This week I took a trip down memory lane and downloaded a pack of demos from old Clickteam products. I’ve been a loyal user of their series of game-making tools since Klik & Play in 1994, and even now I’m using Clickteam Fusion to make my biggest game yet, Super Space Galaxy. Most of the Clickteam tools also came with free demos you could try and as a kid, and these would often inspire me to make something similar myself. Now I’m grown up, I was prepared for the games to be underwhelming. After all, many of the old things that inspired me weren’t actually that great to begin with.
One of the things I think hasn’t stood the test of time with most of the Clickteam demos is the controls. In the days of Klik & Play, Clickteam products gave you a few useful movements that could be applied to objects like Race Car, Platform, and so on. Using these, it was possible to make something playable quickly. Whilst they were easy to set up, though, you didn’t get much control over how they worked, and many of the movements had quite serious bugs in them. For instance, the platform game movement allowed you to rub your character against a wall and jump or get stuck in walls, which clearly wasn’t intended. I thought it was rather ironic that some of Clickteam’s own demos for The Games Factory, like Zeb, used custom-made movement systems that had to be programmed manually instead of showcasing their ready-made systems.
Nowadays on Super Space Galaxy, I’ve put huge amounts of work in the movement programming for your ship. Even recently I improved the movement further with a new ‘warmup’ system. Just like Zeb and some of those old demos, I haven’t used Clickteam’s ready-made movement systems and I wouldn’t want to now. As much as I’m still using Clickteam products to make my games, I’m only able to do it because I understand their weaknesses and I’m able to work around them.
A lot of the games I made during those years were responses to what I saw as the shortcoming of these demos. My space shooter game Supernova was clearly based on demos like Operation Overkill. Then there was the many, many games that were started but never finished. It wasn’t until much later, making Super Space Slayer, that I really committed to finishing what I started.
Trying out the old demos again has shown just how far I’ve come as a gamer and designer. Games that seemed amazing at the time now seem, frankly, remarkably crap. I only played some of them for a minute or two before recognizing their jankiness, then moving on to the next one. A few were worth playing to the end, but by and large they’re just a set of interesting relics from a bygone time.
If you want to try the demos yourself, you can find them here.
Thanks for reading,
Kenneth Dunlop
Kenneth Dunlop's Game Dev Blog 