Hello! I program games.

[Tricky]

Hello everyone.  I'm new here, obviously.  My name is Amy (ooh, a girl!) and I program games for the Amiga.  Well I used to, a lot, but never used to finish them and then the Amiga kind of went out of fashion and I didn't bother anymore but I've recently (January) taken it up again.  There doesn't seem to be a forum category for people developing games or software for classic Amigas, unless I'm missing it.

I'm working on a game at the moment that I hope to finish by the end of the year... don't want to say too much about it though, not sure if I'd get into trouble for "spamming" or not!  But if you were at CGEUK last weekend you may have played it!

I'm also currently trying to get a PC floppy drive to replace a duff internal drive... I shall certainly post on here later if I have any success.

So... that's me!

[Tricky]

Ok my machine is an A1200 with a Blizzard '060 card, 32 meg, and a 1.2 gig HD.  The 060 is supposed to be 50MHz but there's a fault on the board so it only works in '040 clock halving mode for some reason, so it's only 25MHz.  Workbench 3.1, I think...

I also have an unexpanded A1200 test machine.  My games must work on a basic A1200!  It's the rules!

I'm using a rare combination of Devpac and AMOS Pro.  DPaint III and ProTracker 4 Beta.

[Tricky]

It be platform game!  Like Sonic the Hedgehog... only faster...

Full-on 50 fps super bonus turbo action comin' atcha:
www.glastonbridge.co.uk/mrbeanbag/

The next project will be a shoot-em-up I think. It will be released for Christmas on PS2 via the magic of emulation, courtesy of Retrosoft. Along with some other new Amiga stuff on the same disc, I think.

[Tricky]

flashback wrote:
hello tricky ,

your program look's good in the video on you site, but there is a camera tracking problem ... no ?

it's too speed . i think you must program as 'sonic from sega' a tracking method for your game

The frame rate of the video doesn't really do it justice... and neither does UAE for that matter.  It uses a "look ahead" system, so the scrolling centres on a point ahead of you so you can see more of where you're going than where you've been. As opposed to the traditional "push scrolling" of days of yore, which produced exactly the opposite effect.

I'll post an ADF of a playable demo at some point.

[Tricky]

Oh cripes... I can trace its origins right back about 11 years to an 8-way scrolling demo I made in AMOS, featuring our blue and white stripey hero.  It was perfected and converted to assembly language over the years, although it was 50fps in AMOS on an unexpanded A500 believe it or not.  I'm clever like that.  I always got frustrated by the general low standard of AMOS stuff, it gave it a bad name...

It didn't really take off until I got an A1200 a couple of years later, and managed to find the Amiga hardware manuals which were difficult to get hold of by then as they were out of print, but you can get all sorts at car boot sales.  So it got to the stage where I had a couple of playable levels, and then I kind of left it to stagnate as there were just too many levels to do on my own and my brother wasn't bothered about helping out . So January this year, a friend of mine met the guy who edits Retrogamer magazine, which gave me the motivation to open up the project again. And this time I have a boyfriend to help out!

Future projects planned include:
a vertical scrolling shoot-em-up
a super extreme breakout game
and a sequel to Mr Beanbag!

[Tricky]

Thanks but, I wrote my own Protracker extension.  Also has a synthesised sound effect engine.  Plus a couple other extensions.  I only really use AMOS as a development environment these days, all the real business gets done in ASM.  But I'll look it up anyway.

SamuraiCrow wrote:
Hi Tricky!

You might find more Amos-related stuff on the Amos Factory website.  If you're not using the AMCAF extension by now I'd suggest you download it immediately.  It's Protracker player routines are much better than Track Play and it supports better file compression for its bank loading.  There's more blitter optimization in it also!

[Tricky]

_ThEcRoW wrote:
@Tricky
So nothing about the game being playable on a 1.3 amiga 500?

Well not as it is.  It uses some AGA capabilities such as 8 bitplanes and 32-pixel wide sprites.  I could try making a cut down version, I'd have to lose the parallax scrolling for one thing (or cut the foreground graphics down to 8 colours), and I'd have to re-arrange the score display... other thing is, I don't have a A500 to test it on!

[Tricky]

A CD32 version would be no bother, all we'd have to do is burn it to a CD... not sure about CD audio tracks though... sounds like cheating to me!  Although it does all fit onto a 880k floppy and a CD with less than 880k on it just seems a bit silly.  Maybe a bonus cartoon or something.

NTSC wouldn't be too much of a problem either.  The playing area is 320x224 so it would be slightly overscan on NTSC, just have to move it all up a bit.  The only issue is the speed, everything would be 20% faster and it's not like it isn't fast enough already... the important question is, will it have time to draw a complete frame in only 1/60th of a second.  So far we've been working to get the most out of 1/50th and I recently had to fiddle with the execution timing when I realised it didn't always run at full speed without fast ram... does now though, on PAL at least.  Of course if you've got a proper monitor or decent TV I can force it into PAL anyway, but this does make a bit of a scary mess if your TV doesn't do it.

But I'm concentrating more on actually getting the thing finished at the moment, which will be a turn up for the books!

[Tricky]

Playable demo now uploaded on the website!
http://www.glastonbridge.co.uk/mrbeanbag/

Chances of getting it to run on an A600/A500... no idea.  I'd have to cut a few things out, the parallax would have to go for starters, also the sprites would have to be redone (32 pixel wide sprites are an AGA thing...) which means I'd also have to rearrange the score display (it's made of sprites!)

Also no idea if it would run fast enough, although memory certainly isn't a problem, it doesn't use much.  Biggest problem is, I don't have an A600/A500 to test it on so even if I did do it I'd have no idea if it worked or not!

Actually I'd be interested to see what it does if you run it on a 600 as it is, cos it doesn't bother to check at the moment...

[Tricky]

Coolit wrote:
Unfortunately, it won’t work on my Ami :-(  I've only tried it from my HD, when you click on the program the screen flickers for 2-3 seconds then drops back to the WB screen,

Sounds like you have an older version of powerpacker.library and it's not using the one supplied in the archive.  Just copy that to LIBS: and that ought to sort it out!  The final version won't use it anyway...

So where do you hail from?

[Tricky]

Well if anyone's got good suggestions for what sort of games they want to see, I'll certainly add them to the list.  Alex is thinking about some sort of RPG with a public dev tool, so people can add their own realms and we can all collect them and the game will just keep getting bigger.  Kind of like ZZT for the PC, if you've ever heard of that, only better!

New screenshots of Super Oasis Zone now on the website, and a guestbook if you want to tell us what you think of it all.

Might even see if I can make a cut-down version for non-AGA amigas, since there seems to be demand for it, but not until I've finished this version, it's due to be finished in November so we have to get our skates on.

Oh and how do you get those little red and white battenburgs?