Imagine it's 1981. The microcomputer (an all-in-one computer system not unlike an iMac) has exploded in popularity. Featuring the power of a full computer in an affordable and, most importantly, compact size (hence the term micro), the microcomputer has made computing accessible to a larger audience. This accessibility even extends to the system's interface itself. Many have some form of BASIC (an early programming language designed to be useable by novices) built right in, and in some cases, the OS or UI is just a shell running on top of the built in programming language. If that wasn't enough, computing magazines have picked up on this boom, and many include program code for video games you can type directly into your computer.
In this environment of accessibility and ease of use, what purpose does a construction kit serve, especially when magazines are giving away free programming code for games?
By all accounts, Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set is the first construction kit ever released. Following hot on the heels of his popular pinball game Raster Blaster, Bill decided to take this one step further by making a game all about creating your own pinball tables. Not only was the original Apple II version a smashing success, but Bill would later take his creation to EA, who would publish the PC Booter and C64 versions, as well as package it in a fancy, vinyl record style envelope. It would later be followed by numerous imitators (see: Macadam Bumper), as well as official EA "follow ups”, such as Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set and the Racing Destruction Set.
But what motivated Bill Budge to create a construction kit?
The answer was surprisingly simple. Having worked at Apple for a time in the early 80s, Bill was exposed to an at the time new computing concept: the GUI, or Graphical User Interface. Bill immediately saw the potential in applying a simplified graphical interface to his existing pinball game, and set out to create a toolkit centered around pinball tables. The appeal was not only in the challenge of doing so, according to Bill, but also making a toy chest for other people to play around in. This is immediately evident in the user interface. Consisting of a single screen, one half being the table, the other the scoreboard and user interface, the player is immediately able to both play and create a table without too much effort.
It was this accessibility, and the ability to publish your own tables, that led to Pinball Construction Set's immediate success. While many systems of the era included built in tools to make your own software and games, few had the immediate satisfaction and sheer fun that a construction kit provided. This factor was not lost upon EA and authors of later construction kits, such as Garry Kitchen's GameMaker (not to be confused with Mark Overmars' Game Maker!), which advertised both the included games and the potential for novices to create games of their very own.
In fact, the "why" of construction kits, and what sets them apart from similar game authoring tools, lies in the sheer joy and ease of use they provide while creating games. While Bill was very adamant that Pinball Construction Set was meant more as a "toy" than a fully featured game authoring tool, it was a "toy" that was accessible and fun for everyone to use. This unique feature would continue to persist long after Pinball Construction Set's heyday, as many modern construction kits advertise themselves as "easy game makers" or educational tools.
As for Bill, his excitement for construction kits would later lead him to attempt a "Construction Set Construction Set", an all encompassing game creation system that would have provided the same fun that Pinball Construction Set did. He was never quite able to achieve this monumentous task, but later game engines and construction kits would come very close to his vision. But that's an article for another time!
References and Further Reading:
The History of the Pinball Construction Set: Launching Millions of Creative Possibilities on Gamasutra
(Cropped cover of Life & Death courtesy of MobyGames)
As stated in the opening post for this blog, one of the goals of New Games, Old Kit is...well, to create brand new games! To do this, I'm going to pick a construction kit of my choice, then create an in depth profile of the kit with as much information as I can find. There's nothing fancy behind which kit I pick! It's simply what sort of genre or software I'm in the mood for at the time.
The profiles are setup as follows:
Title of Construction Kit: Self explanatory.
Picture of Box Art: Ditto!
Year of Release: When the software was released.
Publisher: Who published the software.
OS: The operating system the kit uses.
Genre: What genre the kit is geared towards, if any.
Base: Whether the kit is based on an existing game or engine.
Scripting Language: Whether it includes some kind of scripting language.
Status: What's going on with this kit right now. Is it still available, open source, discontinued, or something in between? If a particular kit is impossible to find online or no copies are preserved, it is considered extinct.
Community: How active the community is for this particular kit. Much like with the status of the kit, if no community exists, it is considered extinct.
New or Old: A special category, determined by whether the software predates Unity. If it's before, it's Old; if it's after, it's New.
GCST: The Game Creation Tools Classification entry for this kit, if it exists.
The profile will also include some general information on the kit along with a brief history, as well as my experiences with it, if applicable. After a profile is created, I will then explore notable games made with the construction kit, and do write ups on the best of them. This should give you an opportunity to see just what it can do and where it stands today.
A project will then be started using the chosen construction kit. Once I learn the basics, a follow up post will be made describing my initial experiences with the kit, as well as any issues I've run into. A modest goal and a deadline will then be set, and work will begin on creating a brand spanking new game!
Besides the process of making a new game, the it will also be judged against two special criteria: can it display the words "Hello World" in any meaningful way, and does it pass the Bailey Test? Before we continue, let me introduce you to the titular character behind the test:
(Bailey courtesy of me)
This is Bailey. Looking like a combo of Homer Simpson and The Neverhood's Klaymen, this frog-like alien was created a few years ago when I started to get back into drawing. He is designed to be as appealing and easy to draw as possible. As such, he's the perfect candidate for any construction kit worth its salt! For graphical games, he simply has to show up visually, whether that's a texture, character, tile or item. For text driven games, the criteria is a little different: can Bailey appear as a PC, NPC, room or item?
Even the most basic of construction kits are likely to pass the "Hello World" test, but if Bailey cannot appear in the given kit in any way, shape or form, then it may not be as sophisticated as it first seems. If it can’t pass either test, we're probably in for a bad time!
Finally, once the goal is met or failed, I will upload the game along with a post mortem going into what worked, what didn't, and what I would do if I had to do it all over again.
Hopefully this post is an adequate explanation for what to expect in project posts! And if you want to try your hand at game design along with me, please do! Any user created games will be featured alongside my own.
After a hellish work week, I return with an older construction kit popular in Spanish speaking countries that is still in active development, and a kinda-sorta-not-really kit of sorts! The best part is that I don’t have to talk about either of them in the past tense.
DIV Game Studio
(Bert the Barbarian, made with DIV Studio 2. Screenshot courtesy of MobyGames)
Every so often, you stumble upon a kit so ahead of its time, it’s shocking you’ve never heard of it before. Released in 1998 by Spanish company Hammer Technologies, DIV Game Studio is a powerful, GUI driven kit for DOS comparable to GameMaker. Later revisions would add support for 2.5D games similar to Doom, with a fully featured map editor and everything. Notable games include Bert the Barbarian (pictured above), a claymation hack and slash game by the creators of Platypus and Platypus II.
What makes it especially interesting is that it not only includes in-program coding examples, tutorials and libraries, but also allows the user to copy and paste the code directly into a functioning script. While this feature might have existed in earlier kits, it’s still impressive to see something this intuitive so early.
The best part? It’s still in active development! It was also so popular it spawned countless imitators until development was resumed and its source code released, at least if this Spanish Wikipedia article is to be believed.
Mini Ghost
(Yes, that’s exactly who you think it is. Taken from the official Mini Ghost Steam page)
From the creators of Unepic and Ghost 1.0 comes a charming tribute to platformers on the MSX! Mini Ghost can best be described as a love letter to early platformers such as Knightmare II: The Maze of Galious and Legacy of the Wizard. If you’ve never played anything like those games before, they’re basically early Metroidvanias if they were huge, confusing mazes instead of tightly designed, semi-nonlinear worlds.
What makes Mini Ghost truly special is that it includes built-in character, tile, and map editors! While you can’t change the behavior of any objects in the game, you can create as many custom adventures with your OC of choice as your feeble, human body can handle. There are already a large number of characters to play around with, as well as tile sets inspired by the likes of Doom and The Goonies, among numerous others.
Games like Mini Ghost occupy an interesting middle ground between a full blown construction kit and a regular game. At some point I’d like to write a more in depth article on this subject, but for now, consider this a taste of things to come.
Hello and welcome to New Games, Old Constructions Kits! If you're here, you're probably wondering what this is about. In a nutshell, the goal behind this blog is threefold:
Chronicle constructions kits new and old, and how they compare with modern game authoring tools.
Rediscover the history and communities surrounding video game construction kits.
Most importantly, make new games with old kit!
I have fond memories of using early game construction kits such as Pie in the Sky's 3D GCS and Klik 'n Play, and clearly others do too, since Glorious Trainwrecks is a thing. In fact, while doing research for this blog, I was surprised that so many of these early game creation tools still had vibrant communities, but more on that later.
Not sure just what the hell a construction kit is? Don't worry, I have a handy FAQ for just that reason!
It's almost the end of April, so I’ve decided to round-up some interesting construction kits I've recently discovered, or just thought were cool!
Eamon
(Apple II title screen courtesy of MobyGames)
Whenever one starts digging up the history of something, there's always an issue of "firsts". In the case of construction kits, do you go with the first game that had any sort of user created content (arguably Maze War), the first kit that was most relevant/popular (Pinball Construction Set), or something in between? While Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set is often regarded as the first construction kit, it's not technically the first. The first with a GUI perhaps, but at least two kits precede it. One of those is Eamon.
Eamon is a text based computer roleplaying system. Original released for the Apple II as public domain freeware, it was later ported to the Atari ST and DOS. However, in addition to a built-in campaign, Eamon also shipped with an adventure creator. I'm not entirely sure how it worked, but a number of free adventures have been made for it. In fact, the Eamon community is still active today, and there are even enhanced ports to modern systems, such as Windows and Linux! More info can be found at the Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online.
Venture: Adventure Gaming System
(Venture interface screenshot courtesy of Archive.org)
Discovered on an episode of Shovelware Diggers, Venture was created by Richard Foley for Win 3.1 and released as shareware. It appears to be a cross between a first person adventure game and a traditional dungeon crawler. In an odd move, the rooms are actually octagons with 8 possible exits. I've only seen one other game do that, and that was Obitus by Psygnosis, an unusual multigenre adventure game.
What makes this software so interesting (and relevant to this blog's interests natch) is that it includes a full blown adventure creator. In fact, that seems to be its entire purpose! The interface appears to be simple yet powerful, and custom graphics and sounds can be imported.
Unfortunately, a full, registered version of Venture doesn't seem to exist, making it possibly one of a handful of extinct construction kits. A shame too, since the shareware version doesn’t allow custom campaigns to be saved. It's possible that it does exist out there somewhere, but information on this kit seems hard to find in general. If anyone knows where to find the registered version, let me know!
Animation Construction Kit 3-D
I couldn't find an interface screenshot for this one, so have a video of a game made with it instead! The Animation Construction Kit 3-D, or ACK3D as it was also known, was an opensource raycasting engine similar to Wolf 3D. It was created by Lary L. Myers for a book titled Amazing 3-D Games Adventure Set. A modern port can be found on GitHub for those that want to poke around!
Notable titles include the Station Escape tech demo (shown in the video), and H.U.R.L (aka Slob Zone 3D). It's most notable quality was that it was later spunoff into the ACKNEX series of engines by a German programmer. Quite a pedigree for an obscure piece of kit!
(Cropped title screen from Silver Dollar Games' Why Did I Buy This?)
As noted in the Why of Construction Kits, the biggest reason constructions kits appeared was both because of the technical challenge in creating them, and because there was room on the market for an easy, fun to use product that anyone could use to design games. But why would anyone want to use an old kit today, especially with better options on the market?
Having meditated on this question, I've come up with three simple reasons why someone (ie me) would want to use any ancient kit: curiosity, nostalgia and simplicity.
Curiosity
The first reason, curiosity, can be thought of as the historical (or coolness) factor of a kit. Many kits are historically significant, thus lending them an air of mystique. Old kits also act as a time capsule into an era and mentality that no longer exist. We can get a good picture of what features were considered critical at the time, and what lead to a given kit's popularity.
(Box cover courtesy of the The Game-Maker Archive)
In many cases, forgotten kits are rediscovered and brought back into the limelight by an individual or community. This naturally leads to modern day users seeking them out to experience them for themselves. RSD Game-Maker is one such example, having gone from being nearly forgotten to well documented and easily available.
The historical factor will be the #1 reason I cover most of the kits I come across.
Nostalgia
The second reason, nostalgia, is the familiarity (or personal) factor of a kit. Nostalgia is a longing for something familiar that no longer exists, and is a big driving force behind things such as marketing and retro inspired indie games today. Having lived through numerous changes in hardware and software in the 90s, I find old DOS games, retro computing, and early GUIs nostalgic, three things that are relevant to many old construction kits! Not to mention all those early kits and modding tools I used while growing up.
(The nostalgia inducing interface of Venture: Adventure Gaming System)
While nostalgia is a big motivator behind the New Games, Old Kit project, nostalgia alone cannot carry a project very far! Many of the kits I will be looking at have no nostalgia associated with them, nor was I ever part of their communities during their heyday. However, many of them will have similarities to kits I used in the past, making them appealing and familiar when the time comes to cover them.
Simplicity
(Dead Simple from Doom 2)
The third reason, simplicity, is how easy a kit is to use. Many construction kits are dead simple to use, allowing you to crank out a (probably crappy) game in mere minutes. The interfaces are also unobstructive, getting you right into the creative process with minimal hassle. That's not to say modern game development IDEs are bad! They're just far more powerful, which can complicate things.
Simplicity comes at a cost, that being a lack of complexity. Many kits have serious drawbacks, known bugs, and numerous other issues, but despite these limitations, many users are content to continue using outdated kit simply because it offers something that nothing else does. In that respect, olds kits share a lot with retro gaming in general.
Hopefully this should give more insight into why I'm researching these old creation systems. These three reasons are the biggest motivators behind New Games, Old Kit, but by no means the only ones!
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