Between January and April this year, Richard Bayliss of 'The New Dimension' has been running the 'SEUCK Compo 2013'. For those who don't know, SEUCK (Shoot 'Em-Up Construction Kit) is a game creation tool that was released by Sensible Software back in 1987. To save my fingers typing about SEUCK, more information can be found in a Wikipedia entry here...
I bought this kit on cassette back in 1987 along with thousands of other people and quickly realised that, although it was one of the best creation tools available at the time with some pretty powerful built in utilities (I STILL love the simplicity of the sprite editor), it was never going to help you make commercial quality software.
I've found it astonishing that some people persist in making games using SEUCK even to this day and to be honest I think I've been less than complimentary about anything that anyone has made, particularly recently given the number of tools now available on the internet to learn machine code and produce graphics and music.
To that end, I've decided to put my pixels where my mouth is and try to produce a halfway decent SEUCK game and something a little different to the 'million' space/helicopter/car (*delete as applicable) shoot 'em up's out there. Introducing 'Zombie Brain Eaters'.
I decided not to use the original vertically scrolling SEUCK, but the 'newer' horizontally scrolling 'Sideways SEUCK' hacked together from the original code by Jon Wells. Information about this sideways version can be found here...
The reason for using the sideways version? I wanted to create an 'Operation Wolf' type shooting game, but with zombies! There are 4 looping levels and the point of the game is simple: survive without being bitten, shoot zombies and amass a high score. All the graphics in the game were pixelled by me using all the built-in SEUCK tools. Some trivia: one of the smaller sideways walking zombie sprites will soon make another appearance in an Arkanix Labs demo called Sabbat!
To accompany the game, I've pixelled a 'loading screen' and written a note file with details of the game 'story', controls, hints and tips and some credits. Richard Bayliss has kindly written some new music for the title screen and has even 'installed' the music into the final game for me. A special thanks must go to Andrew 'Merman' Fisher of 'The SEUCK Vault' for play-testing and offering support and advice.
Information about the SEUCK Compo 2013 can be found on TND's website here...
The competition has it's own compo page on CSDb here...
Zombie Brain Eaters has it's own entry on CSDb here. On that page are various versions of the game for download.
However, by directly downloading from this blog, you'll get a zip file that contains the versions mentioned above on CSDb in the 'enhanced' folder, in addition to a folder called 'original' that contains my original disk image submission with the game with no music along with some assets that include the loading screen in koala format, the music from the title screen in SID format and the original 'all data' save file that can be loaded into Sideways SEUCK to play around with. The zip file can be downloaded here...
UPDATE:
The competition results are in and 'Zombie Brain Eaters' came a semi-respectable 4th place out of 11 entries.
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