Due to technical reasons, the title of this article differs from the proper title. The title of this article should be: Klik & Play
Klik & Play was the first in the line of 'Klik' products produced by Clickteam. Released in 1994, Klik & Play was a revolutionary way for users to make games quickly and easily. Users could define any number of 'frames', or levels, within which the games took place, then drop in premade or custom graphics, and assign behaviors to them with an Excel-style coding interface. Unlike some game creation programs which only allowed a very limited amount of creativity, and were usually restricted to a single genre, Klik & Play provided an open canvas upon which users could create a wide variety of games within the comfort of Windows, and then distribute their games as standalones, so even users without Klik & Play could enjoy them.
Klik & Play has not aged well. However, it is quite popular among trainwreckers for this very reason. It is incredibly buggy (in a "so-bad-it's-good" way), outdated, and also imposes a number of challenging restrictions on users. These novelties alone make Klik & Play attractive to many, although repulsive to others. There is also a bundled library of premade, low-quality graphics and sounds, many of which have become injokes among trainwreckers.
Features
- Games are divided into 'frames': add any number of different levels and screens into your games.
- An assortment of (hilariously bad) premade graphics, with the ability to import graphics (somewhat buggy)
- A number of pre-built movement systems that can be assigned to objects (most being quite buggy): Mouse, Eight Directions, Race Car, Platform, Bouncing Ball, Path, Static (no movement, usually for users to create their own movement systems)
- Automatic animation system changes animation sequences in response to the pre-built movements
- A Step-Thru Editor for absolute beginners, which runs the game, pausing it when certain events occur in the game and asking the user what actions to take
- An Excel-like Event Editor for more experienced users, providing the full set of events and actions for scripting more complex behaviors in games
- Built-in lives and score displays with customizable graphics, plus number counters which may be hidden, or displayed as a number or bar
- 256-color graphics (16-million colors on old machines supporting the special graphics driver)
- Playback of WAV and MID audio
Limitations
- Klik & Play is old, and for that reason supports few file formats. Digital music must be uncompressed into WAV files, and the Picture Editor is picky about importing.
- There is a limit of approximately 250 Active Objects being present at any point while the game is running. When this limit is reached, no new objects can be created, and collisions will stop working.
- There is no native support for scrolling. It is possible to give your frames a different size than the game window: a frame smaller than the window will be centered with borders surrounding it, and a frame larger than the window will show only the top-left-most portion. Klik & Play does not provide any facilities for changing which portion of the frame is displayed inside the game window. It is possible that the developers may have intended to add this feature at some point, but dropped it, either due to time constraints or poor performance on the target machines. Later entries in the 'Klik' series allowed this kind of scrolling. As a workaround, you can 'fake' scrolling in Klik & Play by using Active Objects in place of Backdrops.
- Every instance of an Active Object has 'Alterable Variables', which are numeric values that can be used to store information in individual objects. However, Klik & Play only provides three such Alterable Values per each instance, labeled Alterable Values A, B, and C. If you need more values, you will need to use Counter objects or extra Active Objects.
- There is a limit on how many events you can include within a frame. As a rule of thumb, you shouldn't go over 450 events, or risk corrupting your game (reference).