Growing up I was a huge fan of LucasArts adventure games. I’m talking about titles like Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and all the rest of them until the company stopped making new IPs and instead turned out mediocre Star Wars games. Maniac Mansion, however, was the game for me. I originally played it as a rental on NES and … didn’t quite understand it. I did understand enough to know that I loved Razor’s theme music. I always selected Razor as one of my kids because of that music. You could probably go as far as to say that I developed an unhealthy crush on this pixel lady. Later, when I purchased Maniac Mansion on PC I would still always choose Razor and was disheartened when the PC release didn’t have the same music as the NES release. It wasn’t until twenty plus years later when I was replaying Maniac Mansion on the NES that my wife said, “That’s supposed to be a girl? She looks like an ugly dude.”
I spent way more time with the PC release as a kid, so my brain eternally thinks of Razor in her more feminine fidelity. In fact, I spent so much time with the PC release of Maniac Mansion that I finished the game without a walkthrough. That’s a pretty impressive feat if I do say so myself. I also finished it playing only with a keyboard. See, every time I’d boot up Maniac Mansion, my mouse wouldn’t work. In today’s world that’s the kind of problem that you’d solve, or at the very least, you would pick a different game. As a kid though, I was undeterred by such setbacks. I was going to play the game and if that means controlling the pointer icon with the arrow keys, then so be it. Not only that, but back then my attitude was still one of pure joy. I wasn’t angry that my mouse didn’t work. I just adapted to it. It was only after playing hours, days, weeks, and months of Maniac Mansion that I discovered, quite by accident, that pressing the “M” key on the keyboard enabled mouse support. Oh, the things we learn. Then I played more hours, days, weeks, and months of Maniac Mansion with full mouse support. It was like a brand new game! If life shared Steam’s playtime counter, I’d like to know how many hours in total I’ve played Maniac Mansion. I think it would be astronomical, perhaps only rivaled by the collective amount of time I’ve played Street Fighter II.
So what does this have to do with RavenFist studios, or game development? SCUMM. The Script Command Utility for Maniac Mansion. The engine of Maniac Mansion and several other LucasArts adventure games. See, I wanted to make my own game, and for a while I thought SCUMM would be my engine of choice. I incorrectly thought that since it was an old engine, it would be an easy engine. It turns out that SCUMM was never meant to be a publicly available engine the way a Unity or an Unreal engine is. SCUMM was essentially tailored to each game by LucasArts. It’s not something that one could just download and start working with.
So what engine should we use?
This was a task that was gladly turned over to the coder. The recommendation that he made was GameMaker. Why not Unreal? I’d heard that word coming off the lips of people at E3. Surely, we can use the same tools those people use! Turns out my criteria for choosing a game engine wasn’t really the best criteria to actually, you know, make a game. From the coder:
The scripting language GameMaker uses (GML) is quite similar to Javascript and easy to learn. The documentation for GML is clear and very descriptive. Being a web developer by trade, it made learning the language for GameMaker a breeze.GameMaker is powerful enough to make the games we want to make without getting tangled up in functionality we didn’t need in some of the other, heavier engines.Everyone else said to start with GameMaker. Ok, maybe not everyone, but after doing some research online of what other developers suggested as the best engine to use when learning how to actually make a game, GameMaker was #1. It might not have the capabilities of some of the bigger engines, but for learning how to make a game, it was suggested far more than any other engine out there.Other games that used GameMaker as their engine played a big part as well. When you see that popular, successful games, like Hyper Light Drifter, Undertale, Hotline Miami, Gunpoint, etc. were created using GameMaker, that spoke louder than anything to whether the engine would be a good choice for us to begin with.The GameMaker community is extremely helpful. There are always answers to questions you may have, and some wonderful tutorial content (looking at you Shaun Spaulding and PixelatedPope) to begin with. This made understanding the basics of coding a game quite easy. The case for GameMaker was plead. It was inexpensive. It could easily go cross platform. And it had been used to create some great games.
That’s the point that convinced me to go along with GameMaker as the right choice. To be completely honest, I was biased against GameMaker simply because of the name. It sounds simplistic, like the “Make-a-Game” software I bought off the shelf at Best Buy as a pre-teen because I knew I could design the next Super Mario Bros. (Spoiler: I didn’t.) When I learned that GameMaker had been used to create games like Hyper Light Drifter, then all questions left my mind.
Until the Humble Bundle happened.
A few weeks ago (as of this writing), Humble released a Unity bundle, which included not only games made in Unity, but also a handful off tools to work in Unity. The coder and I each bought bundles because we figured in the future Unity might be an option and with Humble the price is always right. Then the coder started poking around in Unity, as coders are oft wont to do. Before you know it I hear words coming out of his mouth like, “I don’t know guys, Unity is pretty nice.” Sigh. I know where this is going.
“But,” I say, “But we already have so much working in GameMaker. We have the feel of the game right in GameMaker. We’re loading assets into GameMaker!” Yet, the coder is the coder for a reason, and his opinion in matters such as these is the opinion we listen to. After several more days of research, discussion, and testing, GameMaker was left to wallow where ever bits on a hard drive wallow. Unity had stolen the show. To me, the most impressive reason for this change is this: All three of us knew, without ever having discussed it, that we would outgrow GameMaker. Why not start with an engine that we planned to stay with for two, three, four, however many games? Why not spend the time we’ve been spending learning GameMaker to learn something that we were going to use for the foreseeable future?
Rebuild will be a game made with Unity.
I still want to make a LucasArts-inspired adventure game some day. I doubt that it will be made in SCUMM no matter what, but that was the first time that the concept of a game engine entered my purview. One step closer to the dream, I guess.
Sincerely,
RavenFist Studio
