Presented In Retrovision: Klik & Play
Growing up there was two distinct occupations I wanted to have. Most kids my age wanted to be police officers or firemen, though I wanted to be a video game designer. Given my current audience, this probably does not seem that odd, but at the time it wasn't what was the considered the norm. At age 3, I had started copying BASIC programs for my Apple //e out of old issues of Nybbles (a computer magazine from long ago), and by age 12 I was writing applications in C. Given this, one might assume that I would have had little interest in game "makers," since most provided very little in the way of flexibility. What I had in passion was superseded by impatience. With that, I found great enjoyment screwing around with game engines. I have previously discussed two of my favorite engines: Megazeux and ZZT. This week I present to you Maxis' Klik & Play.
Klik & Play was produced in 1994 by a group called Clickteam. Clickteam consisted of François Lionet and Yves Lamoureux, a small team formed for the soul purpose of designing and building game creation software for everyone. Prior to his work with Clickteam, Lionet had created STOS BASIC and AMOS BASIC, game creation systems for the Commodore Amiga. These pieces of software proved there was a commercial viability for game creation software, and could realistically be called the grandfather to their first engine as a new company.
Klik & Play was designed for the layman. "No programming required," the box said, and it could not be any more true. Not once is it required to type in a single line of code. The system revolves around an "event model" design. This consists of a series of "levels," which are single, static screens with a maximum resolution of 640 x 480. After a player creates a level, the screen is then populated with various objects like trees, text or shaded blocks. In addition to creating objects, players design animations and a control system. The objects can be either automated or user controlled using various schemes like "race car" or "bouncing ball."
Only after the level is populated does the actual game design take place. Design can continue in one of two ways, either through the step-through editor or the event editor. Both essentially do the same thing. The event model revolves around cause and effect. A player creates a block of tiles, a ball and a paddle, and the game logic might be, "If ball hits block, block explodes and add 10 points. If block hits paddle, than ball bounces." To create this logic, the step-through editor will wait for an event to happen (collisions between various objects for example) and request the user define an action for that event. The event editor, however, allows the user to define the events from scratch, allowing for more elaborate game play.
The first thing I designed was, naturally, a platformer. Super Mario Bros. was a favorite of mine and it also had the simplest of design. The screen did not scroll, so creating large games was tedious, because it required players to create many screens to accommodate large play areas. Board games like Othello could easily fit on a single screen with a little creative game logic, but anything requiring tasks like path finding or scrolling was right out. The amusement eventually wore off, and I went back to using larger, more complicated methods of game design.
Klik & Play was probably the first real experience I had with event driven software models. While the system never allowed me to produce anything I would call a masterpiece, it was actually one of the best tools I can remember for learning basic game logic. Klik & Play manages to get pulled out of my pile of old games every so often, because I enjoyed playing it and can still remember how much fun I had making pong clones and the like. Clickteam is still around today, working on sequels to their successful title. Their newer programs like The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion eventually surpassed the old engine by adding features like scrolling and the web-plugin Vitalize, though, none of these ever seemed quite as entertaining to use.
Klik & Play for Schools (Free download)
Asterick
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 6 March 2008
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: clickteam, games factory, klik & play, maxis, multimedia fusion, presented in retrovision
Oh my god! I hadn't thought about Klick and Play in years and years. Way back when I used to either rock the click and play or the Civ. I rememebr playing a bit of Link's Awakening on a friends gameboy and trying to recreate Zelda in Klick and Play.
Yay!
I loved Klik & Play, I spent ages capturing screens from my favorite PC Games, Monkey Island & Indiana Jones Etc, and trying to paste them into my own non-scrolling games. The result looked like a crazy moving scrapbook. Great fun!
What a fantastic programme. Did anybody get the Games Factory as well? It was a nice cleanup of Klik and Play and had some new options. Fantastic stuff!
Hah! I got Klik & Play, but the lack of scrolling eventually killed it for me. I made a few simple SHMUP's (similar to their demo game), and eventually kept trying to build a Jungle Strike clone (remember that? for SNES?). Years later I picked up RPG Maker and went a lot further with that.
I made my own arkanoid on this thang! with squids and gorillas! it was more fun in my head actually...