(Simon N Goodwin owns the copyright to this review. Please visit http://simon.mooli.org.uk to find original articles and updates, much new material and his contact details.)

ANY GAME YOU LIKE

ARGUS SOFTWARE'S Arcade Creator is a package aimed at a very different market - people who definitely DON'T want to learn to program, but who still want to invent games.

Arcade Creator is a package in the tradition of QUICKSILVA'S Games Designer and Hurg from MELBOURNE HOUSE. The aim is to distil the elements of a game design away from the underlying program - so that you can produce original games simply by designing the graphics and selecting from pre-set play options.

QUICKSILVA'S package was easy to use but very limited - it came with eight demo games, with each one packed into 1K of memory. Hurg was more flexible, but not much. Both had the flaw that you had to load the main package before you could load a game of your own. Arcade Creator removes that restriction, but brings its own disadvantages.

For £14.95 you get yet another black video box with two cassettes and a ten-page typeset manual rattling around inside. The documentation is rudimentary; just a tour of the tape contents from Tape 1 Side 1 to Tape 2 Side 2, with commentaries on the process of game design en route.

The text is readable and restrictions are clearly stated, usually with a helpful explanation. I found the '2' key listed in place of 'Z at one point, and could not find the game control keys listed anywhere, but both of these faults were easy to correct by experiment.

The first thing I do when judging any kind of design program is look at the examples provided. In this case I just got a ten-screen platform game, by the name of Nutty Gnome. This is a bad advertisement for the package, and certainly too poor a game to be published separately by any established budget house. It takes me back to early 1983, with its inaccurate collision detection and flickering blocky graphics, including square-edged trees.

Arcade Creator forces you to build up backgrounds from user-defined characters; you can only use a total of 84 characters in all twenty possible screens, so background graphics have to be simple or horrid. If you abandon graphics altogether you can design a game with up to 40 'screens' or, strictly, attack waves. Don't bother if you've already got a copy of Arcadia

...AS LONG AS IT'S

The package lets you design two types of game: simple platform games (without lifts, belts or ladders, and with a fixed jump distance) or 'chase and shoot' games where a character moves around the screen shooting baddies and barriers, and collecting treasure, weapons, keys, glasses or whatever. Many commercial games have been designed around these formats, but they're getting dates and 'hit' programs tended to add features to the bare bones, like the ropes in Jet Set Willy or the moving platforms in Chuckie Egg.

In either case you must start by designing the sound effects , sprites (moving graphics) and user-defined characters which will be used to build up background pictures.

Sprites are designed on a 16x16 pixel grid - about average for Spectrum arcade games and significantly better than the 12x12 of QUICKSILVA'S Games Designer. Sprites are drawn by colouring points on a grid; the complete pattern can be 'rotated' in 90 degree steps, 'reflected' to face the other side of the screen, or 'inverted' by swapping coloured and empty points. You can design up to 21 sprites, each of which can have up to four steps of animation. As the game is played the sprite cycles quickly through the steps, so that it looks alive.

User-defined graphics are drawn in a similar way, but on an 8x8 grid. The graphics are stored in four groups, each holding 21 patterns.

The sound generator is easy to use and versatile - you can get just about any noise that can be made up from a single fluctuating tone, including sirens, buzzes, bleeps and 'white noise' explosion effects. The program stores up to eight different effects, and any six of these can be associated with events during the game - collisions, level changes. and so on.

The graphics are frozen while sound effects are produced - as on most early Spectrum games - but this doesn't matter much if you keep the noises short. There's no continuous music during play, but a jingle is played before the game starts - there are three pre-set possibilities.

The screen designer is very limited. Your pictures must be built up from small user-defined graphics, rather than lines and shapes drawn freehand. The results look like a Lego building site.

After designing that lot you must ave it all on tape and load a second program, which leads you through a set of questions about the game, such as its name, the number of screens, and the game type. A decreasing bonus score can be pre-set. with an option to stop play if the countdown reaches zero.

Then you assign sprites to be players, enemies, missiles, treasure and so on, setting their initial positions, movement (if any, in eight directions at twelve possible speeds), and the effect of collisions with other sprites and the background. You set the initial direction of movement, but the rest of the path depends upon what gets in the way.

When you've positioned and programmed every sprite on every screen you can load a third program to produce a separate game file which can be loaded on its own.

...BEEN DONE BEFORE

This is very clever, and neatly done, but it's not the way that real games are designed. You develop real games interactively - you position the graphics and play for a while, then you adjust the background to make things easier or more difficult, fiddle with the speeds, add and remove sprites, and generally build things up piecemeal.

Even the most brilliant and experienced game designers use this ad hoc approach to get things absolutely spot-on. It is even more important for beginners to be able to experiment; yet it's virtually impossible to work that way with Arcade Creator, because you have to save and re-load everything, and troll through the question and answer sequence, every time you make a change.

All three sections of the package should really be built into one program. The second two parts agree largely programmed in BASIC, so it should be possible to make them much more concise by re-writing them in machine code. Arcade Creator runs on the Spectrum 128 but does not appear to make use of the extra RAM. Nor is there any support for disks or Microdrives.

If you're interested in games you may be able to while away a few evenings playing with Arcade Creator. But if you really want to design and test your own games it's no alternative to 'real' programming. Arcade Creator lets you fiddle with pre-set games, but it doesn't give you the freedom to design anything really original.

Label: Argus Press
Price: £14.95
Joystick: Kempston
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: John Gilbert

Produce your own arcade games without getting involved in the intricacies of machine code with the first in a series of creator utilities from Argus Press.

The package includes four tapes, which makes access to the five graphics and sound utilities easier than searching through one long tape. Those utilities give you control over user-defined graphics (UDG) and sprite generation, the creation of sound effects, background screen design and the final compilation of those elements into a stand-alone code game.

There are two types of game you can produce: Levels and Ladders or a Shoot 'Em Up. The former gives you a Jet Set Willy type scenario while the latter is for Space Invaders freaks where killing aliens is the only form of worthwhile entertainment. Both types are created using the same process.

First create your objects using the UDG designer, your main characters using the sprite designer and create the backgrounds you want.

Then assign the UDGs and sprites as objects of various types, eg, players, aliens, treasure. Link the screens together and define the sound effects. Now compile the whole thing on to one tape and the game is complete.

Actually it's not that simple, but it's not impossible either.

The UDG designer produces a still character set which can be used to create treasure icons and the building blocks for the scenery. There are four blocks of UDGs from which you can select defaults, or design your own over existing ones.

Each UDG is designed on an eight-by-eight grid using a joystick or keyboard controlled pen cursor. When you've created your character you can change it using the block move commands. Those mirror the image, rotate it through 90 degrees and invert the Paper and ink colours. Once you've finished your masterpiece you can save it to one of the four banks of UDGs in Ram.

The sprite designer is similar to the UDG utility but the grid is 16x16 and you can only store 16 of them. Unlike UDG characters the sprite images can be animated. You could, for instance, produce a series of frame grids showing a man walking, then flash them onto the screen one at a time using the Arcade Creator's control program. A 'current sprite window' on the file status screen demonstrates the animation of any figures you have created before you put them into a game.

You can give your sprite characters one of four Paper colours and eight ink colours. Those are chosen from a menu using an arrow cursor - all mod cons - and activated instantly by pressing fire.

Sprites can be moved around in their squares in a similar way to UDGs but the benefits of mirror, invert and rotate are more obvious than for UDGs. Many of your characters will, for instance, want to move left and right which could mean that you have to create two sprites, one for each direction. You don't, of course, have to do that. Just create one sprite and flick its mirror image into a free sprite grid. While you're at it you could get your figure to walk up the walls by rotating it by 90 degrees.

Once you've finished the animated bits you'll need a background for them to play in Arcade Creator has a very basic screen designer which you can use to create all the levels and ladders you need.

Start off with a yellow flashing cursor in the middle of a blank display window. Below are the characters you can use to build your scaffolding and status displays which show the co-ordinates of the cursor and the file number of the screen. You can store more than eight screens in memory and the package shows how many bytes you have left for other screens.

All arcade games need some sound effects to evoke an atmosphere in keeping with the plot. Arcade Creator has a limited sound system which produces beeps or white noise.

Sound effects are created using three parameters: frequence, length and repetition. The frequency of the note is split further into start value, end value and the step of the scale up or down between those two points.

The package includes eight preset sound effects which can be ranged from sharp to mellow. The utility is interactive so you can test your sounds while in the development stage and make alterations if they don't fit your requirements.

When you've set up the graphics and sound you can save all the data to tape ready for the compilation process. The program first asks you to load in the graphics and sound information for your new game.

Those prompts are followed by requests for the number of lives, the name given to 'bonus' points and the starting value of those points. You can also set the game so that every time the character runs out of bonus points you lose a life.

Now set up the types of sprite you want. The package gives names to each type including Player, Missile, Aliens and Bombs. For instance, you could use a little person for Player, a blob for treasure and a bag of gold for bombs.

Once you've set up the number of sprites and defined their shapes you'll need to decide what will happen to them and whether they can use bombs. The program also allows access to multi-coloured sprites which change hue as they move around.

The sound is the last aspect to be dealt with before everything is compiled on to tape. You can put sound anywhere at the start of a new level, or where treasure is collected or even when a missile is fired to five added effect to the action.

Then save everything to tape and load in the file utility. The Game Code generator adds a preselected tune and loading screen, and saves your game which you can then load back without needing Arcade Creator in memory.

Arcade Creator is easy to use and produces competent games - though just how good depends upon the user. An example game included in the package doesn't exploit its potential power, but no doubt some impressive games could be created by anyone with a good imagination.

There's no other package on the Spectrum to rival Adventure Creator. HURG from Melbourne House and Games Designer from Quicksilva both require the development system in memory when you play the games. The Argus package has no such drawback.

OK, so the final game isn't going to be earth-shattering. But it'll be playable and won't require you to have any knowledge of machine-code.

ARCADE GAMES CREATOR

Anthony Thompson reviews a software utility from Argus which allows Spectrum owners to create the games of their dreams.

Even though there are more than 5,000 commercial software packages available for the Spectrum computer, there is nothing so satisfying as creating your own. Writing a machine code shoot-'em-up or platform game, while greatly rewarding, is often a frustrating and dull affair.

Using Arcade Creator, even the novice programmer is able to produce full-length machine code games to professional qualification with up to 40 screens. The time taken to produce a finished game, complete with backgrounds, animated sprites and interactive sound can be as little as an hour.

Arcade Creator is supplied on two tapes. Loading side one of the first produces the opening menu. Choosing option 1, the user-defined graphics designer allows you to create the screen scene on which the game will take place. Using the cursor keys or a joystick, you can create your shape and then rotate, invert or produce a mirror image of it before saving it in the program files. Arcade Creator is complete with its own files of sprites and UDGs and they can be used in preference to your own designs.

The sprite designer has little to distinguish it from the others on the market. It enables you either to produce your own designs or select from the 30 or so retained on file. Once you have drawn four images of your character, the program switches between them to show you how it will took when animated.

The sound designer is self-explanatory and can be used to create background noises while the game is in progress. The final option on this side of the cassette is the screen designer which allows you to select which UDGs are to be used and choose which background colour will appear in the finished game.

The second tape is concerned with the structure of the game. Two types are available, chase-'n-shoot or platform. Both types have set patterns to follow, making the creation process less complicated. For chase-'n-shoot games, the players fire missiles at the aliens while attempting to avoid barriers and obstacles and collecting as much treasure as possible.

In the platform games, the player can avoid the aliens and killer monsters only while collecting the treasure. Although those formats may seen to restrict the game play, even the most exciting professional games are based on similar principles.

After you have chosen the sprites for the aliens, missiles and other items you can select which, if any, sounds are to be produced when a missile is fired, treasure collected or an alien is killed. Finishing touches such as a loading screen and title tune are added using the second side of the tape, which is also used to prepare the final game tape.

Overall. Arcade Creator is a quality, low-cost product which can produce enjoyable games in a short time. As the packaging indicates, the only limit is your imagination.

BUDDING ADVENTURE WRITERS ARE WELL SERVED BY THE QUILL AND GAC, BUT NOW ARCADE FANS CAN GET IN ON THE ACT WITH THE ARCADE CREATOR

Argus Press Software
£14.99

The Arcade Creator is the first title in the new Creator range of programming utilities, and it's a reasonable, if not outstanding start for the new range.

Arcade Creator is quick and easy to use, but it does have very clearly defined limitations. The programs in this two cassette package are designed to help non-programmers to create their own arcade games, but for this purpose the word 'arcade' is defined as basically meaning simple platform games or shoot 'em ups. This isn't necessarily a criticism - remember, some of the most addictive games ever released fall into these categories - but just don't expect to produce your own version of Knight Lore with these programs.

Tape 1, Side 1 is mainly concerned with designing your own UDGs and sprites. Programs for designing these things are probably familiar to most of you by now - grids of different sizes in which you define the shapes of your graphics by filling in squares on the grid which represent pixels on the television screen. This aspect of the Creator is fairly standard, but is well thought out and the option of joystick control makes it much quicker and easier to use than most similar utilities that I've come across. I managed to knock up a few simple sprites in just a couple of minutes using this program, whereas designing sprites normally takes me ages and uses up stacks of graph paper, so Creator gets good marks for 'user friendliness'.

The sprites that you can design can be two character squares high by two wide, and there are also options allowing you to rotate, invert and produce mirror images of sprites. The program comes with about two sets of sprites built in, and there are four variations on each of these which can be used to produce animated sequences in your games.

This side of the tape also allows you to 'manufacture' sound effects for use within the game. This is also made quite simple as you can choose between 'Beeps' and 'White noise' (explosion type noises) and for each of these you can vary the frequency, starting and ending tones and number of repetitions. This won't allow you to create music as in the way that dedicated music utilities can, but it's perfectly adequate for 'spot' sound effects, explosions, collisions and the like.

Again, the ease of use is quite impressive and clearly this has been considered as a major part of the package's design. The manual is just 10 pages long and not at all intimidating (I can remember reading the thick, incomprehensible manuals of some other games-designing utilities and wanting to give up before I'd even got started).

Game screens can be built up simply by entering the screen editor option. Once in this mode you can position a cursor anywhere on screen and then just drop the appropriate UDG into place. All the UDGs available (either your own designs, or the Creator's own built-in files) are displayed at the bottom of the screen and correspond with the keys A-U as normal. The type of screens that you design need to be kept to under 1000 bytes, and of course the simpler the screen design the more of them that you can fit into the available memory - up to a maximum of forty. The sample screens that come with the program occupy about 600 to 800 bytes each and some are quite complex, so the memory limitation isn't likely to be much of a drawback.

Side 2 of this tape contains a demo game called Nutty Gnome, set in a garden and featuring a little gnome sprite who bounces around collecting things and trying to avoid deadly butterflies and plants. As the instruction manual tells you, it's a simple example of what you can do. but its as good as some of the budget games that are around these days. The colours are a bit garish, and the layout of the platform seems to have been done in a bit of a hurry but it wouldn't disgrace most budget software ranges (Mastertronic might think twice, but some of their budget stuff is streets ahead of the competition).

Once you've designed your graphics and screens, or chosen to use the Creator's own pre-designed files, you then go onto the second tape which allows you to program the game's 'mechanics'.

Here you first choose between the platform and shoot 'em up type of game, and then decide on the allocation of points and bonuses. For each screen you are asked to choose the number of items to be collected, the number of 'aliens' (sprites that are out to get you) and the effect of collisions on your own player sprite. For all of these sprites you can also define the speed and direction of movement.

All the way along the program gives you prompts and indicates the options available, so all you have to do is press the appropriate button. This makes game design quick and simple, but you are limited to just the few options available (for instance the number of objects to be collected on each screen is limited to 0, 1 or 2).

I haven't looked closely at how this program is actually written but it does seem to include a chunk of BASIC, and on a couple of occasions I've caused it to drop back into BASIC and then crash when I've accidentally returned a wrong reply to a prompt. Potential buyers are unlikely to have a lot of programming knowledge (or else why buy a utility of this sort?) and can't be expected to iron out bugs in the programming, so this should have been ironed out before now - it doesn't make the programs unusable but it is an irritating and fairly sloppy mistake to let through (mistakes in input have to be expected with this sort of utility).

The only drawback with Arcade Creator lies in the relative simplicity of the games that you will be able to design. If you think back to the days of Manic Miner and Jet-Pac those games represent about the level of complexity that you'll be able to achieve. As I said earlier, some of those games were enormously addictive and spawned vast hordes of imitators, so the potential is definitely there for you to produce a mini-classic but you shouldn't expect to create a game that is anywhere near 'state of the art' by today's standards (or last year's for that matter).