THE STORY
The Saturnian space pirates are utterly ruthless, they captured the freighter you were piloting and you could only watch as they first looted and then scuppered it, leaving the carcass to drift – it might not have been much, but it was your home and deserved a better final resting place. Their plans for you don’t offer much hope either, you’re to be transported to Tethys, one of Saturn’s larger moons, to be sold on as slave labour at whichever mining corporation isn’t fussed by the idea.

But the pirates aren’t the only ones with plans, yours is to escape, steal a spaceship and if need be shoot your way to safety from within their defences… or at least take as many of them with you as possible.

[View with PicLens]

CONTROLS
Move with cursor keys or the D pad on control pad 1.
Press Z or fire button 1 to fire.
Press F4 to toggle full-screen.
Press Escape during the game to quit.

Press Escape to exit the instructions.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What tools were used to make Abrogator? It was developed in just over two days with the newly-released Game Maker 8 and produced entirely without ever leaving Simple Mode (no time lines were harmed during the making of this game, it’s all object-driven!) or using any GML scripting. All graphics were drawn within the editor itself, sound effects generated with DrPetter’s excellent SFXR and the great MIDI music was taken from Bjorn Lynne’s website where he generously gives permission for non-commercial use.

Why no scripting or advanced mode? This was an attempt to approach Game Maker 8 like a beginner; the project i started before going back and beginning from scratch with Abrogator began to expand well beyond that brief and was essentially relying on my own programming knowledge – it’ll probably end up becoming Abrogator 2 at some point). In case anybody is interested in how it was done, the GMK file is included in the archive to pick through.

So how were the waves handled without time lines? Well, it’s a slightly messy approach but there’s an object handling things! A variable called wave_count ticks upwards in the step for level_manager and, when it reaches certain values, attackers are spawned. The wave sequence is quite short because handling things through objects in this way is somewhat fiddly and it’s easy to lose track, so everything is looped through a couple of times and some nasties only spawn during the later loops.

It’s a bit hard, isn’t it?! Yes, but that’s partly down to Game Maker really; in "simple mode" the collisions are very accurate, far more so than the average shoot ‘em up would usually require. Anybody fiddling with the GMK file included who wants to make a more involved version of the game should probably switch to advanced and tune the player’s hit box down to just the player ship’s cockpit. If anyone produces a new game on this base, i’d be interested to hear about it through the comments!