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If you've ever dreamt of writing your own games, or thought that you could make a better job of it than the professionals, here's your chance in Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit, or SEUCK, you decide on everything.

Of course we've seen a few game construction kits in the past like EA's Pinball Construction Set and Mirrorsoft's Games Creator. The trouble with the earlier efforts was that they were too limited. OK, so you could alter a sprite here and there, mess around with the sound effects and fiddle with a few other parameters. But that wasn't the same thing as designing your own game and the end results were hardly any more exciting that what you had begun with.

SEUCK, goes well beyond those efforts, allowing you to design all aspects of your own shoot-'em-up. It was designed for Outlaw by Sensible Software whose previous successes include Wizball and Parallax so as you'd think, they know a thing or two about games design.

You don't have to be a programming prodigy to use it either, as, providing you approach it in an organised fashion, SEUCK is a powerful and easy-to-use tool. All the same, designing and creating your own game is going to involve more than an afternoon leisurely tapping at the keyboard. And, as with all games, its success or otherwise will depend just as much on the original idea as on the actual design and production. For those less ambitious, four free games are supplied and you can mess about with these to your heart's desire.

SEUCK is entirely menu-driven, options being selected either by joystick or initial letter keypress. The main menu offers options for editing sprites, background, objects, sound effects, player limitations, attack waves, levels, character set and front end. Selection of any of these options will lead you to a further sub-menu offering more specific editing features.

Selecting "edit sprite" for example takes you into the powerful sprite editor. This, as you would expect, allows you to make pixel, and colour changes, but also shows, and allows editing of, the complete sprite animation sequence. Other sprite editor facilities include a mirror option and sprite slide which allows you to move the image around within the sprite block.

Having designed your sprites you can give them a role within the game using the object editor. Here you assign numbers to the sprites with which are connected certain roles such as player 1 ship, player 1 bullet, and so on. This section also controls animation - how the object moves and where. This is where you would set up your player's ship to move left and right in response to the joystick. Similarly you could work out set patterns of movement for alien sprites and position them in the playing area. Furthermore you will have to specify how fast your aliens (or indians, or ducks, or whatever) will travel, how many points they are worth, when and where it will fire and what sound effects will be linked to it.

Which is as good a point as any to look at the sound effects, or SFX, facilities. This is probably the simplest and one of the most fun parts of SEUCK to play with, other than the finished game itself, of course. The parameters - wave form, attack, decay, release, pitch and one or two others, can be varied by slider controls on a "mixing desk" sort of set up. You can experiment with four player 1 effects, including fire and explosion, four for player 2, eight alien fire effects and eight alien explosions, giving a total of 24 stored effects.

Probably the last major task to be carried out is to design the background. The background is made of 5 x 5 blocks of characters and you can design the individual characters, make up the blocks and place them on the game map.

There are a few other essential elements that will need to be incorporated before you have a playable game. You might want to incorporate alien attack waves. You will also have to decide which parts of the screen you want to remain still and which parts should scroll and in what direction. Finally, you would probably want to add a snazzy-looking front end with a title screen and credits: it might also be an idea to periodically try out the 'test game' option just to see how things are progressing - they rarely turn out exactly as you expect.

SEUCK is itself a well thought out and designed game creator's tool. If you've got an idea for a game, but don't have the programming skill to turn it into a reality, this is certainly one way to do it. And don't let anyone tell you it's cheating. Nearly every game produced these days is put together with routines culled from libraries or other games and even the best programmers have to use development tools - SEUCK just happens to be a very sophisticated one.

At the end of the day though, it's the ideas and planning that count, so if you're contemplating writing your own game you should spend plenty of time on that side of things before even opening SEUCK. That should also give you time to save up the whacking £19.99 asking price!