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.
Two exciting remakes, two freeware games, and "The nameless platformer". Amiga game developers are busy, and especially many ports and remakes are an impressive display of the technical know-how present in the community - the results often surpass the originals in quality.
Metal Gear
At
the end of January 2021 a port of MSX classic "Metal Gear" to the Amiga
was announced by coder "hOffman". "Metal Gear" was a milestone, and is a
classic in it's own right, as it started the stealth-and-survival genre
in computer gaming. In this type of games it's not just kill-em-all,
but more importantly stealth tactics and strategy.
The game is
still under development, but nearing completion, and already looks and
sounds very good. The graphics are pretty much a pixel perfect recreation of the MSX original. According to the author, it runs at full framerate on
the Amiga (even where the original would slow down due to lots of
on-screen action), and special care is taken to reproduce and possibly
enhance the original soundtrack and sound effects.
"Metal Gear" requires an Amiga 500 with 1MB or higher.
In January 2021 news popped up about turn-based freeware space strategy game "Imperium Terranum 2" by Virtual World Productions. The game has been available on AmiNet since (at least) 2001, but has obviously been resurrected recently.
Coder Rene "fook42" F. is converting the Pascal source code from the AmiNet game version into C code, and adding some improvements. Currently, his new version has no new gameplay features etc., but you can now freely set the game's screenmodes.
This is pretty cool, as it opens up a path for future updates, and portability (maybe AROS?).
Note that if you want to play the new C based version, you need to copy it over the installed previous (AmiNet / Virtual Worlds) version - see GitHub link below for files and instructions.
"Space Pilot of Death" - doesn't that sound awesome? Now if a title like that doesn't catch your attention, I don't know what will.
In Jan. 2021 this game by Marten "goldmomo" Wobst was uploaded to AmiNet, as a result of the author reviving his Amiga, and assembler programming skills, after a break of more than 20 years. It's looks similar to Asteroids, but it's a dodge-and-survive, not a shoot-em-up, that runs on any Amiga with 512KB RAM and able to display a 50Hz PAL or NTSC screen. It can be played with joystick or keyboard. (Note: there seems to be a mistake in the readme file: Space key is not needed.)
It's quite a simple game, but it's also quite well done! The title music gets you into the right mood, terrifying red alert messages pump up your adrenaline level, huge asteroids are approaching, and lots of them - pretty much everything about it feels just right. Yes, this isn't Elite or Wing Commander, we are aware of that. But it's a good looking, well done, quick little release with addictive qualities, for kids and casual gamers, we are aware of that, too. The author also has given hints he might be improving the game further. And, heck, it's... "Space Pilot Of Death"! So what are you waiting for?
"The nameless platformer" is a port of a ZX Spectrum game called "Black and White" - but currently the Amiga version lacks an official name, so we'll just call it "The nameless platformer".
It's a three level demo created using the Scorpion engine, in which you control a little wizard on a single-screen playfield, collecting lots of valuable items. This game is obviously still under development, as you can see in the video below there are a couple of glitches, the title screen looks like it will be changed, maybe sound effects will be added, and so on. But it looks promising with it's cute wizard and overall visual style, some music playing along (I think I've heard the tune before...?), and what appears to be quick and fluid playability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzrf6CJqoeQ
The demo was first shown at the end of Jan. 2021, so far there seem to be no news, but can certainly be expected in the near future.
Another update to "Super Sprint AGA": It now goes by the name of "Turbo Sprint" - and you can actually play it, it's finished! Since we last reported about the game, development has made lots of progress, in Feb. 2021 a playable 5-minute demo has been released, and on April 28th author Graeme Cowie announced the finished game on facebook and YouTube.
After a year of development "Turbo Sprint" now really feels like a complete game, with lots of stuff going on visually, everything moving around and interacting reasonably, sound effects that create proper atmosphere, yeah, you almost start smelling burning rubber. Up to four players, hires graphics, 8 tracks, car upgrades, ...you name it - and it runs from Workbench. Very good, congratulations!
The game requires an AGA Amiga to run, and will be commercially released as digital download very soon, with a glossy boxed edition following.
