GameSuite Release 3

Welcome to GameSuite - a package of modules which are designed to allow programmers to write top quality games with the minimum of effort. The package contains the sort of routines that are common to most games. Sound, sprite plotting, movement, collision checking, animation, etc. Best of all there are no restrictions to their use - you can include them in commercial games if you wish and you pay no royalties to me.

This Release

Well, this is the third and final release of Gamesuite, but it's the best yet! There are a few bug fixes but lots of new stuff. There's the complete source code for all of the modules, and the game Oddball, plus an entirely new, compilable source for the game Bolmaster - the first platform game to be written with GameSuite.

Getting Started

Firstly I suggest you look at the programs in the Examples directory. You can hold down shift and double click them to see how they work. Most include the original sprite files and uncrunched versions of their BASIC programs. The applications !Amnesia, !FastSpr and !Stasis have MicroHelp files, which can be accessed by selecting Help from the Filer menu, or shift- double-clicking the application. !FSPConv has help files which can be accessed from its menus when it is loaded.

Gamesuite is split into three modules. Ź FastSpr - the sprite plotter. Ź Stasis - the sound module. Ź Amnesia - everything else. These are contained in the applications !FastSpr, !Stasis and !Amnesia. Double clicking these just loads the module, so doesn‘t appear to do much. FSPConv is an application which produces the sprite files used by FastSpr. There are many settings which can be altered, but usually it‘s enough to drag your sprite file to FSPConv on the icon bar and click Convert. There are a few other add-ons which have built up, including example fade code, a compression system, and a dodgy music player! There‘s also this help system with full documentation. The examples directory contains a few demos of the modules in action.

Bug

Reports

Bugs? I'm afraid I don't want any more bug reports! This is the final release of GameSuite because

I'm giving up!

Or, to be more specific, I'm moving to a different platform. These Acorn machines are a bit too slow for me, so I'm moving to PowerMacs. Don't worry! The way things are going we'll all be able to run software for any other machine in a few years. I‘ll get to work on some PowerPC routines... Anyway, no bug reports please! I‘ve included just about every source file you could ever need, so you‘ll have to fix them yourselves (and good luck to you!).

Contacting Me

I won't be at my current address for long, and the phone is being taken away, so it's a bit tricky to contact me. For post, the address St John's College, Cambridge, CB2 1TP. should be good until June 1996, and the email address as142@cam.ac.uk should be OK until March 1996. You could try http://hydra.phy.cam.ac.uk/andy/andy.htm to see if my Web page is still valid.

The Final Word

Just to say that writing games is supposed to be fun. It‘s a great way to learn programming and enjoy yourself at the same time. With GameSuite, a lot of the groundwork is done for you, but it‘s still up to you to design the game and get everything working. Please don‘t be put off by the complexity of the modules and application. You‘ll only need a fraction of their facilities for the average game so just take things one step at a time. Good luck! Apologies for all the mistakes, and I hope you write a few (more) masterpieces of games!

Well, That Used to be The Final Word

I‘d just like to thank everybody who gave me so much feedback about Gamesuite. Please keep writing software with these routines. I hope that the release of source code will be useful, and that you will continue to release PD software (and hopefully updated Gamesuite modules). For now, I‘ll just have to leave you to it... All the best, Andy Southgate. 7th August 1995.