- Activision Gamemaker
"Activision Gamemaker" (aka "Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker") was an IDE for the
Commodore 64 created byGarry Kitchen and released byActivision in1985 .The system was divided into 6 subsystems, all of which provided a graphical interface controlled with the joystick:
* SceneMaker - for creating background graphics
* SpriteMaker - for creating movable objects (commonly called sprites)
* MusicMaker - for composing musical scores
* SoundMaker - for creating sound effects
* The Editor - for programming the actual gameThe programming language used in gamemaker was reminiscent of other early programming languages like
BASIC , but with many built in graphics and sound facilities that tied in components created in the other parts of the system.The language was not keyed in via the keyboard, but used a novel system of selecting possible instructions from a menu, and then customizing the active parts of the instruction, like variable names or numbers.
Limitations
There were some notable limitations, some imposed by the Commodore 64 architecture and some imposed by Gamemaker itself, most likely because the IDE itself used a good deal of resources.
* Only 8 sprites could be on screen at once (a C64 limitation)
* Each sprite and background could have a maximum of four colors (out of a palette of 16) (a C64 limitation)
* Only 2 stationary background screens could be used per game (a Gamemaker limitation)
* Only 3553 bytes were available for game resources, including songs, sounds, sprites, and code (a Gamemaker limitation)
* No disk access could be added to the game itself (a Gamemaker limitation)Still, Gamemaker proved to be a powerful game programming environment for its day. As a demonstration of its power, a remake of
Pitfall! (one of Activision's most popular games) created entirely with Gamemaker was included with the package.External links
* [http://www.mts.net/~kbagnall/commodore/gamemaker/info.html Gamemaker Fan Site] including some games
* [http://www.gamebase64.com/search.php?a=5&f=1&id=623&d=18&h=0&p=0 Games Made with Gamemaker] at gamebase64
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