So......I started producing an Amiga game today...

[Digiman]

But it's a secret. What I will say is it's an update of an old Atari/C64/MSX arcade game conversion but visually the game world will much more closely resemble part of the movie intro sequence...well level 1 2 and 4 not 3 and 5

It kind of started yesterday but I only really started doing some 32 colour feasibility studies today.

So I did the vehicle you control, all 10 frames of animation (need to tween it a bit I think but we shall see) and did the 'floor' texture I hope to achieve and also the big towers!

Not happy with the way the mountains are looking so far but we shall see

It's a game I really loved to play, plays well even on the old VIC-20, but I guess most people will say 'is that it?' when it's got to a one level demo and I can show something on my friends ever popular youtube channel (Jeri Elsworth is one of his youtube friends and subscribers hehe)

So to recap....

1. I was bored at work
2. Decided to sit at my desk for lunch
3. Created half of the first level graphics
4. Did some quick feasibility studies
5. Found Dpaint Animation for PC (to save out anim brushes!) and Dpaint II enhanced 3.0 (to view things in the correct resolution full screen)
6. Did a full screen mockup with the 'floor' mountains sky and one class of enemies.

All in 1h 20mins (shhhh I had a slightly longer lunch!)

Well I am going to admit I have hardly any spare time BUT I was so impressed with my test animations, 1st level mockup and quick rough calculations for the textured floor chipset bandwidth impact I am really fired up. Don't even own a desk in my new place at the moment!

Coding aside, I need to actually

-define a floor texture that will work, look great and actually tiles properly. ---possibly some up and down frames from my 3D model of your craft you control
-some gorgeous looking clouds as nice as the ones in Shadow of the Beast
-A few shadows (possibly using EHB so they don't look rubbish...depends on speed)
-find some good clean sources for samples from the TV show!

And then write a very basic game engine to move the floor and see how much bandwidth I have left.

Only then will I think about if I want to make it linear or sandbox (either will work, arcade original is linear but a great PC game from the 90s in a similar fashion does it sandbox style too...bit like Starfox on SNES)

Maybe it will be a little Xmas present for the Amiga community in December 2011 (assuming you like shootem ups!!)

[commodorejohn]

Sweet! I've been wanting to do an Amiga game for a while, but I've been holding off on getting committed to anything since I'm trying to reserve my time for this year's MSXDev. Maybe next year, though...

[Digiman]

Even though it's a fairly simple game technically it will still be the best it can possibly look...if you squint a bit it might even look like 486 PC gaming (not bad for a 1985 chipset inside my A1000)

I am even going to use some tricks used by Stardust to eek a bit extra out of the machine

[commodorejohn]

Sweet! I look forward to seeing it; it's always fascinating seeing what a creative mind can come up with when given a nice flexible piece of hardware like the Amiga chipset

[Digiman]

That's the thing that always fascinated me, the Amiga is a blank sheet of paper, you decide so many things and the audio is entirely undefined and can sound like anything you can get a sample for.

And yet most games look like mildly breathed on C64/Atari ST games in this era.

Today I was looking at Time Pilot on XBLA and I thought if you assigned 20 colours to the clouds and sky how much nicer it would look than the versions of Time Pilot we got with 2 colour white/blue blobs all over the screen :roflmao:

Bit of thinking outside the box always goes well with Amiga game design especially graphics

[Einstein]

Cool. Have you written other games previously ?

[Daedalus]

Cool, sounds good! Good luck with it - I'd love to have the time to be able to start a project like that

[Digiman]

Cool. Have you written other games previously ?

I've written all kinds of things in Blitz Basic before in the mid 90s. Even did a relational database with wildcard searching too. Nothing ever got released though as I never did ASM stuff or bothered to finish stuff as I was doing a degree at the time too

Technically it's not a difficult game to write, but having the time to do it (and a desk to work at!) is a bit of a problem just at the minute though as I work AND run my own business. If I get the floor working nicely on this game I might be able to do a simple texture mapped road in a driving game for OCS/ECS too...we shall see though.

[Arkhan]

Sweet! I've been wanting to do an Amiga game for a while, but I've been holding off on getting committed to anything since I'm trying to reserve my time for this year's MSXDev. Maybe next year, though...

Oh, another MSXen?  

Any plans for Passion MSX2 contest also?

[commodorejohn]

Oh, another MSXen?  

Any plans for Passion MSX2 contest also?

I don't know; I can't find any information for it...anyway, I'll probably have my hands full with MSXDev, as this will be my first real attempt at building a project in Z80 assembler. I will be tweaking it to take advantage of the MSX2, though

[Digiman]

Very interesting, today a guy who came in for work experience interview said he had also done some Amiga programming including Blitz Basic. Could be a sign