Pro game artist looking for help/collaboration

[Cammy]

Hi Michael, I'm very glad you came along. You've got very similar ideas to what we have been talking about already, and I have begun working on a GUI for the IDE/Game maker program. I am using MUI so it can be used on OS3, Aros, MorphOS and OS4. I'm also trying to work on a map editor. The idea was to make a modular game maker engine that lets you choose from pre-coded engines, and then tweaking all of the options from the GUI. The code output can then be edited and refined. We also wanted to make it possible to mark locations on the map where palette changes would occur, and possibly let you define how many blocks you would have to move across for the palette fade to occur, which would be useful for when you enter caves.

I've had a bunch of games in mind for years, one of them I've always imagined to be on the scale of Castlevania Symphony of the Night, but with my own characters and plot, not a copy of anything. Just a massive platform adventure game with character interaction and a deep story that unwinds as you play on, with non-linear gameplay where you can choose your path and return to some previously-completed levels.

I got into the Amiga through the CD32, so it has always been one of my favourite target platforms. I'm also interested in self-publishing our games if we need to, I've already started stocking up on brand new double-density floppy disks to use for our smaller games. My friends and I had an idea to quickly try and make a game in Backbone in our free time in a couple of weeks leading up to Halloween, a few years ago. I came up with a basic story for the single-level demo and designed the level layout, while Rebel pixelled most of the graphics, while we had some friendly contributions from a couple of other online friends with some extra graphics and the title screen, and I was very lucky to meet a music composer on IRC who whipped up a couple of tunes for us to use. The whole project was rushed and incomplete, but we wanted to get something playable to upload to Aminet by October 31st, which we did fully on time. Anyway I'd like to finish it some day, we've redesigned the character and a lot more about the game, but it's just one of the games I want to make over the next few years. Here's the only video I could find of it on YouTube, you can download it from Aminet and try it yourself though if you'd like.

[Cammy]

Hi Michael, I can't believe how much we're thinking along the same lines. Using the palette fading for big explosions and lightning and fog was something else we wanted to do, it makes the games much more visually dynamic when there's more flashing going on and it's pretty much a free effect on the Amiga.

As for the game editor it will certainly be open source, I believe there's no point in being greedy about sharing secrets to making good games with the Amiga, it only holds the platform back. If there was readily accessible code for all those effects used in the very best games, any games coming out after them could have improved on the formula rather than the coders having to work out all the tricks from scratch. So if I ever make a discovery on how to make the Amiga do something good, I want to share that with other people so they can do it too, including code.

I love how you worked out a translucent colour effect, it's something I always wanted to use in my Amiga games but wasn't sure if I should plan too much on it if it was going to be too heavy of an effect, so I'm very glad you have found an efficient way of applying it. I do have Amos Pro but I've honestly never given it a go, I was considering it for a while but settled on AmigaE as a programming language to learn. I will install it and check out your example however.

As for the Halloween Nightmare demo, well there's quite a bit we couldn't finish in time, and that includes adding animation to the enemies. Unfortunately Backbone has no option for visual feedback/confirmation of a successful blow on an enemy other than the bullet stopping and exploding. They will continue to move forward until their hitpoints are decreased to zero, the same goes for the player character unfortunately. One trick I've toyed with since though is making each enemy a multi-object enemy, made up of stages. Instead of having three hit points, for example, it is an enemy with a single hit point who dies when hit, but turns into a duplicate enemy after the death animation, which in turn is replaced by a final duplicate when it is killed. This way the 3-stage enemy could change each time, perhaps becoming redder in the face or running faster as he gets madder.