Create your own retro shooter

Posted by oddbob on April 24, 2008 · Lovingly Filed Under Reviews 
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Took Problem Chimp To Ideal Home Exhibition

Ever wanted to create your own ZX Spectrum shooter but like me, lacked the know how? Fear not because the ever prolific Jonathan Cauldwell and Cronosoft have just released SEUD for the ZX Spectrum. Well, I say just - it was about two weeks ago but I’ve only just got round to having a proper look at my copy. In case you’re a bit thicky and haven’t worked it out yet, SEUD stands for Shoot Em Up Designer. Genius!

I fear that unlike my good pal TCK, the limits of my Speccy coding history are a few UDG based BASIC games and a few years back the genesis of George’s Squizzy Griffin in previous Cronosoft release “Platform Game Designer”. As many of you do readers will already be aware, my first computer love belongs to the Speccy. Combine that with a love of shooters and well, it’s almost like they made this for me really.

Commodore owners have been well served (although I’m not sure the majority of folks who had a deluge of SEUCK created games foisted on them on magazine covers would agree) by Sensible Software’s Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit, but us lowly Spectrum owners never had such a “privilege”. It may be a little late considering the machine is long dead but hey, better late than never, eh?

Creating With SEUD

I’ll confess, my first attempt at creating a game with SEUD could politely be described as an abortion. I don’t know, maybe it was the concept that went wrong - after all, the starting point of “Took Problem Chimp To Ideal Home Show” probably wasn’t the best in the world. But still, things can only get better from here.

When you first delve into SEUD you’re confronted with a myriad of menus and options - there’s everything the budding shoot em up creator might need. There’s attack wave generators, sprite editors, boss construction menu’s, the ability to set events, all sorts. It’s a little bit scary but luckily there’s an exhaustive text file that covers most of the bases (although there’s a few bits missing here and there, nothing that can’t be scoped out from nipping back a bit and checking another section where the keys are duplicated) so a quick read should see you right.

Knocking up chimps isn’t big or clever, kids. Remember, chimps have feelings too.

Naturally, the first thing I dived into was the sprite editor and now I remember why I’m grateful that technology has progressed. The amount of time and effort it takes compared to pixelling something up using a multitude of colours is phenomenal and puts me in awe of those who managed to create glorious monochrome graphics back in the Speccy’s heyday. It’s only when faced with what we used to think as incredible that it really hits home just how far we’ve come.

So, I pixelled up a few household items including a sofa, a bath and some light fittings (hey, this is the Ideal Home Exhibition!) as tiles, knocked up a quick chimp (hush matron!) and the head of a security guard for an enemy and proceeded to lay down the first level.

From there it was a simple matter of dropping the tiles into the map editor, drawing out a few attack waves (which is incredibly tedious but precise) and placing them onto the map.

No bullet hell

All told, it took about 15 minutes from opening SEUD to getting something substantial up and running on the screen. Which is nice considering it usually takes me half an hour to an hour to get a quick prototype running for a PC game. Obviously, there’s limitations and if you’re going into SEUD expecting to create the greatest bullet hell shooter for the Spectrum then I’d think again. It’s not likely to be happening.

I doubt anything I mung up in SEUD will ever see the light of day for the public, but as something to bung onto the DS, boot up the emu and kick back and fiddle with for nostalgia kicks - you can’t knock it. I doff my cap in respect to Mr Cauldwell. For a cheap and cheerful nostalgia fix and a multitude of years itching to be scratched, then I can’t say I’m disappointed with bunging the couple of quid over to Cronosoft.

Download and play:

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Speak your brains

7 Responses to “Create your own retro shooter”

  1. Richard Phipps on April 24th, 2008 10:36 pm

    Isn’t there any good shoot em up creators for the PC?

    I like the sofa by the way.. ;)

  2. oddbob on April 25th, 2008 12:56 am

    It *is* a nice sofa :p

    And no, not really. There’s only Dan’s beta that I know of to date. Bill might know otherwise though…

  3. the2bears on April 25th, 2008 6:08 am

    Well, if you think Perl’s elegant and you’re excited by obfuscated C there’s always CannonML for you. I know some Japanese use STG Builder, but I haven’t seen a translation for it. The Stencyl project is supposed to be shmup friendly, but it’s not out yet and is getting re-written.

    Not really that much out there that’s useful :P

    Bill

  4. oddbob on April 25th, 2008 7:26 am

    I took one look at CannonML and my brain went for a very long walk.

    Seriously impressed by the demo code, but by god! My poor eyes will never recover.

    No MMO support for Stencil though :( ;)

  5. Richard Phipps on April 25th, 2008 5:34 pm

    If I was a shooter fan, this would be a nice project to do.
    Surprised there’s not more tools out there to be honest..

  6. the2bears on April 26th, 2008 7:36 am

    Yeah, CannonML is not for the feint of heart… debugging must be the proverbial bitch. There’s a very outside chance that my current game engine efforts could lead to something useful. At least it’s turning out useful for me. A big missing piece is what I refer to as a “level editor”.

    Bill

  7. OmgItsAbbie on September 27th, 2008 2:27 pm

    Rules.
    1. Do Not Swear.
    2. Dont Scam People.
    3. Be Nice To Others Evan If You Dont Know Them
    4. Do Not Lap Dance Please.

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