These files are around two decades old and are presented as an archive rather than modern supported software. Expect period quirks, bad compatibility and several design decisions management can no longer explain. Many thanks to Mark Overmars, developer of the original Game Maker, for making this particular corner of teenage creativity possible.
FPAINT (2005)
BOXVILLE (2006)
THE CITY OF PLISTON (2006)
STARDOG (2007)
NEON 3D (2008)
STARFLEET OPERATIONS (2008)
UTOPIA UNLIMITED (2009)
Armed with a demo of TrueSpace 3 and a newly registered copy of Game Maker 6, twelve-year-old Fionn concluded that the possibilities were limitless. The Enemy Lines became his first “complete” game and was released on the Game Maker Community forums.
Fionn says the objective was to make something exciting. The approved solution was an enthusiastic quantity of particle effects in a primitive top-down space shooter. He had not learned conventional coding yet, so the entire game was assembled with Game Maker’s drag-and-drop actions.
Movement is restricted to four directions, the action is strangely slow, and it remains impressively difficult to determine what is happening. Fionn particularly enjoyed packaging it with promotional artwork, misspelt HTML documentation, ship specifications and backstory. The readme even identifies the school library computers with enough graphics memory to launch it. Premium compatibility information for the discerning 2005 customer.
Fionn made a small suite of creative programs for children, including a music sequencer, image editor and drawing program. Only FPaint appears to have survived.
FPaint permits drawing in five luxurious colours. Fionn had not yet discovered drawing surfaces, so every pencil pixel exists as a separate object. A sufficiently ambitious picture can therefore reduce the frame rate below 30 FPS on hardware many years newer than the program itself.
Later editions reached version 3.2 and became somewhat closer to MS Paint. Fionn forgot to back them up. Hotline Café would be genuinely delighted to hear from anyone who somehow still possesses a copy.
Boxville was Fionn’s first GTA clone and, by his own description, a Frankenstein’s monster of borrowed material. Evil Cookie’s fake-3D tutorial supplied the buildings, screenshots from San Andreas became vehicles, and Poser 4’s default models provided the pedestrians.
The whole game was assembled in about one week. It was then the largest project Fionn had attempted and forced him to begin finding actual logical solutions to development problems, an alarming escalation in professionalism.
Although released largely as a joke, Boxville became unexpectedly popular within the Game Maker community. Contemporary reviews correctly identified numerous bugs, but Fionn was pleased simply to have produced the novelty: free-roaming Game Maker games were still unusual.
Following Boxville’s popularity, Fionn decided to build another GTA-style game that he might actually be proud of. Boxville took a week. Pliston occupied roughly six months.
Pliston marks a substantial jump in Fionn’s understanding of game development: texturing, model conversion and importing, lighting, and fuller use of Game Maker’s 3D engine.
The setting became a deliberately dilapidated American city. It was also the first Fionn game with properly written radio dialogue: Pop, Jungle, House and Talk/Comedy. The Hotline Café broadcasting department clearly had to begin somewhere. Pliston circulated around the scene for a year or two; today its glitches make it more interesting as a preserved piece of 2006 Game Maker culture than as a polished modern game.
Stardog: The Slaves’ Alliance is an arcade-flavoured space combat game and loose successor to The Enemy Lines. This premium revision introduces full 360-degree movement and several firing modes.
Energy, fuel and armour each receive their own health bar. Energy can be rerouted to replenish fuel and armour, assuming the player has a spare moment between incoming laser blasts.
Fionn remembers Stardog fondly as a quick project. Its ships reused old TrueSpace 3 models, while the soundtrack consists of General MIDI arrangements of early Fruity Loops beats. The whole thing apparently took three or four days. Efficiency at last.
By 2008 Fionn was increasingly absorbed in electronic dance music, and Neon became an excuse to showcase it. Every level received a different track. The game pursued classic arcade priorities: abstract, colourful and loud.
Players pilot a ship with the mouse through an apparently endless 3D tunnel, avoiding and shooting coloured geometric enemies.
Fionn says playing it through today gives him a headache. Difficulty rises across fifteen levels, followed by a jaunty tune for anybody determined enough to reach the end.
Download Editable GMK (3MB)
Plans were characteristically modest: approximately 300 years of Trek history and every starship class Fionn could think of. Considerable groundwork went into an RTS engine where ships could level up into more advanced variants as the timeline progressed.
Code was written for the Borg, Romulans, Klingons, Gorn, Suliban and Cardassians. An attempt to model every vessel in 3D ended after the Constitution and Excelsior classes, when common sense briefly prevailed.
Development reached a reliable road-tiling system, a basic economic model and early residential and commercial zones. Fionn was particularly pleased with the illusion of bustling streets populated by 3D traffic and pedestrians.
The project ultimately hit severe performance problems once cities reached a certain size. Fionn says he could probably approach it differently today, but at the time his programming experience was not enough to realise a simulation of that scale. Hotline Café respectfully preserves the unfinished metropolis exactly where construction stopped.
⇑ Back to top
SITE DIRECTORYサイト案内
またね！ SEE YOU IN CYBERSPACE ♥