CRL
£8.95
Reviewer: Phil South

It had to happen! No less than (in fact slightly more than) a year after the Future Shocks preview, 3D Game Maker is here! Now you too (What? Both of us? Schizo Ed) can make adventure games in the grand old Alien 8/Fairlight tradition.

There are two cassettes in the box you get with Game Maker, a sprite editor, a room designer and a game which you can play your designs on. Unfortunately you can't play your game on its own, or give copies to your friends, as the designs won't play unless they've been loaded into the game. But you can have several different maps, sprites and puzzles to amuse yourself with, although why you should want to, when you already know the answer is anybody's guess.

The editor programs are a little bit flakey. With a bit of a problem reading the joysticks and crashing at the least provocation on the +3. But when it was running on a Speccy+, not so much trouble. Your own sprite designs have to fit onto the designs already in the machine. For example, sprites 8a-8f are part of the disintegration sequence, sprite 16 is a fixed block, sprite 17 is a poisonous block and sprite 18 is a pushable block. Sprite 15 is the finish block, which you have to place in the finish square of the map. Shooting this sprite finishes the game, so I'm afraid the scenario that you had in mind for fighting a 3-sprite dragon just went up in smoke!

The room editor is fairly comprehensive, but relies on a pretty strict format. The doors must all be in the same place, and the wall sections are placed for you. I can imagine the average games designer tearing his hair out with boredom and frustration after a few minutes of this. The program can't really be used just to try something out quickly either, 'cos you have to design your sprites, all of them, then save them to tape. THEN you've got to load up the game tape, and load your sprites in. (That's three loads so far!) Then you can try out your sprites, and you won't be able to see if they work when animated until then.

As a bit of fun, 3D Game Maker fulfills most of its promise, constructing 3D type games and effortlessly whiling away hours. But if you've got anything remotely serious in mind, you might be better off using a simple graphics package and learning Z80 machine code.

IT'S A METRICAL DESIGNER

A simple recipe for metamorphosis

Have you ever wanted to customise a game and put your signature to it? Well now's your chance with CRL's 3D Gamemaker. Franco Frey gives it a whirl

THE GAME is your typical Knightlore clone wIth 256 different rooms and the usual objects, obstacles and nasties. Fed up with the standard characters, objects and background, you simply create your own fantasy land or theme park.

The idea is not really all that new. Perhaps older readers may remember that odd excursion into games designing by Quicksilva, Games designer, where several different game structures could be configured from a wide choice of available graphic characters and attack waves. This was fairly limiting though, as it left little creation to the player, just a choice of combinations. Remember the Robin Candy Playing Tips cassette last year, that contained a program by Phil Churchyard which would let the player rearrange the rooms, objects and exits of Sweevo's World from Gargoyle. Again, it didn't allow you to create your own graphics. 3D Game Maker does just that.

The package consists of three programs, 3D Graphic Editor, 3D Room Designer and 3D Gamemaker.

As its name implies, the first provides a graphics utility, which accesses the available range of graphic blocks/sprites and allows you to modify or create your very own designs. Each graphic is assigned to a function, ie fixed or moving/crumbling object, background/room border block or player/nasty sprite. This function cannot obviously be changed, only the look of it.

Each graphic requires the generation of a mask - to clear the background - but this is made easier by the automatic mask generator, which follows the new object's outlines and provides a quick starting point for further modification. An individual block can be stored in a temporary buffer, so that it can be copied into the next graphic block - useful for moving spites or for similar looking objects. The block can be flipped over from left to right and a fill routine provides some further help in the creation of your graphical element. SAVE, VERIFY and LOAD routines are provided for permanent storage.

The 3D Room Designer is a facility for positioning objects and aliens at any point, and for the addition or removal of the exits which connect the rooms. The colour of each room can be specified. Each object position requires memory and a memory status indicator displays the amount of memory still left.

The game area is a 16 by 16 matrix of rooms, but only one quarter of this is displayed, with an indicator to indicate which quarter is active. The position of the current room is indicated in the lower right-hand corner of the screen along with the position of the current object within the room. A 15 by 15 matrix shows the horizontal position, and a bar graph the actual height of the object within the room.

The current object can be selected by scanning the complete graphic repertoire for objects and aliens, and the joystick/cursor keys are used to move the object about. An Epson screen dump may be executed for keeping a record of the game area. Generated room data may be saved, verified and loaded from tape for later use.

The 3D Gamemaker is the master program which is required to save the customised version as an autonomous file on cassette. This loads with an example game called 3D Adventure, which can be accessed from the main menu, and which should provide a good example of what can be achieved. The same menu, however, provides the facility of loading the customised graphics and room data. The game can then be tested and, if satisfactory, saved with the appropriate name as an independent game file.

The utility programs are very well presented and designing the graphics and the room layout is simple and enjoyable, as most of the commands are accessed in true point and click style.

If the package were to be judged purely on the merits of the sample game, it would not end up in the top charts, in fact it would be rated as a poor to mediocre version of the particuLar game style. But with the possibility of creating your very own version, it should interest some of the would-be m/c programmers, who will never make it on their own. As long as nobody expects to create a new games technique with it, 3D Gamemaker should prove to be a versatile utility within the constraints of the program framework, but it's important to remember that apart from the disposition of the rooms and the objects, it's only the graphical look of the game that is going to change.

3D Gamemaker, CRL, £9.95 cass, £14.95 disk, joystick or keys.

Label: CRL
Author: Iain Christopher Hayward
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

They said it couldn't be done; well, it certainly took ages. But now the CRL 3-D Game Maker is here. Those of you with long memories might remember efforts like Melbourne House's H.U.R.G. This allowed you to define a number of sprites, backgrounds and sound effects, select a few collision options and scoring rules, and create a simple shooty-shooty or jumpy-jumpy game. CRL's 3-D Game Maker allows you to do exactly the same thing, but in, gaspo de gasp, perspective 3-D.

Since the introduction of Ultimate titles like Alien 8, Knight Lore and Pentagram, this sort of "isometric" game has been regarded as state-of-the-art - despite the fact that such things are now turning up regularly as budget games (look at Mastertronic's Rentakill Rita or Firebird's Cylu, for instance).

3-D Game Maker comes on two cassettes, in three parts; a Graphic Editor, a Rooms Designer and the 3-D Adventure itself. How does it all work then?

Let's start with the Graphic Editor. Load it up, and you can use a joystick or the cursor keys to control the command arrow. On the left of the screen is the graphic window, showing the current character either in a sixteen by sixteen or sixteen by thirty-two pixel box. On the right are all the editing commands. You can skip forwards or backwards through the seventy or so sprites provided, edit them pixel by pixel, flip, erase, fill, and scroll to your heart's content. Having designed your "sprites", use the Mask option which clears a space in the background, and the Base option which displays a 'perspective' square showing the space the graphic will take up.

Real-size displays of the sprite, the mask and the completed image appear over the option boxes. Having finished creating all your sprites, you can save them to tape for use in the finished game. The trick, of course, is that you have to design sprites from a number of different angles. The default set, for instance, contains designs for "Player Feet Coming Forward", "Player Feet Going Away", "Player Head Going Away Turned Right" and so forth. The implication is that if you want to design your own sprites, you need a lot of patience.

The same applies to the Room Designer program. Here, you can position objects such as doorways, trees, moving blocks, poisonous blocks, jelly-monsters, bubbles and robots to create your backgrounds. The game area is a sixteen by sixteen grid. There's a display on the left which shows the current cursor position within the room, and one on the right which shows which room you're in. A bar graph shows your height within the room, and at the top of the screen is a memory remaining indicator.

After choosing what colour you want the room to be, you choose your objects, position them on the screen using the joystick/keys, and remove the status indicators for a good look at what you're about.

Since you can place as many or as few exits as you want, the overall shape of the game isn't limited to a 16 16 square. Save the room designer data, then load the 3-D adventure itself, load up your two data sets, and play away...

The format of the game designer allows you to move forward, left, right and backwards, jump (forward if moving, vertically if not), and release a fireball.

Mast of the features familiar from Ultimate-type games are available; you can program moving blocks, pushable blocks, conveyor blocks, disintegrating blocks, and even blocks which trail along following the player and can be used as transport. To win each game you have to find and zap the Finish Sprite; there's a cute disintegration sequence which can be programmed in at this or any other point.

The graphics routines are excellent, with particularly good use of sprite priorities as one object passes in front of another. Sounds wonderful yet I'm really not that impressed with the game. The Mr Biggy super-gigantic drawback is that you can not create freestanding games; in order to run your creation, you need to load up 3-D GM and go through all the business of loading data sets. This is a huge and unforgivable blunder; perhaps CRL is afraid that if anyone can market free-standing games of the quality possible using 3-D GM, their own sales will suffer.

The other problem - perhaps more understandable in view of the Spectrum's limited memory - is the lack of any provision to record scores, pick up and manipulate objects, or really define any aspect of the gameplay other than the simple interaction of the objects. In this sense, the games you can create look good, but are really half-finished. Plus which, the three-page instruction manual is terse to the point of bluntness - a lot of people will be very confused.

Worth a shot, then - but not the key to fame and fortune.