Creating your first action game from scratch can be quite a challenge, and cause severe frustration. But at some point you begin to see some light at the end of the tunnel - and that's where the real fun part begins.
My experiments in creating something that might become... a game?! ...have reached a stage where (except for sound) pretty much everything is in place: timing, user input, movement, graphics, limits, ...and it seems to work! Stably!
To achieve this within a somewhat tolerable time frame (= this lifetime), some fundamental decisions had to be made:
- few colors
It turns out that Amiga color palette considerations can be very time consuming. To make progress, no attempts were made to max out the possibilities.
- single reference platform support
AGA compatibility has been dropped early on, OS3.x would be nice, but Kickstart 1.x support is a must for this project anyway (for personal reasons), so an Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.3, OCS, 1MB RAM has become the single target platform. If possible, the... game? ...should fit into 512KB RAM. (256KB would be even better.)
- accept bad performance now, optimize later
This is something I really had to get into my head: It won't be fast! Not yet! Maybe never! I have a tendency to spend a lot of time thinking about loops, variable size, etc. without being sure the entire program architecture will work out. (Compare AA DevLog #0.) So to get a proof-of-concept of where and when things happen, the basic assumption was made that with some fundamental limitations set, the Amiga will somehow be able to handle the load within one, or at least two vertical screen refresh cycles, resulting in a usable frame rate. All other performance- or elegance-of-execution-considerations were dropped.
Everything still looks pretty... flat.
Well, despite my self-imposed rules, I still tried to make some routines scalable, reasonably "elegant" (?), or spent a little bit of time on thinking about speed. It just happens, and is part of the fun.
Having an ugly, but working prototype of the game, a level editor speeds up further development considerably. Creating the editor was comparably easy, as many of the functions required were already there from the game files.
Editing an NPC's path/waypoints
Now background tiles, foreground items, and non-player-characters (NPCs) can be easily added to the level - and as mentioned in the introduction, this put a broad smile on my face a couple of times. It's really fun to invent game mechanics - e.g. a path with waypoints for your NPC - and then be able to immediately see the effects in the game.
COVID-19 is still spreading, but that doesn't stop Amiga game development, new games keep popping up. Here's another snapshot of what's going on: 8-bit ports, arcade ports, and platformers all over the place!
Lala Prologue
In April this year arcade platformer "Lala Prologue" was announced. Inspired by "Lala The Magical" (by The Mojon Twins) for NES and other 8-bit platforms, created for the C64 / VIC40 / Plus4, "Lala Prologue" is now making it's way to OCS plus 512KB memory equipped Amigas.
A spooky theme throughout, in this game you'll evade enemies, negotiate moving platforms, avoid traps, and collect power-ups and keys to make sure Lala safely progresses through her adventure at the Great Witch Academy.
"Lala Prologue" looks good in 8 bits, and it surely looks at least as good in 16 bits - it's still work-in-progress, so far we know that it uses a 32 color playfield with two layers, and some bitmap tricks to get more detail on screen. There will certainly be updates, little changes in appearance, and so on, as it's still work in progress, but this is going to be another fun release for the Amiga!
"Hydra Castle Labyrinth" is a Metroidvania style game, ported to Amiga 68k by Artur "Arczi" Jarosik.
Basically another platformer, but this version supports CD32-gamepads, which itself makes it something special. Of course you can use a joystick, too. A (very) fast Amiga - namely: Vampire board - is recommended to play the game.
"Hydra Castle Labyrinth" has already been available for many platforms - including MS-DOS, SEGA Dreamcast, AmigaOS 4 - and is a welcome addition to the range of 68k titles.
"Hydra Castle Labyrinth" 68k running on AROS m68k (2020-04-05):
It's still a rare, and always exciting sight when a new Amiga CD32 game pops up. This one is new, yet old, and we get only one level, but beware, it's friggin' "Aztec Challenge" from the Commodore 64 and Atari 800!
A massive update to the original, "Aztec Challenge" certainly never looked better - this one plays butter smooth, has nice sprite animations, even cinematic 3D rendered cutscenes, and an impressive soundtrack. Yeah, of course, 16 bits can do more than 8 bits, but the attention to detail and overall love for the source material and the target platform is obvious.
Literally everyone who watches the video below and likes "Aztec Challenge" even in the slightest bit will be craving for the full game on CD32 - very, very nice work!
"Aztec Challenge EP01" for Amiga CD32 (2020-05-17):
Two arcade action super-classics ports by coder "Abyss" have been released for the Amiga, in pocket size: "Tiny Invaders" is a remake of 1978 Taito/Atari classic "Space Invaders", and "Tiny Galaga" is a remake of 1981 Namco classic "Galaga".
Well, they're not pixel precise ports, but lovely little interpretations of the original games. Obviously they're not feature-packed, but both games play smoothly, look great, and they're so tiny you can put both together on a single floppy disk, or easily send them over a (null)modem line.
If you need a quick round of arcade action these are perfect for you!
Around June yet another platformer was announced, that goes by the name of "Amiga the Fox". Jump, run, collect coins - just by looking at a screenshot it almost spells out "Mario!", and that's a good thing. This is clearly inspired my some other well known game, and is perfectly tailored to fans of the genre, probably esp. the younger ones.
Erik "earok" Hogan is creating the game using his "Scorpion" game engine, which means it's framerate is 50Hz, and it runs on OCS equipped Amiga 500s and upwards. For "Amigo the Fox" some extra processing power is recommended.
Since we last reported about "Boss Machine" a couple of testing/preview videos have been uploaded to Daniel Stephens YouTube channel. The game looked great from day zero, but it's really starting to take breathtaking shape, see for yourself:
Boss Machine : New Scroll Delta (2020-05-05)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjsPLE06qys
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Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for "Games galore #9"!
Still more 2019 games! And some 2020 gaming news, too! Yes, we're transitioning into 2020, but in many cases development dates back to
2019, or even further. Either way, more awesomeness here.
R.E.R.O. - Amiga H.E.R.O. remake
"R.E.R.O. - Rocket driven Emergency Rescue Operation" is a remake of cave exploration and rescue game "H.E.R.O. - Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operation", originally released in 1984 for Atari 2600 and ported to many 8-bit platforms.
Cave rescue teams use rocket engineering these days.
In November 2019,
a nine level preview of R.E.R.O was released. It runs on a standard
Amiga 500, but utilizes more RAM if present. The game looks great, it's
tastefully colorful, detailed, and moves smoothly! It also sounds great,
with a nice minimalistic in-game soundtrack and lots of oldskool
soundeffects!
The original "H.E.R.O." had a certain
flow to it - you could fly around quite swifly if you knew your way.
"R.E.R.O." seems to do a very good job at capturing the original game's
pacing and precision.
Bombs open paths, but get away from that explosion!
A possible Christmas 2019 release was tentatively mentioned, but has
passed without further news. We're still happily looking forward to a
final release.
"Stalker" was rediscovered and restored after members of English Amiga Board (EAB) had found the game in 2013, and wondered what it could be. After some investigation it turned out the game was created in 1993 by Jozsef Punk, Viktor Dara, and Ferenc Bardos. Jozsef and Ferenc had been coding Amiga demos since 1989 as a group called "FI-RE Crew". Jozsef was contacted by the members of EAB,
and gave them the full game in its latest development version plus assembler sourcecode and permission to publish both
publicly. Cool. :-)
So far this is rather old "news", but in January 2020 some more work was put into the game by adding improved title screens from various previous versions, creating the latest, previously unavailable release 0.778.
That's a hell of a machine.
According to the author, "Stalker"'s main feature is the rearrangeable playfield:
"The player controls a [...] robot in a scene that is built by same sized blocks. These blocks are moveable in rearrange mode." That sounds very interesting!
They said Doom can't be done on an Amiga.
They said Alien Breed 3D was the best an Amiga could do.
They said you need a 68030 (at least).
Now we're getting actual "Doom" for an unexpanded, 7MHz Amiga 500. Well, kind of, and it goes by the name of "Dread". When this popped up about a week ago it caused quite some excitement, for obvious reasons. Actually this is from 2019, a highly optimized and specialized 2.5D FPS engine by KK/Altair (from Altair demo group) that was first shown at the Xenium developer conference in Poland in Aug./Sep. 2019, but it's the "making-of" video that gets people's attention these days.
Currently this is nowhere near completion, but it very much looks as if the author is working towards a full "Dread" game release. Stay tuned, and in the meantime enjoy the video:
Watch "Dread Ep 01 - making "Doom" clone for Amiga 500" (2020-02-23)
Very welcome news from the commercial side of Amiga gaming: In February 2020, Adrian Cummings announced the return of his software label "Mutation Software"!
Currently planned releases are a "Micro Series Collectors Signature edition" of remastered games "Tin Toy", "Tommy Gun", and "Castle Kingdoms" in early 2020, and a new game called "Wiz" towards the end of the year.
http://hol.abime.net/1441/screenshot
"Tin Toy" requires an AGA Amiga, as will the new game "Wiz" do, while "Tommy Gun" and "Castle Kingdoms" run on 1MB OCS/ECS Amiga.
http://hol.abime.net/1455/screenshot
Note that these screenshots are from the original game versions - the new editions will be remastered.
http://hol.abime.net/2944/screenshot
All games will be available in digital and physical form. The "Micro Series Collectors Signature edition" (physical, boxed) will contain the game on floppy disc, and a free drinks coaster, and should be available in March - that's pretty much right now!
Yeah, super smooth "Super Hang-On" style motorcycle racing on any Amiga with 1MB! Ok, not really, but a video released in February 2020 shows a demo that could potentially turn into a great clone, potentially better than the official port the Amiga got back in the day.
Author vesuri, from artist/demo group dA JoRMaS, doesn't have any plans to turn this into a game, but he's considering to release the source code - maybe someone will pick this up and...?
Ready, set, go: "dA JoRMaS: Bonus Stage #75" video (2020-02-15)
We're about to catch up with 2019's game developments for the Amiga, with another set of exciting new productions.
Jump!
Announced around June 2019, "Jump!" is a conversion of AtariXE/XL game "Yoomp!". You control a ball bouncing through a tunnel made of panels, some of which can speed up your ball, or have other effects on the gameplay. It's a tactical arcade action game, similar to "Trailblazer" on the C64.
In January 2020 a teaser video of "Jump!" has been released, and it looks awesome! No surprise it looks slightly better than "Yoomp" on the Atari, but who would've expected something even a Playstation wouldn't be too ashamed of? The tunnel animation and overall quality of the graphics are near-perfect, colorful, shaded, smooth, with simple but flashy special effects - and it has a Boing Ball!
The game will require an Amiga with AGA chipset, 68020/14MHz CPU and 4MB of FastRAM, or better. It runs in 320x256 pixels resolution, 256 colors, at 25fps. Planned release is Q3 2020.
Here's the video: "Jump! teaser #1" (2020-01-20)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHHgPQ8mHYI
Check out Jump!'s homepage at: http://amigajump.com Additional sources: http://www.indieretronews.com/2019/06/jump-amiga-version-of-yoomp-has-been.html https://www.ppa.pl/forum/strefa-gier/40284/jump-amiga-yoomp
Tiny Little Slug
Another beautiful platformer is in development and close to completion, "Tiny Little Slug" by Slamy and XplrA, for (pretty much) all Amigas, including CD32, with a planned release around spring 2020.
In the game, you get a neat slug with wall and ceiling climbing abilities, water and fire effects, parallax scrolling, and some even lesser usual features like a tutorial demo mode and online (internet! yay!) highscore tables, or offline saving to CD32's non-volatile RAM, if you prefer.
As we can see in their "Final Update Video", the developers obviously put extra time into tweaking playability & gameplay, and adding extra features to make "Tiny Little Slug" an overall complete Amiga platform game experience.
The "Tiny Little Slug" very much looks like it's gonna be a "Huge Giant Hit"!
Watch the developers' "Tiny Little Slug - Final Update Video" (2019-12-05) for more details:
Good old Cold War brought us the infamous "Raid over Moscow" back in 1984. The game was released for most 8-bit homecomputers, and was a best-seller for the Commodore 64. An Amiga port was in development back in the day, but was cancelled. Only now, just 30 years later, with the Cold War long gone, can we truly experience the excitement of nuclear threat on our Amigas.
Title screen, now on the Amiga!
The Amiga port is developed by Erik Hogan, with graphics by original "Raid over Moscow" artist Adrian Cummings, and soundtrack by Simone Bernacchia. It should run on any Amiga with 512KB ChipRAM plus 512KB other RAM, and supports joysticks with one or two buttons and CD32 joypad.
Guide your spaceship toward the launch site, avoid obstacles
Note that these screens are from the preview release, which is still undergoing optimization and bugfixing, and when done is planned to be a "final release" of the Amiga port of "Raid over Moscow". Also planned is a second, separate game, with reworked graphics and significant updates, which the authors refer to as a "spiritual sequel" with a possible commercial release.
Announced in September 2019, "Metro Siege" by Pixelglass / BitBeamCannon / Enable Software, is an original street brawler game for OCS Amigas (512KB ChipRAM plus 512KB other RAM), similar to "Renegade" and "Shadow Warriors".
It features single player and dual player co-op gameplay, arcade style sound and hi-quality graphics with more than 60 colours and parallax scrolling, multi button joystick and joypad
support, and an elaborate combat system with lots of moves including dodging and blocking.
http://pixelglass.org/images/MetroSiege/6.png
The gameplay looks fast and exciting, "Metro Siege" obviously makes proper use of the Amiga hardware, providing accuracy and responsiveness to the player.
No release date has been set, but with the game being in a playable state since 2019 maybe we can assume a final version in 2020.
"Recoil" is a 1989 Atari ST game similar to "Defender", originally released as a coverdisk of Zero magazine. Recently it got ported to the Amiga by Galahad, ADRDesign, and Notorious. Probably not the most exciting game ever, but a nice addition to the catalogue, and according to the team of coders it wasn't a terrible amount of work.
"Recoil" has this little twist to it, the spaceship doesn't fly freely but is tied to a "mothership" at the top of the screen. Check it out, it's a simple but fun sidescrolling shooter.
Another round of looking at 2019's Amiga game development scene.
RESHOOT PROXIMA III Devleaks
Richard "Spieleschreiber" Loewenstein and crew are blowing people's minds with outstanding shoot-em-up games, and the excitement never stops. PROXIMA III is the next episode in Richard's RESHOOT games series, and it's going to be another awesome one. He's released a couple of so-called "Devleaks" videos so far, giving a rough idea of what the end result might look and feel like. Again, as with RESHOOT and RESHOOT R, this will make your eyebrows raise. How PlayStation can you go on Amiga? Be amazed.
Here's Richard "Spieleschreiber" Loewenstein's latest RESHOOT PROXIMA III Devleaks video ("Xmas Update" 2019-12-22):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SPA9qrflf4
Now this is pretty impressive...!
But... might there be even more to it? In this next video, an earlier "Devleaks" clip, you can see that the game is running in "Amiga 1200 (Blizzard 1260)" emulation, using FS-UAE. Wait a second - are we going full 68060 here? Does this mean this game will go even further and compete with Vampire-levels of performance? With the presumed releases of TF1260 and WARP1260 ahead... is this going to be the killer application that will lead the Amiga into it's next m68k-generation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RjYi0riWxE
Subscribe to Spieleschreiber's YouTube channel, and stay up to date!
"Amiga DreamTeam" is working on "Hyperborea", promising the "world's first real Amiga 1200 Danmaku bullet hell classic vertically scrolling shmup game". Not so much is known about the planned game mechanics or level design, and there's no music or effects yet, but, wow, this is a lot of stuff moving around the screen! This very much looks like it's gonna be another envelope-pushing game, with, for example, fast, colorful graphics by using a cleverly designed engine allowing for lots of in-game colors on a low-color screen.
Check out "Hyperborea" latest work-in-progress video below, showing a little bit of menu-action, and a lot of bullets and stuff (2019-10-09):
Inviyya is a horizontal R-Type-type shooter for Amiga 500 (OCS) with 1MB RAM.
Doesn't that alone sound awesome?
A demo has been released over a year ago, but it looks like this classic-style action game is still under heavy development. The latest preview videos (on the game's facebook page, see links below) look increasingly polished, playability seems to be getting tweaked to perfection, and so on. And it has a damn catchy music track.
Here's the latest Inviyya video on YouTube (2019-11-02):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CpmVtoTPjo
Bleeding-edge updates and previews can be found on Inviyya's facebook page:
This was just a round of shoot-em-ups, but more great Amiga games were under development, or have been released in 2019, such titles as: Rygar AGA,Scourge of the Underkind, andJump! - "Games galore #3", coming soon!
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UPDATE 2020-01-04: The video for Hyperborea wrongly showed "Hyperborea wip #8" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0mdvi4TY00). This has been corrected to the current one: "Hyperborea wip #%10101" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRP3d7Zq8WA)
UPDATE 2020-03-08: "Games galore" has turned into a whole series of articles:
It very much looks like 2019 will surpass many previous years in number of new games released for the Amiga. In fact it becomes pretty hard to keep up with all the new developments.
RESHOOT R
"RESHOOT" from 2016 by Richard Loewenstein looked awesome, and was kind of something new on Amiga, but Richard isn't done with us yet: now he's given us "RESHOOT R" with more assembler coded action, more bullets, extra weapons, more outlandish looking enemies, more insane sound effects, and more awesome pounding, hypnotizing music. It runs on AGA Amigas (CD32 included), claims to put up to 100 objects on screen at the same time, more than 400 colors, with transparency effects, still parallax-scrolling at 50Hz - no accelerator required, yet runs on 68020 to 68060, taking advantage of additional RAM if present.
Hats off, RESHOOT R rivals "T-Zero" in being the most advanced shoot'em up on the Amiga ever. ESCALATION!
Here's a gameplay video - but beware: this might be a bit of a spoiler!
Better buy the game, start playing, and have your jaw drop as you progress though the levels! It's insanely good!
Not finished yet, but with preview videos out, we can pretty safely assume a 2019 release. "Rygar" is a fantasy themed game for AGA Amigas, a remake of the 1986 Tecmo arcade game. Jump, shoot, dodge, run - somewhere in between "Lionheart", "Shadow of the Beast", and "Ghosts'n'Goblins". It already looks very good, and has some above-average game mechanics. Expect some more improvements and bugfixes, this is gonna be an exciting game.
Inspired by the classic "H.E.R.O." game, "BioJet" is a variation of the fly/dodge/explore genre for all Amigas (with 512KB FastRAM). This looks like a smooth, fun game, and has some interesting technical details (see Aminet readme). Last but not least: it's freeware!
One of the oldest gaming ideas got a massive update with "PONG 4K". You still try to catch and reflect a ball, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. "PONG 4K" is the successor to "PoNG4" - for Amiga CD32 only, has an intro video, CD soundtrack, lots of bleeps and blurps, dark yet colorful graphics, giving it a "Speedball" like dystopian future atmosphere, with parallax scrolling, four players simultaneously, gravity effects, obstacles, ... you name it. Originally released in 2018 it's got a commercial release in 2019. Pong is dead, long live PONG!
Dave May's "AirTaxi" is a 1994 game heavily-inspired by "SpaceTaxi", in fact it looks like a super-polished, enhanced version of the classic. A demo has long been on AmiNet, but recently the full version (.adf) has been released, and even an updated rework is considered by the author. "AirTaxi" can be played by up to 5 human players simultaneously (2 joysticks + 2 joysticks on parallel port + keyboard), and runs smoothly on any Amiga with 1MB ChipRAM and some acceleration (25Mhz). It's got speech, soundfx, obstacles, weather conditions, bad guys, nice little character animations, etc. - this looks very entertaining to play with a couple of friends!
Frank Wille's "Trap Runner" had a "party release" in 2018, but is still going strong in 2019 with an updated "final release", and recently the sourcecode has been released. The game is a "Giana Sisters" type jump-and-run with super cute graphics and sounds, very classic, and it also has the best storyline ever: rescue girl from bad guy. Add playability, intro screens, and of course this irresistable marshmellow-smurf-kindof character - you just can't go wrong with "Trap Runner".
You can buy a physical edition of the game, and you can also try your hands on the sourcecode. It's designed to be portable to other platforms, but there's some assembler code involved.
And we have one more that popped up recently: "Cuba 1898" by Irongate / José A. González P. is a neat sidescrolling jump'n'shoot that puts you right into the Spanish-American war of 1898. Well, kinda. Shoot enemies "Green Beret" style, collect boni - win a war!
Good news for OCS Amiga gamers, there's some fine looking new game out to satisfy your addictions.
Alex Brown with Simone Bernacchia and John Tsakiris just announced the availability of their new action puzzler "Worthy" via facebook.
According to Alex's post on facebook, "Worthy" is a new game, that runs in 320x256 / 32 colors / 50fps on any PAL Amiga with 1MB RAM. It has smart enemies that interact with lots of different game level elements in complex ways.
Cute, nicely animated comic style graphics, funky music, retro arcade sound effects, and as with any good game it's about collecting diamonds to win a girl's heart, encountering numerous enemies and obstacles along the way. Who can resist that?
What sounds good on paper also looks good on video, you can watch a release trailer on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq_9-0SUrvQ
Find more information about "Worthy" on the publisher's homepage, and on their facebook page:
And for game developers Alex Brown has shared his GitHub page, on which he hosts some of his older projects for you to study: https://github.com/alpine9000
Collect boni, earn extra ships, get the hi-score - Quasarius is a (very) classic Space Invaders type shoot-em-up game for Amiga by Raliza software. The graphics are simplistic, but perfectly moody, as is the soundtrack. "Quasarius" was written in BlitzBasic by Rafael Lima, with music provided by "Akira". It should run on any Amiga with at least 512KB RAM and OCS or above. (It has been reported that it doesn't run on Kickstart 1.3, though.)
It's donationware, so consider making a donation if you like the game, encouraging the authors to continue developing for the Amiga. The developer already announced he's like to do a - probably (very) classic, too - side-scrolling beat-em-up game.
