (partially due to a desire to eliminate programming from the design tools); a lack of persistent flags for game eventsGamasutra
"James W. Morris: Learning to Game, Gaming to Learn"
/ref> (partially due to memory constraints); and the lack of on-screen displays for health, lives, and other counters (due to Andrew's emphasis on full-screen rendering). Monsters are a particular point of contention. Compared to characters, monsters have only limited interaction with their environments. For instance, monsters are not affected by gravity or other physics—and have no contextual AI to speak of, aside from a limited awareness of the character. Monsters also lack variable counters, such as hit points. Instead each monster (including NPCs, character shots, and some kinds of power-up) has a fixed "power level" between 0 and 255, and a collision between unequal monsters is resolved by destroying the weaker monster. The engine therefore does not lend itself to graduated damage (i.e., sword 1 does twice the damage as sword 2). Rather, collisions are all binary; either a weapon works, or it doesn't.


Workarounds

For advanced users, many of the engine's limitations have workarounds. One can approximate gravity's effect on a monster by defining a heavy diagonal path; the monster will move horizontally until it reaches a ledge, at which point it will fall until it hits the ground again. Similarly, although monsters lack hit counters, the user can create chains of identical (or successively injured-looking) monsters to approximate the same effect. In later years users have found ways to subvert or play along with the system's properties to achieve effects, mechanisms, and even genres unaccounted for in the engine's basic features—including extensive in-engine
cutscene A cutscene or event scene (sometimes in-game cinematic or in-game movie) is a sequence in a video game that is not interactive, interrupting the gameplay. Such scenes are used to show conversations between characters, set the mood, reward the ...
s, boss sequences,
AM2 AM2 can refer to: * Socket AM2, a CPU socket for AMD desktop processors * Sega AM2, a research and development team for the video game company Sega * Arp-Madore 2, an open star cluster * a fictional element from The Sten Chronicles * Animusic * AM ...
-style sprite scalers,Alan Caudel
"New Dummy 7 Game!"
RPG RPG may refer to: Military * Rocket-propelled grenade, a shoulder-launched anti-tank weapon **''Ruchnoi Protivotankoviy Granatomyot'' (Russian: ''Ручной Противотанковый Гранатомёт''), hand-held anti-tank grenade laun ...
style battles,Gamasutra
"The Game-Maker Story: Infoboxes"
/ref>
parallax scrolling Parallax scrolling is a technique in computer graphics where background images move past the camera more slowly than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in a 2D scene of distance. The technique grew out of the multiplane camera tec ...
, shooting galleries, and destructible terrain.


Influence

As one of the first complete game design suites for IBM-based PCs, and the only one devoted to action games during the early '90s Shareware boom, Game-Maker "anticipated the thriving indie game community we have today with countless game engines, web sites and
indie game An indie game, short for independent video game, is a video game typically created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most "AAA" (triple-A) games. ...
companies." Several of its users went on to later note in indie or commercial game development, such as renowned ''
Seiklus ''Seiklus'' (Estonian for ) is a platform game for Microsoft Windows. It was created by cly5m, using GameMaker over a period of approximately 6 months. Overview ''Seiklus'' is a puzzle platform game made with GameMaker with an emphasis on explo ...
'' author cly5m, '' Slender: The Eight Pages'' designer Mark Hadley,
Liight
' programmer Roland Ludlam, ''
Warhammer Online ''Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning'' (officially abbreviated as ''WAR''Mythic Entertainment (2007)Game Overview Mythic Entertainment. Retrieved on 2007-02-01.) was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game based on Games Workshop's ''War ...
'' background artist Justin Meisse, and ''
Bionic Commando ''Bionic Commando'' is a video game franchise consisting of an original arcade game released in 1987 and several later versions and sequels. Background The original Japanese arcade game and its Famicom counterpart (''Hitler's Resurrection'' ...
'' associate producer James W. Morris. Some games produced with RSD's tools, such as Jeremy LaMar's ''Blinky'' series, have become cult favorites.DIYGamer
"Jeremy LaMar: Doodles, Dawdles, and the Creative Cycle"
Others, like ''A-J's Quest'', ''Die Blarney!'', and Matt Bell's ''Paper Airplane'', reached a wide circulation during the 1990s Shareware boom, appearing on many CD compilations. Game-Maker seems also to have made an impression in the
Benelux The Benelux Union ( nl, Benelux Unie; french: Union Benelux; lb, Benelux-Unioun), also known as simply Benelux, is a politico-economic union and formal international intergovernmental cooperation of three neighboring states in western Europe: B ...
, with references in various academic papers, coverage in the largest game magazine in the region, and dissection by the local
demoscene The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual ...
.


Notable games

* ''A-J's Quest'' (A-J Games, 1992) – A widely distributed side-scrolling platformer that was also incorporated into an early slideshow demo of Game-Maker. * ''Barracuda'' (GameLynk, 1992) – An action simulation game, involving deep sea diving. The shareware episode, distributed on a separate floppy disk with early versions of Game-Maker, incorporates external functions such as
LHarc LHA or LZH is a freeware compression utility and associated file format. It was created in 1988 by , a doctor and originally named LHarc. A complete rewrite of LHarc, tentatively named ''LHx'', was eventually released as ''LH''. It was then rena ...
auto-compression and the portable
Deluxe Paint Animation DeluxePaint Animation is a 1990 graphics editor and animation creation package for MS-DOS, based on Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. It was adapted by Brent Iverson with additional animation features by Steve Shaw and released by Electronic Arts. ...
player, into the game's presentation. * ''Blinky 2'' (Jeremy LaMar, 1994) – A top-down action game inspired by '' The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past''. Through its distribution on
AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017â ...
Kids, ''Blinky 2'' and its sequel achieved a small cult status. * ''Blinky 3'' (Jeremy LaMar, 1995) – A side-scrolling platformer featuring multiple characters and a branching level structure. Of the two distributed ''Blinky'' games, ''Blinky 3'' has received the bulk of attention. * ''Nebula'' (RSD, 1991) – Game-Maker programmer Andy Stone's ''
Metroid is an action-adventure game franchise created by Nintendo. The player controls the bounty hunter Samus Aran, who protects the galaxy from Space Pirate (Metroid), Space Pirates and other malevolent forces and their attempts to harness the powe ...
''-influenced action-adventure platformer, that was always first to demonstrate any new features to the software.DIYGamer
"The Game-Maker Archive: Samples and Demos"
* ''Parsec Man 3D'' (Mark Hadley, 1994) – A minimalist free-floating/platform shooter by '' Slender: The Eight Pages'' designer Mark Hadley, that uses red/cyan
anaglyphic Anaglyph 3D is the stereoscopic 3D effect achieved by means of encoding each eye's image using filters of different (usually chromatically opposite) colors, typically red and cyan. Anaglyph 3D images contain two differently filtered colored i ...
3D glasses to add both atmosphere and functional design. ''Parsec Man'' was also distributed on the Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM. * ''Paper Airplane'' (Matt Bell, 1993) – A side-scrolling strategic action game with puzzle-solving elements; perhaps the most widely distributed Game-Maker game. * ''Peach the Lobster'' (A-J Games, 1994) – A ''
Sonic the Hedgehog is a Japanese video game series and media franchise created by Sega. The franchise follows Sonic, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who battles the evil Doctor Eggman, a mad scientist. The main ''Sonic the Hedgehog'' games are platformers mo ...
'' influenced side-scrolling platformer that was incorporated into a late-era slideshow demo of Game-Maker. * ''Pipemare'' (RSD, 1991) – G. Oliver Stone's top-down action maze game, which provides much of the iconography for the Game-Maker software and packaging. * ''Sample'' (RSD, 1991) – Joan Stone's simple 3/4 view adventure game that formed the basis for dozens of user-created games.Gamasutra
"Inside the Mind of Gary Acord"
/ref>


References


External links


The Game-Maker Archive
Wiki
RSD Game-Maker Facebook group

Game-Maker source code project at GitHub

Game-Maker demo at archive.org



RSD Game-Maker subreddit

Lost Media Wiki page on RSD Game-Maker
{{Video game engines 1991 software DOS software Formerly proprietary software Free game engines Free software Software using the MIT license Video game development software Video game engines Windows software