I’m going to do one of these little presentations for each of my games 
“Supersoldat” was the first “Gamemaker” game I ever made. I started off by modifying Mark Overmars‘ “platform game” tutorial and gradually added more and more weapons, abilities and enemies: some games have “feature-creep” but Supersoldat was the very embodiment of feature-creep. That said I’m very pleased with how it turned out, considering that I never once say down and planned out what I wanted the game to be. It also only used Gamemaker’s Drag’n'Drop functions, which is an achievment… in the same sense that head-butting your way through a brick wall is an achievement.
Setting
Apart from experimentations with the tools, Supersoldat was born out of a “Ramnstein” phase – that’s where the name and setting come from at any rate. The Nazi enemies will actually goose-step in time to “Du Hast” because that’s the song I was listening when I started working on it. Later on I swapped it for something less loud so you could actually hear the other sound effects.
The basic premise is that “Seibben” (“Seven” in German) is a super soldier developed in a Nuclear Bunker in a post-apocalyptic, alternate-history world where Nazis and Soviets are the only surviving world powers, and are still fighting the good fight despite both being buried deep beneath the ground. I’d just finished reading “Children of the Dust” and wanted to say something about Nuclear War (man). I’d also recently watched the original “Manchurian Candidate” so I decided that Seibben would be neuro-linguistically programmed to follow the orders of anyone who knew the right code-word. But the code is stolen by a Russian spy (who else?) who takes a sample of Seibben’s blood (so as to clone him) then orders him to escape, hoping this will create a distraction.
Of course, none of this actually comes across in the game because I never got round to making any cinematics – it does however explain why our aerian hero is running around a bunker flying-kick Einstein look-alikes in the face.
Gameplay
Supersoldat is a pure adolescent power-fantasy: I was also doing Tae Kwon Do throughout development (all of Seibbens attacks are based on this martial-art) and feeling pretty lean and mean, and the game was an outlet for that intensity. So you can run unbelievably fast and jump unbelievable high, you can sneak up behind a guard and literally turn their head backwards, or, if you get enough of a run-up: rebound off a wall and flying-back-kick them from one side of the room to the other.
The mechanics are really all about speed: the faster you’re running the more power your attacks have and the further you can jump. You’ll also bounce further if you kick off walls, which is nessecary for certain levels. Obviously some inspiration comes from “Abe’s Oddyssey”: you need a run-up to make certain jumps, you’ll knock yourself down if you run into a wall, and for the final level you have to escape from guard-dogs by timing rolls under various obstacles and jumping over bottomless pits. There are also grenades you can use, shadows you can hide in, buttons to press to open (trap) doors and men with guns to shoot you down if they catch sight of you.
I’m particularly proud of the AI: it was probably the thing I spent the most time on – enemies will jump over pits and climb up ladders to search for you, and generally do a very good job of hunting you down. Depending on their type they may also keep their distance and hurl projectile back at you, or periodically stop in their pursuit and take pot-shots.
Presentation
There artwork for Supersoldat was very minimalistic: one background, one tileset, two tracks (from “Final Fantasy 7″ in case you were wondering). I spent a lot of time on the pixel-art though, and I’m very pleased with the often gruesome animations, especially considering that I was very bad at drawing with a mouse back then (I used a lot of references). I actually started off with static, black and red stick figures (the game was originally called “Stick Wars”) and gradually coloured them in and animated them, frame-by-fame-by-hand. I think animation is the most important thing when it comes to bringing a character to life: Seibben may only be 32 by 32 pixels, but when his face gets bitten off, you feel it!
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