Are 'games designer' programs all they're made out to be?

Sooner or later, most Basic programmers are going to try their hand at writing a game. Why not - they've all done it, why can't you? But for the less-than-obsessive enthusiast, that's a tall order. So a games designer package like Scope, The Quill or Mirrorsoft's Games Creator might be an attractive answer, especially if it "lets you off" learning machine code. Roger Jones, himself a professional programmer, looks at all three and finds out whether they'll help him make a million - or at least a few bob.

Games designers fall into two main groups, adventure and arcade, but the arcade designers have to be split into two sub-categories, re-designers and pseudo-assemblers. In this article I am going to take an example of each of these and compare their merits and disadvantages.

Taking the last type first, one of the best pseudo-assemblers currently available for the Commodore 64 is Scope from Codewriter Limited. Scope is an entirely new language dedicated solely to the purpose of games writing. It enables you to construct machine code routines (or at least something like them) which can be run from within a Basic program. It uses Basic-like commands to write the routines and then compiles them into its machine code.

Scope comes in a nice presentation box complete with a comprehensive and fairly easy-to-read manual which takes you step by step through the 46 command words which make up its language. These command words have to be entered in basic REM statements, and the completed Scope routine is then compiled into an area of high memory reserved for it by the main program. Completed routines can be saved to tape for later use with the tapesave program included with the package.

Scope is intended for the rapid execution of sub-routines in a Basic program and as such can handle graphics, sprites, colour, sound effects, music and animation but herein lies its weakness as a 'designer'. It is not the sort of thing that a programmer with only a smattering of Basic could hope to pick up and create those elusive moneymakers with straight away.

In use, Scope is as complicated as Basic and a good knowledge of program structure is necessary before any results can be achieved. There is no provision for multi-statement lines, so listings tend to be very long and narrow and the interminable printing of REM after every line number is tedious to say the least. The demonstration programs included on the reverse of the tape show some of the capabilities of this undoubtedly powerful language, but that is what it is: a language, and it's not that easy to learn.

At £17.95 it is neither cheap nor, for what it is, expensive. When I have more time maybe I will learn to speak Scope, but then I might just as well learn machine code itself.

Sticking with arcade designers for the moment, the other sub-category is the *re-designer*. There have been a number of home-produced re-designers around for some time for the Spectrum which allow you to chop Jet Set Willy and company to bits and put them back together in a different shape.

Now from Mirrorsoft comes Games Creator for the Commodore 64. If only that was what it was. When I first heard about it, I thought my quest for a way to write that blockbusting arcade game was at an end, but, oh dear me, it was not to be.

For all that, though, Games Creator is still a very good program in its own right. More pretty packaging contains the manual and single tape, which is a fast loader. The manual is written, I feel, to appeal to younger enthusiasts and takes you step by step through the program's capabilities.

But within seconds of reading it through, came the bitter disappointment. Games Creator is not capable of producing games that will run without the presence of the main program in memory.

The tape loads rather unusually; it makes the C64 behave like a Spectrum, and you are presented with a title screen whilst the loading takes place complete with multi-coloured flashing lines surrounding it. Very clever. I wish I knew how they did that.

When loading is complete you see a menu page allowing access to the various options for redesigning the game currently in memory. It automatically loaded one sample game with the main program and there are two more on the reverse of the tape. These games are of the platform, maze and good old shoot-'em-up types, and any one of them can be changed in the minutest of detail.

The menu options allow you to alter the sprites, background, music, sound effects and the rules governing the actions of the player and his opponents or aliens (as the authors describe them). The background can be scrolled or static, but as far as I can tell it cannot be changed within a game to a new scene, even when moving to a new level.

The system for designing the scenery is a little complicated at first glance, but very versatile once you've got the hang of it. The music menu is absolutely first class, allowing you to write quite lengthy tunes simply by putting the right note on to the correct stave. Only one minor gripe here, no sharps or flats, which made my version of Bridge Over Troubled Water sound a bit off in places.

The whole thing can be driven almost completely with the joystick making it easy to use for the little 'uns, but is sophisticated enough to keep us older folks amused as well. Your completed masterpiece can be saved to amuse and astound your friends when they come around. but why oh why couldn't they have gone just that little bit further and make them run on their own?

As it stands though, it is a very interesting piece of software and, I think, well worth the price tag of £12.95. Mirrorsoft themselves are prepared to buy original Games Creator-supported games, with the intention of offering them to owners of the main package, but I somehow feel that this defeats the idea of the program.

Now, at last, to the real gem in the list of runners. This next program falls into the adventure game category. It's called The Quill from Gilsoft and it is, at last, a true text adventure designer in that it produces a standalone game (one that doesn't require the host program to be loaded first) of marketable quality without the need for specialist programming knowledge.

The Quill comes in an unprepossessing black and gold package which belies the excellence of its contents. The program is on a single tape and is supported by an easy-to-read, two-part manual.

The first part takes you through the construction of a very simple adventure which, if followed carefully, will teach you enough about the program to enable you to tackle the first steps of writing your own adventure game. The second part is a detailed description of the editor, interpreter and database that make up The Quill, forming a clear and concise reference for the serious user.

On loading the program, you see a very complete menu arranged in order of entry, and it's a good idea to have worked your game out on paper first, so that the majority of entries can be inserted in this order. Further additions can be made later, but it is important to stick to the order of entry as, for example, the interpreter cannot recognise a word if it's not already in the vocabulary.

I've found that The Quill can be made to go beyond the limits stated in the manual. Although it is a text-only game designer, you can, for example, access some of the Commodore's graphics (by using the CBM key) and with careful use of colours, reversed spaces and latters, you can build some very pretty screens and limited pictures.

Playing around with the interpreter in the 'event' and 'status' tables can make some seemingly impossible things happen, such as causing secondary characters in your game to appear in locations other than that occupied by your main character. It is even possible to cause an almost random sequence of events to occur by combining the chance feature with one of the move counting flags.

Your game can be saved to tape at any time as a database, which allows you to re-load it at a later date into The Quill for further work, or as a completed adventure for distribution among your friends or even for sale.

I've been using The Quill for some time now and I market the results. Very generously, the authors of The Quill do not mind you doing this, asking only that you mention their program in your own.

In my opinion, The Quill is one of the most amazing programs I have come across. It does all the authors claim for it, and a bit more. It takes the hammer and chisel work out of adventure game writing and leaves you to tackle the more important job of producing a logical and demanding result.

This is not to say that it is easy. The amount of work that goes into producing a reasonably presented adventure game is still, to say the least, prodigious. But The Quill frees you from the confines of Basic and allows your imagination to run free. I cannot praise it highly enough, and at £14.95, it is cheap. Very cheap!

There are, of course, other utilities dedicated to the art of computer games writing and chief among these for the Commodore 64 must be sprite designers. Pro Sprite from Dosoft and Mirrorsoft's Go Sprite are good examples of these, allowing on-screen building and animation of sprites and the compilation of a sprite 'library'. The data statements for the sprites thus created can be extracted for later use in your own programs. But there is no way these can be called games designers, and the authors do not claim them to be so.

Still, some software producers allow their advertising to get the better of them. For example, the blurb on the cover of Scope claims it to be the games designer. Unfortunately, it is not. It's a very good and powerful language dedicated to the writing of arcade-style games. So why don't they say so - it's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm not knocking the product, just the fact that it is not really what it is claimed to be.

The same can be said for Mirrorsoft's Games Creator. "The Games Creator is all you need to make your own complete and unique games" claims the advertising. But it won't: there is no way a list of data statements can be called a complete gsme. Games Creator is a very clever user re-designable game, a sort of meccano set of the computer. It can be assembled and re-assembled time and time again, but in the end, it's still meccano.

Of the three main utilities reviewed here, only The Quill is a true games designer. Of course, it only produces adventure games, but then that is what it was designed to be. Now, if someone could combine the brilliant graphics capabilities of Games Creator with the excellence of The Quill, we would really be getting somewhere

Taking the last type first, one of the best pseudo-assemblers currently available for the Commodore 64 is Scope from Codewriter Limited. Scope is an entirely new language dedicated solely to the purpose of games writing. It enables you to construct machine code routines (or at least something like them) which can be run from within a Basic program. It uses Basic-like commands to write the routines and then compiles them into its machine code.

Scope comes in a nice presentation box complete with a comprehensive and fairly easy-to-read manual which takes you step by step through the 46 command words which make up its language. These command words have to be entered in basic REM statements, and the completed Scope routine is then compiled into an area of high memory reserved for it by the main program. Completed routines can be saved to tape for later use with the tapesave program included with the package.

Scope is intended for the rapid execution of sub-routines in a Basic program and as such can handle graphics, sprites, colour, sound effects, music and animation but herein lies its weakness as a 'designer'. It is not the sort of thing that a programmer with only a smattering of Basic could hope to pick up and create those elusive moneymakers with straight away.

In use, Scope is as complicated as Basic and a good knowledge of program structure is necessary before any results can be achieved. There is no provision for multi-statement lines, so listings tend to be very long and narrow and the interminable printing of REM after every line number is tedious to say the least. The demonstration programs included on the reverse of the tape show some of the capabilities of this undoubtedly powerful language, but that is what it is: a language, and it's not that easy to learn.

At £17.95 it is neither cheap nor, for what it is, expensive. When I have more time maybe I will learn to speak Scope, but then I might just as well learn machine code itself.

Previous Next

Sticking with arcade designers for the moment, the other sub-category is the re-designer. There have been a number of home-produced re-designers around for some time for the Spectrum which allow you to chop Jet Set Willy and company to bits and put them back together in a different shape.

Now from Mirrorsoft comes Games Creator for the Commodore 64. If only that was what it was. When I first heard about it, I thought my quest for a way to write that blockbusting arcade game was at an end, but, oh dear me, it was not to be.

For all that, though, Games Creator is still a very good program in its own right. More pretty packaging contains the manual and single tape, which is a fast loader. The manual is written, I feel, to appeal to younger enthusiasts and takes you step by step through the program's capabilities.

But within seconds of reading it through, came the bitter disappointment. Games Creator is not capable of producing games that will run without the presence of the main program in memory.

The tape loads rather unusually; it makes the C64 behave like a Spectrum, and you are presented with a title screen whilst the loading takes place complete with multi-coloured flashing lines surrounding it. Very clever. I wish I knew how they did that.

When loading is complete you see a menu page allowing access to the various options for redesigning the game currently in memory. It automatically loaded one sample game with the main program and there are two more on the reverse of the tape. These games are of the platform, maze and good old shoot-'em-up types, and any one of them can be changed in the minutest of detail.

The menu options allow you to alter the sprites, background, music, sound effects and the rules governing the actions of the player and his opponents or aliens (as the authors describe them). The background can be scrolled or static, but as far as I can tell it cannot be changed within a game to a new scene, even when moving to a new level.

The system for designing the scenery is a little complicated at first glance, but very versatile once you've got the hang of it. The music menu is absolutely first class, allowing you to write quite lengthy tunes simply by putting the right note on to the correct stave. Only one minor gripe here, no sharps or flats, which made my version of Bridge Over Troubled Water sound a bit off in places.

The whole thing can be driven almost completely with the joystick making it easy to use for the little 'uns, but is sophisticated enough to keep us older folks amused as well. Your completed masterpiece can be saved to amuse and astound your friends when they come around. but why oh why couldn't they have gone just that little bit further and make them run on their own?

As it stands though, it is a very interesting piece of software and, I think, well worth the price tag of £12.95. Mirrorsoft themselves are prepared to buy original Games Creator-supported games, with the intention of offering them to owners of the main package, but I somehow feel that this defeats the idea of the program.

Now, at last, to the real gem in the list of runners. This next program falls into the adventure game category. It's called The Quill from Gilsoft and it is, at last, a true text adventure designer in that it produces a standalone game (one that doesn't require the host program to be loaded first) of marketable quality without the need for specialist programming knowledge.

The Quill comes in an unprepossessing black and gold package which belies the excellence of its contents. The program is on a single tape and is supported by an easy-to-read, two-part manual.

The first part takes you through the construction of a very simple adventure which, if followed carefully, will teach you enough about the program to enable you to tackle the first steps of writing your own adventure game. The second part is a detailed description of the editor, interpreter and database that make up The Quill, forming a clear and concise reference for the serious user.

On loading the program, you see a very complete menu arranged in order of entry, and it's a good idea to have worked your game out on paper first, so that the majority of entries can be inserted in this order. Further additions can be made later, but it is important to stick to the order of entry as, for example, the interpreter cannot recognise a word if it's not already in the vocabulary.

I've found that The Quill can be made to go beyond the limits stated in the manual. Although it is a text-only game designer, you can, for example, access some of the Commodore's graphics (by using the CBM key) and with careful use of colours, reversed spaces and latters, you can build some very pretty screens and limited pictures.

Playing around with the interpreter in the 'event' and 'status' tables can make some seemingly impossible things happen, such as causing secondary characters in your game to appear in locations other than that occupied by your main character. It is even possible to cause an almost random sequence of events to occur by combining the chance feature with one of the move counting flags.

Your game can be saved to tape at any time as a database, which allows you to re-load it at a later date into The Quill for further work, or as a completed adventure for distribution among your friends or even for sale.

I've been using The Quill for some time now and I market the results. Very generously, the authors of The Quill do not mind you doing this, asking only that you mention their program in your own.

In my opinion, The Quill is one of the most amazing programs I have come across. It does all the authors claim for it, and a bit more. It takes the hammer and chisel work out of adventure game writing and leaves you to tackle the more important job of producing a logical and demanding result.

This is not to say that it is easy. The amount of work that goes into producing a reasonably presented adventure game is still, to say the least, prodigious. But The Quill frees you from the confines of Basic and allows your imagination to run free. I cannot praise it highly enough, and at £14.95, it is cheap. Very cheap!

There are, of course, other utilities dedicated to the art of computer games writing and chief among these for the Commodore 64 must be sprite designers. Pro Sprite from Dosoft and Mirrorsoft's Go Sprite are good examples of these, allowing on-screen building and animation of sprites and the compilation of a sprite 'library'. The data statements for the sprites thus created can be extracted for later use in your own programs. But there is no way these can be called games designers, and the authors do not claim them to be so.

Still, some software producers allow their advertising to get the better of them. For example, the blurb on the cover of Scope claims it to be the games designer. Unfortunately, it is not. It's a very good and powerful language dedicated to the writing of arcade-style games. So why don't they say so - it's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm not knocking the product, just the fact that it is not really what it is claimed to be.

The same can be said for Mirrorsoft's Games Creator. "The Games Creator is all you need to make your own complete and unique games" claims the advertising. But it won't: there is no way a list of data statements can be called a complete game. Games Creator is a very clever user re-designable game, a sort of meccano set of the computer. It can be assembled and re-assembled time and time again, but in the end, it's still meccano.

Of the three main utilities reviewed here, only The Quill is a true games designer. Of course, it only produces adventure games, but then that is what it was designed to be. Now, if someone could combine the brilliant graphics capabilities of Games Creator with the excellence of The Quill, we would really be getting somewhere...