Crawly Crypt Collection 1/crawlyvol1.bin/crm_demo/magedemo/magedemo.doc

Text File | 1994-03-21 | 16KB | 316 lines

This file is (c) 1994 MajicSoft and may be freely printed or
duplicated as long as this file is not changed in any way shape or
form.
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                Welcome to the M.A.G.E. Demo Disk!

First off M.A.G.E. stands for Majic Arcade Graphics Engine, which
simply means using this tool you can design some of the best
arcade action games in GFA BASIC ever written for play on the
Atari ST/Ste/TT/Falcon computers.

If our company is new to you, or if you don't know what
exactly M.A.G.E. can do then maybe this will help. The following
games were designed using the 100% exact same tools available
from within the M.A.G.E. system. (Further reference will be
as simply MAGE.) These games are available from your local public
domain supplier.

 1) GP_Shoot    - A simple shooter.
 2) KID_GP      - A cute platform game.
 3) Evader      - Fast action shooter.
 4) MS.Munchie  - A great arcade conversion!
 5) Kaboom!     - Fast addictive fun.
 6) Frogger     - Classic hopping fun.
 7) Cud Lee     - Platform adventure.
 8) Instectroid - Similar to Galaga.
 9) Kid_Kong    - The definitive Donkey Kong for the ST!
10) ST Invaders - Line em up and shoot em!
11) Bugs!       - Classic garden insect invasion.
12) Megapede    - Combines the classic Centipede/Millipede.
13) Dlx Invader - (Deluxe Invaders) True to the 8 bit cart.
14) Sleuth      - Remeber Shamus on the 8 bit?
15) Thurg-Murg  - Cute platform game for two players.
16) Dark Pearl  - Bounce the pearl over the scrolling maze.

Chances are if you have an ST and play games, you have probably
already played 1 or more of these popular games. You probably also
didn't know that the majority of the above games took less than 3
weeks to program. All of the above games were written to show what
the MAGE system can do without spending most of your youth on the
design process. Bottom line, MAGE allows you to design fun style
games quickly. It makes us extremely excited to think what someone
could do with these tools if they spent say, 2-3 months on a
project! Ok, let's dive into exactly what the MAGE system is.

The editors:

MAGE comes with 4 editing tools to help you design the background
graphics and animation for your games. These consist of:

The Character Editor

This is where you design those fancy letters or little graphics
called "Characters". Design a character that looks like a tree,
then plot that tree on the screen several times and now you've got
a whole forest to walk through! Get the idea? The character editor
is also where you would design your sprite for your games. Sprite?
What's a sprite? A sprite is simply anything that moves on your
screen. But in the MAGE system it's usually a little object that
you first designed in the character editor, brought it to life
with the animation editor and then finally un-leashed in your
program. Sprites can interact with the background characters. So
you can for instance, detect if a sprite is moving over one of
those trees, therefore you might not let him travel anywhere else
until he(she!) gets out of those trees! Again, the MAGE system
makes all of this a breeze to program.

The Animation Editor

Now that you have designed a bunch of sprite images using the
characted editor, you now have to tell the MAGE kernal how to
animate them. This is where the anim editor comes into play. You
can draw a path for the sprite to follow using the mouse, you can
set up some frame animations to make the sprites look like they
are walking, throwing, etc. What ever YOU want them to do. The
animation editor is not a cad program, it's designed to allow the
novice programmer to get some results effortlessly and quickly.

The Map editor

This is where you can design the backgrounds for your games. Using
the character editor you have defined a bunch of little cells that
may form larger images, or they may be defined as singular images.
It don't matter, again it's up to YOU the DESIGNER of YOUR game
to think of these things. So you load these character cells into
the map editor and start creating your game world. What's your
preference, Fantasy?, Arcade?, Military?, use your mouse and
let your imagination fly.

Inline Maker

This simply helps you compact your data so that it can all reside
inside of your program code. A real file saver. How about all
those other pd games you've played that has about 2 dozen files!!

The MAGE Design Shell

This is where you get your GFA BASIC up and running. Here, using
the included routines is where you actually design your games. The
neatest thing is you don't have to compile them to try them out,
you can actually run your games (a little slower..) from the GFA
INTERPETER. There is really too many things about MAGE to go into
here, if you want to get technical, we can get technical, but
let's do it over the phone ok? MAGE provides enough power for
the more experienced coder but really shines when it comes to
first time game designers. Using the demo "30 minute game" from
the MAGE manual you can design your own Galaxian,Invaders type
game the same day you buy the MAGE system. (seriously...)

The MAGE DEMO

Which brings us to the MAGE Demo programs themselves. To prove to
you how easy it is to design some vital sections of a game we have
provided you with the chance to interact with the MAGE editors and
see for yourself just how easy (and not to mention fun!) it is to
create a game using MAGE.

The DEMO GAME

The demo game is similar to the one used in the 30 minute demo,
but we added a few things to it like, music, a fancy demo title
screen, etc. It's a simple shooter that's fun to play. It was
designed in about 2 hours one evening.

Tech talk: This may go over a few heads but I had to get this in.
In the title screen demo, the MAGE sprite engine is cranking out
at 60 frames a second with a star field and some music playing in
an interupt. I wanted to get this in incase any hackers out there
thought MAGE wasn't up to speed so to speak.

Boot this thing already....

Now is probably a good time to run the demo game just to see what
the heck it is you will be playing with later on. The editors only
work in low res but MAGE allows your games to be launched from
almost any resolution. (Except True color mode on the Falcon)
See the fancy title screen with those little sprites buzzing
around? Actually, the loop handling that section is only about 10
lines long. You see, the main engine used by MAGE is a fast
compact machine language kernal. It takes care of all the pattern,
tracking, direction, ect. sprite movement for you. All you have to
do is pass a few parameters to the proper GFA BASIC PROCEDURE.
Pretty simple really, but actually pretty amazing how well it
works.

Anyway, press the joystick button to play the game. Notice the
background? You might at first think this is picture drawn from an
art package like Degas right? Nope..this entire screen was
designed using the character editor to first create some
characters and then we used the map editor to place them in the
correct character location. The planets are made out of multiple
cells! The patterns that the sprites use to move around were
designed using the anim editor and the mouse. Using the included
demo versions of the MAGE editors you will be able to:

1) Design new character cells to create a new font and background.
2) Use the map editor to place the new cells into a screen layout.
3) Design new sprite images using the character editor.
4) Use the anim editor to draw new sprite paths with the mouse.

Since the game loads all of it's data from disk, now just might be
a good time to make a back up copy of the demo disk in case you
need to start over.

NOTE: Rather than provide you a detailed doc file, we encourage
you to explore the abilities of the demo editors, if you have any
questions about these editors please feel free to call.

Character set and sprite images:

Go ahead and boot up the MAGE Character Editor. Here you can load
the .CP1 and .SP1 files that came with the demo disk. Click on the
V 1-1 section to flip between the banks of the images. Each
.CP1/.SP1 file has 200 images, the demo images use 16x10 as their
grid size so you can flip between 2 banks of 100 to see the entire
set. Click on a character to edit with the mouse button. Choose a
color from the color bar and start plotting/drawing with the
mouse. Press the right button to erase.

Hint: Many MAGE programmers use packages like Degas or Deluxe
Paint to first draw their images and then use the editor to grab
them into the image bank. Greatly speeds up the design process.
You can also press HELP to see keyboard commands.

The .CP1 file is the character set where .SP1 is the sprite file.
Please do NOT confuse these two file types. After you have made
some modifications or created some new images don't forget to SAVE
them to disk so you can see them in action when the demogame gets
run again. The character editor demo has been modified to save
16x10 images for use by the demo game only.

NOTE: Do not change the order of where the images are located. If
you alter the cell locations of these images, strange things will
surely happen when the demo game is run.

The MAGE Map Editor:

The MAGE Map editor is really a breeze to use, adter loading the
editor click on LOAD and then CP1. Click on the DEMOGAME.CP1 file,
next do the same procedure but load the MAP data this time. You'll
be asked if you really want to do this because it will erase any
existing work, say yes to begin your session. If everything went
well during the load process you are looking at the background
screen of the demo game. Where are all the drawing tools? There is
nonce because you aren't really drawing pixel by pixel, here using
cells you designed with the character editor is where you'll be
placing those cells onto to a screen to form background patterns
or complete game backgrounds. The advantage is a regular bit
mapped screen takes up around 32000 bytes, where as once we define
our character set we can make up to 255 rooms where each room only
uses 400 bytes of memory!!! (20x20=400 cells per room)

Ok, so go ahead and click on EDIT. Next you'll see at the top of
the screen a row of your character set. Move the mouse to the
EXTREME left and right borders to make the display row scroll
leeft and right. Move the mouse to the middle of the screen to
stop the scroll. You may click anywhere on the top row, OR
anywhere on the screen itself to pick up a cell. This cell then
becomes the object you can plot anywhere on the screen by pressing
or holding the LEFT button. The RIGHT button acts like an eraser
and plots cell number 32(ascii for the SPACE) onto the screen. To
select another cell to plot press ESC, the top row will be
displayed again. You can select another cell or press the RIGHT
button to get back to the main menu. After you have created a new
background click on SAVE. The new data will be saved to disk and
when you load the demogame again, it will use this new background
data! You can press HELP to have access to all the keyboard
commands.

The map editor allows you to create virtual worlds several times
the size of your ST monitor. The background screen for the
demogame is rather primitive because the sprites aren't really
interacting with it. Even though it would be easy to tell if a
sprite ran into a star or one of the planets, but that's not very
pratical for this type of game. The MAGE map editor really comes
into it's own when you start designing platform games or maze
games. The background data in games like MS_MUNCHIE or
DARK PEARL were designed using the map editor. This allowed the
programmer to check which cell the sprites were moving over, thus
easily checking for power pills, or in the case of DARK PEARL
making sure there was a cell there otherwise the pearl would just
fall through the floor! So designing wallpaper backgrounds like
the one used in the demogame is rahter easy, but it by no means
displays the full power of the map editor.

The MAGE Animation Editor:

Using this tool you will be able to create new patterns for the
sprites to follow during the demo game. After you load the
animation editor (from low res ofcourse) the first thing you'll
need to do is load the sprites. Click under LOAD on SP1. Next
under GPA click on LOAD to install the GPA animation data. You'll
see that there are several animation and pattern sequences
designed. What we want you to do is draw some new patterns! First
a little warning though.

WARNING! The animation editor will only save up to what number is
being displayed. You may freely click on the arrows to cycle up
and down through the items but when it comes time to save your
work make sure the number displayed at the total number of anims
and patterns is at the last one. MAKE SURE you store the original
data in safe place before editing the data (GPA) file.

The demo game uses 11 patterns. The first 10 are the ones used
during the game to represent the different waves. The last one
(11) is used during the title screen sequence.

Under PATTERN click on edit. Next you'll be asked if you want to
use the keyboard or mouse. For pattern creation it's best to use
the mouse. Next, locate a good starting point and HOLD DOWN the
mouse button and draw the path. (The sprite will use the current
animation if available.) Each pattern can have up to 500 points, a
bell will sound when you are getting close to the end. The faster
you move the mouse the faster the sprite will appear to move.
Don't move it to fast though, then your animation gets a little
chuncky looking. Keep the movements smooth and fluid for best
results. You can press ESC to abort. After you create your pattern
click on PLAY to see it in action. Simple! Repeat this task for
all 10 patterns and then SAVE the data, make sure you set the
counter at 11 for 11 TOTAL PATTERNS!! And then load up the demo
game and see your new patterns in use.

We realize this only gives you a small taste of what it's like to
actually use these editors and how much fun it is to design YOUR
OWN game from start to finish, but if you find yourself tinkering
with these editors and getting just a tad more curious about the
MAGE package why not give us a call or better yet, give your local
Atari dealer a call and order MAGE. With MajicSoft's new dealer
direct plan your dealer can provide you with great savings on the
entire MAGE package!

M.A.G.E. Majic Arcade Graphics Engine:

Character Editor
Map Editor
Animation Editor
Inline Maker
The GFA Design Shell
Over 1000 professionally drawn sprites for immediate use.
GFA BASIC,COMPILER, GFA ASSEMBLER - (Order the manuals from GFA!)
Music creation program.
3 demo games for you to modify and play with.

If you have any comments or questions about MAGE please take the
time to call. The creator of MAGE Dave Munsie, is now working
with us directly to insure proper technical support for this
amazing product. We look forward to hearing from you.

MajicSoft
348 Meredith Square
Columbia, SC 29223
[phone]