SNEAK PREVIEW
OF SPACE DUMPLINS!

by Rick_Slick

When I first got my greasy, perverted little hands on GameMaker 6.1 (downloadable at http://www.gamemaker.nl), my first instincts were to find clever ways to use this powerful and revolutionary programming tool to make little animated computer animals mate for the amusement of RavenTresses and myself. Sadly, I lost interest in this project when I learned I could just watch the real thing on The Discovery Channel. Although I have been programming computers since I was six years old, back when the Commodore 64 was all the rage (right now, my wristwatch has more computational power than the ancient computer I speak of), I have never quite finished programming a complete game that I have started. However, in retrospect, with all of the patches and updating of modern games nowadays, I appear to have been a pioneer of the "unfinished game" concept.

Finally, upon finding GameMaker 6.1, a complete game/application development suite, I was determined to develop and complete my very first game. Messing around with the drag-and-drop graphical interface and importing some graphics that RavenLynn had drawn up of her "Cute Lil Dumplins" gang, which are representations of the inner children trying to get out of RavenTresses, RavenLynn, FatHamburger, and myself, I asked RavenTresses to record some voices for me. At the time, she didn't know I was creating  "Dumplin Jump" or using her voices in it. After a few hours each night for a week, I had created a simple children's game right quick with a few obstacles to jump a car over, along with excessive blood, gore, and profanity -- the hallmark of all modern children's games. With additional time, what more mayhem could I create?

Now, after several months of working on a much more difficult and complex game, I have completed "Space Dumplins"! This game features custom artwork by RavenLynn, along with voices from all four of our gang digitally altered to make us all sound like pre-pubescent six year olds (disappointingly enough, I didn't have to modify my voice). Downloading and editing various sounds, music, and graphics from the internet for atmosphere, and creating some of the other effects by hand in Photoshop, I first started this project by creating all of the cutscenes for the game. This part was the most fun, as it allowed me to develop the weak storyline which clearly had no thought put into it whatsoever. I learned how to use important programming techniques like "timelines", "particle effects", and "uncommented spaghetti code" in GameMaker, which allowed me to experiment even more with some of the effects I would have to program into the game further down the road to make it completely unsuitable for children. Next, I designed the enemies and the characters that the player controls -- in GameMaker, which uses a form of object-oriented programming, you have to set up all the behavior you want to have happen when each object is created, during each processing step for that object, during any sort of collisions or keypresses, and then you have to make sure it all works properly when you test it. Which, if you program anything like I do... it never does!

As the game slowly came to life, I added the explosion and blood effects, as well as the character voices. The most difficult part of creating the game was deciding how to do the final confrontation with the end boss. This stage of the game would be the final challenge for the player, and it was important that I put my usual 26% effort into the design. So, when you get to level 10 and face off against the end boss, it will become obvious what little time and planning went into designing this encounter. I finished up the project by optimizing all the code by removing all the vowels and every other parenthesis, and then putting all of the music and voices as external files that the game loads as it needs them, which made things run a lot quicker than glomming it all up inside the main executable file. As playtesting occurred, I went back and wrote up an instructional web page that comes with the game, so you know how to play it and whatnot.

 The Space Dumplins saga starts when an alien invasion force made completely out of Legos attacks the Starship Enterprise, which was patrolling around in the wrong game. Once the Enterprise is destroyed, the commander of the space fleet radios ahead to the renowned Dumplin Squadron, which is called into action once again to save the universe from destruction (not to mention the impending litigation from Paramount Studios and whatever company makes Legos.) After selecting which of the four dumplins you wish to play (or you can play as a Box O' Cats, which was RavenTresses' contribution to the game design), you head out into space to fight off the massive Lego armada because they're fixin' to conquer Earth! Be sure to read the instructions to find out the strengths and weaknesses of each character -- and when you do, please understand that the character that's based off of me was made to be far more of a sissy than I happen to be in real life, so BACK OFF!

This game is not meant for children, unless your parenting strategy includes exposing your children to a lot of profanity and bloody gore in order to desensitize them to those sorts of things. I am told by our legal department -- which is devoted entirely to minimizing the legal liability to which I allegedly continue to expose this online publication -- that The Voice apparently does not condone exposing innocent children to profanity and bloody gore, so if you want to let them play this game, make sure your monitor and speakers are turned off. Thank you to Carcus for hosting this download at http://www.carcuscreations.com/spacedumplins.zip  where you can find this 25 MB file. On a Cable/DSL connection, it should take about 5 minutes to download. If you have a 300 baud modem from like 1990, then it should take about 12.3 days to download. You will need at least 1024x768 resolution, and 160 MB of RAM. Due to some of the violent gore and explosions, those with slower, outdated computers may not be able to play as intended, so you're stuck with Minesweeper and Pong on your little 15" monochrome monitors while you watch movies on your Betamax videotape player and listen to your Fleetwood Mac 8-tracks.

Editor's note:  The Voice in no way endorses the violence and profanity in this game.  But once again, we sure had a good time playing it.