The Raster Bar

Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit (Palace Software, 1987)

Tentative first steps in game creation.

20 Sep 2021 | by njmcode | 8 min

Genre:
Utility | Creative
Format:
Cassette
Developer:
Sensible Software
Publisher:
Palace Software
Released:
1987
Tags:
pack-in

Memory

The Light Fantastic bundle offered more than just short-term fun with a plastic gun.

Alongside its bevy of action games, it also prominently featured a suite of creative programs dubbed Tool Box. Of course, it took me a while to take interest, as Blaze Out and its cousins occupied most of my early time with my new C64. Occasionally I would glance at the Tool Box cassettes, with their identikit covers and weighty folded manuals, and dismiss them back to the shelf. It wasn't lack of excitement, more lack of immediacy: music and graphics-making looked complex, and were not high on this eight-year-old's list of priorities.[1]

One evening, I found my folks on the C64 in front of the TV. They were attempting to play a cool-looking space action game I didn't recognise. I excitedly wondered if they had bought some new software, but my father gleefully proclaimed that he and my mother had just 'made' this new game themselves. Fortunately, my mother put him in his place and set the record straight - they had not, in fact, somehow obtained the skills to craft a vertically-scrolling shooter in the scant few days we'd had the machine. However, the new action on-screen was only half the story: they quit the game to a set of serious-looking blue menus, with options to edit 'sprites', 'backgrounds' and other powerful-sounding features. It started to make sense. Thus began my time with Shoot 'Em-Up Construction Kit.

Screenshot of Shoot 'Em-Up Construction Kit

SEUCK provided a set of tools for creating levels, enemies, attack waves, SFX and more. It included editors for multicolor sprites, character sets, block-based background maps, title screens, and player behaviour. The created game could be tested at any time, and ultimately could be exported as a standalone C64 program, playable without the tools. The program shipped with four example games, encouraging tinkering and editing of an otherwise 'finished' product without fear of the proverbial blank canvas. Slap And Tickle was the aforementioned space shooter; Outlaw offered a Wild West-themed push-scroller. The bizarre Transputer Man took a fixed-screen approach amongst what looked like circuit boards and components, while the even stranger (and obviously filler) Celebrity Squares was a truncated glide through various in-jokes and bits of text that left me completely baffled as a child.[2] The merit of these games, short and demonstrative as they were, was questionable. I enjoyed playing them, and poking about with different aspects of the text and graphics, but none of them set my world on fire. I think even at my young age, I understood that they were merely a showcase of what SEUCK could do, in the right hands.

Predictably enough, those hands were not mine. Not at such a young age, and with such a short attention span. I did pull the exact same gag on my friends that my father had pulled on me: I changed a good bit of the text and front-end of Celebrity Squares, saved it standalone to tape with a hand-illustrated label, then passed it off as my own amazing creation at a neighbour's house. Of course, I was not gracious or mature enough to admit my lies, even as my friend unironically dubbed me a 'genius'. Fortunately, I was able to quietly 'retire' the game before anyone with any sense (i.e. an adult) could call me out on my precocious bullshit.

SEUCK lay dormant for some time in my collection after that. The theory was obviously compelling - make your own games! - but the practice required patience, dedication, and familiarity with technical limits that my pre-teen mind just couldn't settle on. I was a very creative kid, constantly drawing and painting, and my imagination ran riot with outlandish ideas for art pieces, craft projects, toys, action figure adventures, and other Very Cool Stuff. Working with four colours in a pixel grid just wasn't where I was at. Not until I made it to high school, and gained a like-minded collaborator, would SEUCK return to personal relevance.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I was regularly making stabs at game development with SEUCK, aided by 'H', my best friend and fellow schoolmate. Much time was spent in class daydreaming of incredible, ego-gratifying action extravaganzas, and we were often able to whip ourselves into a frenzy of hype that neither our skills nor available technology could possibly hope to match. Instead, we got about what you'd expect of a couple of Beavis and Butt-Head-esque juveniles with access to creative tools: toilet humour. The most memorable scatological offering saw the players scrolling past a crude approximation of the school grounds. Player One was a giant floating nose that fired snot at enemies, while Player Two was a huge disembodied ass that launched excrement up the screen.[3] It played about as well as it looked, which was... not good.

Screenshot of Shoot 'Em-Up Construction Kit

In fact, actually making a game of all this always seemed to be the stumbling block for us. Drawing pixelated body parts and blocky, square recreations of the playground was one thing, but for all SEUCK's power, it still required you to bring some actual craft. Without well-designed enemy attack patterns, and an appreciation of challenge and pacing, there was literally no game at all. 'H' and I eventually got more serious in our efforts, but that involved merely getting better at graphics - he focused on sprites, I worked on backgrounds - rather than actual game design. There were moments where we probed the edges of something worthy: an asymmetric two-player idea where a sprinting ground trooper navigated obstacles while a fighter craft provided cover, or an Alleykat-style combat racer dubbed Destructo Rally with some genuinely attractive art direction. We even threw together a completely generic doodle of a space shooter, excruciatingly titled Supablast, and submitted it to Commodore Format. Predictably, we never heard back, but the mere fact we had 'released' something was a huge moment. Yet the same issues remained: dwindling attention spans, lack of actual creative skill, and an unwillingness to really put the effort in.

None of this was the fault of SEUCK itself. The tools remained impressive, but also impassive, beyond us. CF magazine eventually began to feature SEUCK games on its Power Pack covertapes. In theory this should have been inspiring and empowering, but only served to illustrate just how far from the true measure of quality we were. Not only did these offerings, which included Twin Tigers, Superstrike, Sub Burner and many others, often come with enhanced title screens and blistering music added through non-SEUCK coding, but they showed mastery of the toolkit itself, overcoming its limitations with unique aesthetics and devious level design.[4] Supablast, by comparison, would have been lucky to get a dismissive chuckle from the CF staff before the tape was tossed in the bin.

And so it was that our dreams of SEUCK glory slowly faded away. Other 'game kits' caught our attention around that time, specifically Graphic Adventure Creator and 3D Construction Kit, but any attempts to craft something meaningful foundered in ways we were resigned to at this point. The SEUCK-based Power Pack offerings became more frequent as the C64 died commercially and the available software dried up; by this stage, the shortcomings of the toolkit were readily obvious, despite the continued creativity of its fanbase. By the time the final few Power Packs came out, SEUCK was a byword for sub-par filler in my mind, a harbinger of an era's end, though my fondness for and appreciation of the tool itself remained strong.

Analysis

Reflecting on Shoot 'Em-Up Construction Kit, I'm amused by the 'tribute' nature of the example games. I often wondered at the origins of Slap And Tickle's title, but in hindsight the game is an obvious minimalist parody of Taito's Slap Fight, particularly the paved pathways and orb-shaped enemies of its graphics. Outlaw, meanwhile, borrows more than a little inspiration from Gun.Smoke by Capcom. These 'homages' to more famous games unfortunately throw the engine's limitations into sharper relief: powerups are impossible to create beyond basic score bonuses; player weapons can never change; bosses are simply enemies stuck together, with no containing hitbox or ability to halt the players' progress. Despite the smoothness of the scrolling and the multiplexing routines, slowdown is rampant when the screen gets busy, even in the example games. The surprisingly-powerful SFX engine is the extent of the sonic palette available, with no intro or in-game music. And the HUD and title screen have very limited aesthetic options, making nearly every non-enhanced SEUCK game immediately identifiable in screenshots.

A tool for creating generic shoot 'em ups on the C64 would always struggle against the sheer volume of AAA genre examples present on the machine. By the time 'H' and I started poking at it in the early '90s, we were already intimately familiar with face-melting, technically-astounding blasters like X-Out, R-Type, Armalyte, Denaris and many more. Even the middle levels of Turrican II: The Final Fight - little more than an interlude in the grand scheme of the game - contained almost inconcievable amounts of eye candy: multi-layer parallax, insanely-fast scrolling, screen-filling bosses, plus an entire armoury of powerups, and heart-stopping battle music.[5] There was no way anything produced by SEUCK could compete, nor was it ever designed to do so. Yet the gulf in quality, as unfair as it was, couldn't be ignored.

Screenshot of Shoot 'Em-Up Construction Kit

SEUCK did evolve, however. As mentioned, 'enhanced' games began to appear on magazine covertapes of the day, adding lavish title screens, in-game music, animated backgrounds and more. Names like Alf Yngve and Jon Wells were respected and known to me thanks to magazine coverage of their efforts. Tools sprung up to make the enhancements easier; I even recall a tutorial appearing in Commodore Format. Unfortunately, the level of coding required was beyond me at the time, not to mention that I had no finished games to actually 'enhance'. In 1993, even as the C64 truly breathed its last commercially, Wells' then-upcoming Breakthrough got a Power Pack demo, and was notable for its use of a hacked SEUCK to produce a sideways-scrolling game - something impossible with the original software. Even at this late stage, my interest was well and truly piqued, and I played that demo often, not least for the amazing music. Sadly, the game never saw the light of day before CF - and thus the entire C64 scene, from my limited perspective at the time - died in late 1995.

The toolkit has persisted through to the modern era - thrived, even. The Sideways SEUCK variant used for Breakthrough was officially released in 2008, and is used frequently in an annual dev competition which, astoundingly, has been running for over a decade at time of writing.[6] Commercial releases based on SEUCK games also continue to the present day, as developers old and new work to bend, twist and hotwire Sensible Software's base engine in new and creative ways, their imaginations and technical savvy overcoming the boundaries of the original tools.

That's the true lasting appeal of SEUCK: creativity within constraints, the carefully-walked line between immediacy and power, stretched and pulled as the community and software matured. I've been quite harsh on its technical shortcomings here, but producing the next R-Type was never the point. The whimsical blurb of the example games' title screens evokes a charming, lo-fi 'bedroom coder' vibe that suits the DIY feel of games created with the kit. It provided wannabe game design heroes with a fraction of the power available to dedicated coders, yet wrapped up in an accessible and flexible package that could get you from blank slate to your next big idea in impressively short order. That it did so with such casual efficiency - intuitive tools for graphics, sound, level design, fonts, and logic, running in parallel to the game, and all in one load! - is an immense achievement, and speaks to SEUCK's enduring legacy as one of the C64's most popular creative tools.

njmcode


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