Mr Lionet,

You, sir, have raised an entire generation of programmers, beginning with STOS/AMOS and then continuing with Klik'n Play and all the other cool stuff you've developed all those years. While I haven't used any of your tools, I know of many people that did and were inspired to create games using them or move on to more powerful stuff.

Look down at your legacy and feel proud of it! Thanks for all your hard work!

GGN/KÜA software productions/[url="http://alive.atari.org"]Alive[/url]/[url="http://paradize.atari.org"]Paradize[/url]/[url="http://dbug.atari.org"]D-BUG[/url]/[url="http://reboot.atari.org"]Reboot[/url]

Hello! Nice to see you here!

I've wanted to make games for as long as I could remember. When I was around age 9 I finally discovered a shareware demo of Klik & Play on my Maxis SimTown CD. I had never seen anything like it before. Needless to say, it left a pretty big impact on me.

I went online looking for someone who was selling Klik & Play. I searched through AltaVista and Ask Jeeves (this was before Google became super-popular) but couldn't find anything except Klik & Play fansites. I think we even placed a classified in the local paper asking if anyone had this elusive and mysterious program and was willing to sell it to us - hah! No luck of course, so I ended up using the shareware version, which wouldn't let you save or use the Event Editor or Storyboard Editor. I came up with creative workarounds for these situations, such as keeping Klik & Play open forever just to keep the game "saved", and importing lives/score objects from the example games to get those indicators into my own game because the demo wouldn't let you add them by normal means.

I eventually discovered that Clickteam.com was selling Klik & Play, which confused me because I had associated the product with Maxis and Europress Software. Who was this mysterious Clickteam and what were they doing selling this product? Soon I realized that, yes, this was the real deal and not some other random company, so I went and purchased Klik & Play for $15. I had no idea how to actually obtain the program though, since all I got was a registration code through email and the concept of digital distribution was totally alien to me at the time. So still no Klik & Play.

Then I discovered The Games Factory, this mysterious sequel to Klik & Play that apparently allowed you to create scrolling games whereas Klik & Play couldn't. So I bought it for $30 and this time actually did end up obtaining the program since I now knew how digital distribution worked.

I made pretty good use of TGF. I used it to create numerous things, ranging from gameplay experiments to multiplayer battle games to attempts at full-length single-player games (which didn't really get anywhere). I also discovered that game-making was a good way to socialize. I introduced my best friend to TGF and soon enough we used it to make games together.

These days I use MMF2 when I want to do something quick. Now that I know how to program I wouldn't use it for any serious work, but it's nice for prototyping and non-serious stuff, and just having fun, really.

Some suggestions for future versions:

TGF marked the introduction of specifically-integrated Windows objects like common controls (not so bad) and various video formats (evil). This trend continued with MMF where you guys included even more Windows-specific objects. I'd like to see you guys cut back on this a little bit. Instead of, say, a DirectShow object, have an Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis object that plays audio/video through software rather than rooting itself into a dependency on the Windows operating system.

I stopped using Windows as my main OS a little over a year ago because I wanted more control over my system and I was getting tired of Microsoft's uninformed design decisions (a view which I feel has become more and more justified over the years - Windows 8 Metro anyone?). Anything you can do software-side and in a platform-agnostic manner will make my life using Wine a lot easier.

I must say that I _am_ glad that you guys decided not to go the Game Maker route when rewriting the audio subsystem. Game Maker 6 makes _very_ strange use of various rooted-in-Windows APIs, including both Windows Media Player and DirectSound 8 and in order for Game Maker's sound to work correctly in Wine I have to launch programs a special way - and even when I do this I get some pretty heavy audio lag. Your audio subsystem, on the other hand, is completely software-based and actually works correctly under Wine, and for that I am thankful. It still has a few minor issues (namely, playing a sound and trying to set an initial lower volume doesn't always work) but these pertain to all platforms and it's way better than the system you had for TGF1 through MMF 1.5 (which broke on multicore systems), AND its build quality is superior to Game Maker's.

Also, while I can tolerate some drag 'n' drop, there is a point where I feel that the mouse moving/clicking and pop-up dialog navigation gets to be a little too much. I think right now the easiest and most effective step you can take to alleviate this somewhat is to merge all the action's expressions into a single pop-up dialog rather than a separate dialog for each one. I've used a few extensions (such as the box2d extension) where many actions require a lot of expressions - and surfing through the dialogs to get to the expression I want is annoying, and I sometimes press Enter past the one I want to adjust.

Another place where you could improve workflow is allowing the negation of conditions such as "Object is (in)visible" and "Object flag is on/off" where both the condition and its opposite exist explicitly. I think it would be much easier to have "Negate" switch the condition to its opposite rather than forcing me to recreate the condition.

Overall though I've had a lot of fun using Klik as it's helped me further establish an interest in computer science and it even made me take math more seriously as a school subject - hah! Keep it up.

i've also used KNP since 1994

50fps 640x480 on a 486 was amazing.

Klik & Play is pretty much what inspired me to learn to program, and to create games. I've even still got a copy of the old disc because i'm sentimental like that. Thank you for creating such amazing software!

I'm curious about those propositions