Using the Amiga for iPhone game dev

[larsef]

I have finally made a game for the iPhone, which has just been submitted to the App Store. The name of the game is Roll a Stone and I have a web site here: www.rollastone.com

The game is inspired by the Amiga game Rock'n'roll and your goal is to roll a stone in a map and take all the stars. If you take all the stars in time, you will get to the next level. It might sound quite boring from this short description, but I promise you it's really fun. At least I think so because I'm playing the game every day, trying to beat my best score. :-)

The interesting story behind the game is how I used the Amiga to make both the music and all the levels for the game. I decided early on to have music in the game, but didn't want to increase the file size of the game too much. Instead of using mp3-files, I decided to port a java mod-player to Objective-C. This took about two weeks of my spare time. It is really nice to have a modplayer that I can easily add to any game I develop for the iPhone.

I used my Amiga 1200 and Protracker to make all the music, and sampled sounds directly into Protracker from my Korg Wavestation, Clavia Micromodular, and Logic Pro. I ended up with three music tracks for the first version of the game, and more tracks will be added in future versions when I add more levels.

The other program I used on the Amiga was DeluxePaint. DPaint was used to create all the levels, where one pixel corresponds to a tile in the level map. It means I can easily draw large maps on my Amiga.

My Amiga 1200 is connected to my Mac through NFS and I use remotesync on my Amiga to sync a folder between the two computers. With this setup, it is really easy to make a change in a map and then send it over to the Mac and the iPhone, or for that matter create a whole new map from scratch and send it over.

It might sound crazy, but I don't know how I would have done this without Protracker and DeluxePaint. At one point, the Amiga died and I got quite frustrated because I needed to make more levels and more music. I had to order a new A1200 motherboard from Amigakit.

[bloodline]

Um... If my miggy died mid project... I'd be using UAE, to fill in (though a new miggy would be on order ;-))

[larsef]

UAE is not an option for making music. As I wrote, I needed to take samples from my synths and Protracker is really great for that, but afaik it's not possible to sample sounds in UAE.

[bloodline]

larsef wrote:
UAE is not an option for making music. As I wrote, I needed to take samples from my synths and Protracker is really great for that, but afaik it's not possible to sample sounds in UAE.

Sure! Just save the sample in Logic as AIFF 8bit... it will load in to Octamed just fine, I do it a lot :-)

[weirdami]

@larsef

What's the learning curve like for iphone? Does it take a while to get things going or did you start doing up the rollastone game as your first project?

[amigakit]

Many thanks for your order :-)

[cantido]

weirdami wrote:
Does it take a while to get things going

If you've written applications for OSX before you shouldn't have any major issues writing iPhone apps.
Last time I looked at the official iPhone sdk it was still a bit flaky. Like the UI builder was practically worthless. Not sure if it's gotten any better recently.

[bloodline]

looking at the site, the game has a strong Amiga vibe to it, though obviously more 3D :-)

Look forward to giving it a spin ;-)

[larsef]

bloodline wrote:

larsef wrote:
UAE is not an option for making music. As I wrote, I needed to take samples from my synths and Protracker is really great for that, but afaik it's not possible to sample sounds in UAE.

Sure! Just save the sample in Logic as AIFF 8bit... it will load in to Octamed just fine, I do it a lot :-)

I know, but I'm kind of lazy. :-) What I like about running Protracker on my Amiga instead of UAE is that I can so easily capture samples directly into the program. I want to go from sampling the sound to pushing in notes in the pattern immediately. If it sounds bad in the score, I can easily replace it by sampling the sound again.

[larsef]

amigakit wrote:
Many thanks for your order :-)

Many thanks for your service! You saved my Amiga. :-)

[dammy]

Speaking of the iPhone, maybe renamed the a(nubis)Phone one day?

Dammy

[larsef]

Roll a Stone Lite is out now, for those of you who would like to try the game for free: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=298003681&mt=8

All music tracks are in mod format and made on an Amiga 1200. That's why the game as such is so small in size, only 0.7 MB.

For more info about the game, go to http://www.rollastone.com

[jj]

I thought apple would not let lite free versions of games to try and sell full games ?

[bloodline]

JJ wrote:
I thought apple would not let lite free versions of games to try and sell full games ?

Sure they do!! I always try the free lite version of a game before I buy it :-)

This game is actually very good, the gfx are a little dark though and the motion needs to be a little more fluid! Good fun to play :-)

[darksun9210]

awesome work :-)