The Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit. The Holy Grail for making your own computer games in the late 1980's and early 90's. We'll...almost.

When I stumbled upon S.E.U.C.K. around 1990 I was then the proud owner of a Commodore Amiga 500 plus. I had just upgraded from an Amiga 500, an upgrade that turned out to be a pain in the neck as about half of my games were now no longer compatible with the newer machine. Grrr!

At the time I was unaware that a Commodore 64 version of S.E.U.C.K had already been released, a product that was superior to the Amiga version in some respects, frame rate being one of them for example.

Getting to grips with the mechanics and menus of the program was fairly straight forward but also annoying for it's lack of a few things that seemed obvious to include. Thing's such as an onscreen life counter and the ability to upgrade weapons. 

Nevertheless, the program was very accessible and easy to work with and most importantly gave you the ability to create everything from scratch. Your own graphics, backgrounds, enemies, animations, level designs and attack waves. There was a reasonable library of sounds to play with and manipulate plus the option to upload your own if you wanted to. All creatively appealing stuff!

My first game, which I started in 1990 was an experimental effort that I called "Donkbuster". Named partly after a friend of mine who's nickname was Donk (Don't ask). It was supposed to be some kind of push-scroll "ghostbuster" game where you go around vanquishing ghosts and bats and disembodied hands and the like. Of course any enemy with a face was originally designed to look like my friend Donk. Graphically it looked OK but the backgrounds were very sparse and the sprites a mixture of average to very good. I would eventually (30 years later as it turned out) return to finish this game to a far better standard complete with a totally new name and look. This we'll return to later.

So with that first experimental effort under my belt, for my next project I had decided on making a scrolling space shooter. Original! This this was to be a much bigger game, more ambitious and at least have the rudiments of a story and "purpose". I gave it the title "Solar Rescue" with the mission being to pilot the Phazar X7 and fight your way through many varied levels of enemies until you reach the Manatron base. There you would find four stolen green X7's. You were to destroy the base and get those ships and their pilots out of there!
 
Sounds exciting now doesn't it? Well... for a straight-up space shooter made with the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit it does anyway!
                                                 
                                        Solar Rescue







 
 
 
 
 
I started work on Solar Rescue around 1991 and it was a game that I would work on very sporadically, mainly because I didn't want to rush things and make a mess of it and also because it was nice returning to it weeks or months later with fresh eyes and new ideas to change the action up and vary the pace and tactics (as much as was possible with S.E.U.C.K). Some ideas that I had seemed impossible given the limitations so you had to think creatively to achieve what you wanted.
 
For example, in the second level I wanted walls either side that if you crashed into them you would die. As the walls were only really part of the background graphics my first thought was to put invisible static enemies all the way along the walls but that used up far to many enemies and slowed everything down. In the end what I had to do was have an invisible enemy at the bottom of either side of the screen that would shoot invisible, silent bullets upwards near the edge of the walls. However, with the screen scrolling downwards I would have to make these invisible enemies move upwards at the same rate that the screen was scrolling downwards. That way they would stay in position throughout the level. This tactic came in very useful for some later levels too.

I also wanted levels with large rock formations that split the screen so that you had to go either one side or the other. For that I used a combination of the above tactic plus static invisible enemies placed on smaller background rocks and formations.

In fact most problems came when I wanted to do something that technically there was no actual option for. Like when I wanted to create exploding fireballs that would completely explode and shoot across the screen in all eight directions. Those I ended up making with two animated fireballs on top of each other with one timed to fire vertically and horizontally as the other one fired diagonally. In order to give them the appearance of having exploded I had to time the animation so that blank sprite frames were shown as the fire went out in all directions. To make it look good eight different sprites were used for the direction of the fire giving each one a comet-like head and tail.  In fact a couple of these sprites also came in useful to act as comet enemies and also all doubled-up as fire from the eyeballs of the guardian shown below. 






 

















The only catch with the exploding fireballs was that I had to make them harmless until the point of explosion, otherwise after the "explosion" it would have still been possible for your ship to be killed by crashing into an enemy that was seemingly no longer there.

Making larger enemies was always an issue and again required some thought in order to get what you wanted. One ship I made consisted of five different enemies joined together. That in itself is not too difficult but the problem was how dumb it can look when one of the inner sections is blown up yet the outer pieces that are no longer connected continue to follow the same pattern of movement. This I "solved" by making only the outer firing arms destructible. I also made the section directly attached to the arms display damage once those outer pieces were destroyed.  (See below) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The guardian with the two big eyeballs was made of two enemies as eyeballs placed onto background graphics showing the rest of the body. A number of invisible enemies were then added to the body which would explode when you fired at them. This gave the impression that the body is taking damage as it is fired on. It looks very effective in the game even if I say so myself.

A further issue I had was when I wanted one of the ships to have visible rockets attached to it that would fire after a certain amount of time. This was only made to look possible through animation. The enemy had two main sprites. One showing rockets attached and one without. A matching "bullet" sprite for the rockets was then timed to fire as the enemy sprite changed from the sprite with rockets to the one without. This method also proved to work very well.

Extra life "canisters" I made from two separate enemies overlaid on each other. The outer one being the actual canister that you would shoot to destroy and "inside" that was the actual heart-shaped extra life that you collected in the usual way by colliding with it.

I also made it a two player game with two distinctly different ships and different coloured firepower. One is also set to be a little faster than the other which is offset by it also having a slightly shorter firing distance. 

In all, there were some big gaps time-wise in the making Solar Rescue and I didn't actually finish it until sometime in 1997. It would be a further seven years before I managed to get it online for other S.E.U.C.K enthusiasts and Amiga gamers in general to download and play. 

Playing it now, I'm still very happy with it from a gameplay point of view. The levels flow well and are very varied, it's long enough without being too long and I spent a huge amount of time getting the attack waves right. Graphically I'd say I'm still happy with about 90% of it. I might go back into it at some point to improve the detail of the first end-of-level boss ships and a few other bits and pieces here. Having said that, it has looked the same now since I finished it in 1997 so it almost feels like sacrilege to do so. (Are you listening George Lucas?) Lol. Of course I may have to eat those words if I end up doing it.   

I was rather amused a couple of years ago when I discovered that someone had recorded and uploaded a full play-through of the game on Youtube. Although to be fair, this person had also done the same with a number of other S.E.U.C.K. games.

You can view it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc45YOb1Pzc

 
A Sound Issue with Amiga Shoot Em Up Construction Kit:

A thing to note regarding the audio when playing Amiga S.E.U.C.K games is that if you use an emulator you might be better off setting it to play in A500 mode. If you use it in A1200 mode you will often get dropouts so that the sounds don't always play consistently when they are supposed to. It's not the end of the world but it's irritating nonetheless. The same problem also occurs when using a real A1200 and I'm not really aware of a fix for that. You can download Solar Rescue as an ADF file below:

Solar Rescue
ADF (Zip file)
 


Alternatively the file can also be downloaded here:
http://www.seuck.retrogaming64.com/amigagames.html#solar

The file will need to be unzipped before it can be used with an Amiga emulator such as WinUAE. I can also be copied to an appropriate Amiga compatible disk or Gotek drive for playing on original Amiga hardware.

 
2020 - The Revamping and completion of a Past Project:

Fast forward to the spring and summer of 2020 and suddenly half the world is in lock-down in attempt to combat the spread of a certain virus.   

For me this was a time to dust off my first attempt at using S.E.U.C.K which if you remember I'd given the working title of "Donkbuster". As mentioned earlier, whilst I liked a number of things about it, it was never really finished it to my satisfaction and here I was, 30 years later looking to "polish it up a bit". 
 
Well, given the time on my hands, that "polish" ended up being a complete overhaul taking about two months or so. At least now I had the kind of results I was finally happy with. The main character changed from some kind of light blue combat-suited individual to a hooded wizard called Zaub. At first I tried giving him a traditional wizard hat but given the amount of pixels available, no matter how I tried I couldn't get it to look right from a top down view. The main problem was that I didn't want the character to simply look like a "walking hat" from above.  After switching the hat for a hood I finally had an easily recognisable character that looked right in all directions.
















I chose the name Zaub for the simple reason that it rhymed with "Orb". Your main aim in the game being to reach the end (obviously) where you would find and collect four stolen Orbs, each worth 10,000 points. Your secondary aim being to score 200,000 points in total. A feat requiring much more diligence in your gem collecting and enemy killing. In play testing my own highest score is currently 201,700. At least with this game being a push-scroll one you could take your time.











 
Certain enemies that I wasn't happy with in the original iteration were changed for others. I never quite mastered the look of the ghosts so instead they became demons. Some dodgy looking severed hands were replaced with purple blobby characters with pained expressions. The orbs mentioned in the title were a late addition that were added in order to give the game a goal and a bit of a story. With each orb being worth 10,000 points the mere act of reaching the end and collecting them boosts your score by 40,000 points. Other late additions were bouncing eyeballs inspired by those that appear in Shadow of the Beast and some cute looking yellow characters with red wings or ears (I'll let you decide which). The design for those I came up with in about 10 minutes. Then there's the final boss which I called Skullion. Basically it's a big skull that shoots fireballs from its eyes and white stars from its forehead. 












Just prior to the player tackling Skullion there are a couple of other smaller skulls that need taking out. There is also the occasional pitchfork seemingly being hurled at you by a couple of off-screen demons. These particular pitchforks are in fact not enemy fire but are independent enemies created using the same "bullet" sprites to give that impression. These also act as a warning that demons are lurking somewhere above the viewable screen. This ploy is also used at a few other points in the game. It is only once the demons are visible on screen that their pitchforks are actual "bullet" fire. I hope that makes sense! 












Probably the biggest problem I had with making this game was the cobbled floor backgrounds, particularly the blue / aqua coloured ones. For the smaller pebbles I used about five different main blocks in which the pebbles were all varied slightly in shape and size from block to block. However, these blocks also had to fit with each other in any combination and direction. A seemingly simple task that's not quite so easy in practice! This would also apply to blocks that had other background objects drawn on them such as skulls, bones, swords, broken arrows and chains etc. Making as many background blocks fit in any direction as possible certainly takes more time but it does make things much more flexible when it comes designing the background as a whole.

Once the game was completed to my satisfaction it was then a matter of setting how many lives the player starts with and how many extra lives are attainable throughout the game. This is always tricky. If you're too generous then it removes the challenge but if you're too mean then the player will get frustrated and give up before they get to see much of the game. Getting others to play-test is a good way to gauge this. 

The majority of SEUCK players generally know the "feel" that games made with this program have and will probably have an easier time completing them than others.

In both of my games I've been deliberately a little more generous with lives than is usually the case with other SEUCK games I've encountered. After all, I do want players to be able to complete it without having to go insane trying to do so.
 
A straight, confident play through should take somewhere in the region 20 minutes for Zaubs Orbs and a similar time for Solar Rescue. 


Below you will find a zip file of Zaubs Orbs (which will need to be unzipped before use) can be found below and can be played using an Amiga emulator such as
WinUAE or on original Amiga hardware if transferred across to compatible Amiga disk medium or a Gotek drive etc.
 
 
ZAUBS ORBS
Zip file (ADF Format)



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