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Construction Kits are nothing new to would-be games writers, but SEUCK can claim to be the first for Amiga owners. It's more than a straight port up from its 8-bit counterpart too, having been designed by the boys at Sensible Software, and programmed by Palace resident Richard Leinfellner. Ken McMahon donned his hard hat and made a visit to the construction site...

SEUCK first appeared on the C64 about eighteen months ago. As well as taking advantage of the superior hardware, the Amiga version incorporates a few other improvements to make life easier for the aspiring games creator. You don't need any programming knowledge to create brain blasting, professional-looking shoot-'em-ups, it's as easy as using lego.

If you think about what goes into your above average construction kit, the menu is organised logically enough. You have a sprite editor, background editor and sound effects editor. The last two items Player Limitations and Attack Waves allow you to tweak things to make life easy for you and impossibly difficult for anyone else.

Before you boot up SEUCK it's probably a good idea to go to work with a pen and paper and jot down a few ideas about the kind of game you want to create. Will it be a deep space laser battle, a Wild West shootout, a jaunt through the enchanted caverns, or what? Now's the time to decide. Then you can think about the scenery and the characters, creatures, craft or whatever else is going to inhabit your landscape. Don't forget the most important one - you.

You don't, of course, have to design your game according to the order of the menu. My preference would be to sort out the background first. Making a background is a bit like bricklaying, but first you have to make the bricks, or blocks. Each block is made up of a number of smaller coloured pattern squares. You insert the squares into the block to make part of a landscape feature, like, say, a bit of road, a rampart, a pyramid, a bit of metallic space station and so on.

The blocks are then placed on the background map to build up the scene. You can use the same blocks repeatedly to create, say, a stretch of road or a building. In this way, with a couple of dozen different basic blocks you can create some pretty diverse background material with very little effort. The map can contain up to 32,000 blocks, which should hold enough surprises for even the most ardent shoot-'em-up fan.

Sprites are the backbone of any game. All the mooving parts in any shoot-'em-up will be sprites. Games programmers like them because they make programming games easy. A bunch of registers tell you what a sprite will look like, where it is, where it's going, and even when it hits other sprites. SEUCK makes it even easier and you don't have to bother with all that.

The sprite editor is a little like the background editor in that you design your sprites within a grid. You can decide the colour and shade of any individual pixel within the grid and thus create aliens, insects, craft and so on. The sprite editor offers the exciting prospect of animating your sprites. Your shoot-'em-up would look pretty boring if the alien invaders were frozen in one position. How is your gunslinger going to draw his six shooter without the aid of animation?

To animate your sprites you must create several versions of the same object at different stages in time. Our gunslinger might be depicted with his pistol holstered, then reaching for it, with it halfway out, then blasting. The more intermediate stages you have, the smoother the action will look.

You need to create these animation sequences for everything that moves. The guy on the other end of the bullet as he collapses to the ground, the screaming woman, the frightened horse. You can run your animation sequences within the sprite editor to make sure all looks OK and make any adjustments. The other thing you have to sort out is where the sprites will go in relation to the background. This is where you can create those stunning formation flying techniques by alien fighter squadrons.

No game would be complete without sound effects. Playing a game without sound is like watching TV with the volume turned down - not a lot of point really. Sound effects have the added bonus of being completely irksome to anyone within earshot, so you really need as many completely weird ones as you can cram in. The SEUCH sound editor comes with a library of 40 effects which cover the more usual SEU events like explosions, laser fire, sirens, aaaarrgghhhs and so on.

You can of course create your own, and a good place to start is with one of the existing ones. By tweaking the parameters you 'll soon end up with something unrecognisable. Real freedom artists can experiment with sampled sound, but may have to keep an eye on the memory meter.

When and where do the enemies show up, when does the screen scroll? It looks like a word of work, but it isn't and you can answer all these questions very quickly. The big question is will it work, and if it does, is it any good? If things go badly wrong, it's probably more to do with your preparation and ideas - or lack of them - than any failing of SEUCK. It's possible to produce a surprising diversity of first class vertical scrolling shoot-'em-ups and, to prove it, and give the beginner some tips, Palace have included three. Slap & Tickle is a commando-style war in the desert job, and Psychoblast is a non-scrolling, flip-screen weirdo with lots of pulsating geometric shapes.

If you've ever thought "I could do better!" now's your chance. The software houses aren't likely to come knocking on your door for the fruits of your labour, but you'll be able to turn your own ideas into reality. Even if you don't end up with the next big hit, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing it was all your own work.

Sprite Editor Background Editor Sound Editor Player Limitations Attack Waves Level Parameters Accepts Sampled sound files and Screen files in IFF format 40 sound library Games included: Slap & Tickle, Blood & Bullets, Psychoblast 32,000 block screen area Vertical Scroll only