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.

[Michael V. Parent]

Hi Cammy,
 
It does indeed seem like we're on the same page.  Your project sounds great.  I too think one of Amiga's still untapped strengths is on the fly palette changing...like you said, into and out of caves...but also imagine for quickly flashing the screen brighter, then fading back to normal for during big explosions, or lightning etc...of course time of day, etc.  Or when entering a paralel dimension, or slowing down time... so much potential to make games look so much more atmospheric and impressive and so few have really used it.
 
I'd very much like to test your editors as they evolve..  Is your editor project going to be open source so others can easily add to it, etc?
 
A castlevania SOTN Style game is something I want to make too.. hopefully we'll both benifit from all our investments.  For now I can offer you the trick I mastered for a SNES type translucent effect.  Do you have Amos Pro?  I'll post example files explaining exactly how to do the trick in the very near future.
 
Your Haloween game is really clean and impressive, especially for a very fast made project.  Well done everyone involved!  The only thing that I see that would make it a lot better very quickly (if its easy to add in backbone) would be visual feedback for when you are sucessfully hitting enemies..like a quick animation that flashes the enemy white etc.

[Michael V. Parent]

Hi again,
 
For now, here are the two examples. (they are Amos Pro projects)  The one calles trans explains exactly how to make the translucency trick work.
 
The older demo:
www.holymonkeystudio.com/amiga/trans.zip

The second, prettier demo:
www.holymonkeystudio.com/amiga/a_demo.zip

[Michael V. Parent]

I've posted a bit of unfinished pixel art here...free for anyone to use.
 
https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/amigaarcade/index.php?sid=e4879a29770641259a25cf09cdfb99a6
 
It's in the 2d pixel art section.

[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.

[Michael V. Parent]

Great way to overcome a limit in backbone.  I can't wait until we're all finished with a super flexible Backbone substitute thats more optimized and allows for all these tricks (if not all at once )

[jj]

Where are you from/based ?

[OlafS3]

i do not know what you would use for it. When you need Amos-Extensions I have most of them...

[Michael V. Parent]

I'm American (grew up on the east coast, in Providence RI, lived in NY for a year, California for several), but now live in France.

[Michael V. Parent]

Use what for?  A drastically improved game authoring system/engine like Backbone?  Lotsw of people could make really fun games if they didn't have to do all the programming legwork that even great langualges like Amos require.
 
It's about freeing up people to be creative.  To use their time with what they can do best.
 
 

i do not know what you would use for it. When you need Amos-Extensions I have most of them...

[jj]

I am not an Amiga coder.  I do work in pregramming.  I could help with Amos and Blitz basic.   Where it comes to ASM though i have no idea.  I know basic but not amos or blitz.  So I am not sure what help I could be

[Digiman]

What would be great is if we could get some really talented coders to do thing not present in the chipset from mid 80s arcade technology. eg proper overlaid parallax in software without crippling limitations of dual playfield, scaling graphic routines as good as Lotus 2, scrolling 3D textured floors in perspective (think dpaint rotating image 45 degrees into Z plane via X axis through its centre). Hell isometric engine would be awesome so I could finally code something like the unreleased Big Engine F1 arcade game.

I have had to think outside the box a lot for my 16bit scaling psuedo 3D Oblivion forest engine, Blitz will give me a rough guide but it might not be enough. We shall see.

My other game will just cheat by using a 2mb A500/1000/2000 but will have big bold very subtly animated objects. I will shrink them later to tweak chipset/CPU bandwidth used up by the textured 3D floor.

Of course none of this (or Gradius/Vulcan Venture/Salamander 1 level ports) will start until I can support myself without doing this soul destroying job AND I have atleast one fully networked Amiga set up 24/7 with a way to drop files in and out of WINUAE environment to real Amiga as easily as you can on ST emulator + emulated hard drive.......and find a few missing pages from my Blitz 2.1 manual

If you can do this in STOS just using original STE CPU power to do everything (scroll, animate soft sprites etc) just think what is possible in Blitz etc on feature rich Amiga chipset.

[youtube]zqjNSF5M0tQ[/youtube]

[Michael V. Parent]

Yeah, look at games like Xenon 2 Megablast... the ST version is all processor, right? Thats a full screen 16 color game with lots of shots, enemies and a simulated 2.5 playfields (counting the back stars as 0.5 playfields )
[youtube]od0B1EQw47I[/youtube]
 
The A500 version looked the same (sounded WAY better)...so, if the Amiga could do all that with just its processor, what about all that blitter power on top...Then the Sprites...Amiga games should have incredible visual potential.
Lets make it happem
 
PS, how do you imbed a youtube vid like that?

[SamuraiCrow]

Use what for?  A drastically improved game authoring system/engine like Backbone?  Lotsw of people could make really fun games if they didn't have to do all the programming legwork that even great langualges like Amos require.
 
It's about freeing up people to be creative.  To use their time with what they can do best.

AMOS is an easy language but the compiler generates absolutely pathetic code.  That's why I had Cammy start out on AmigaE instead of AmosPro.  There's a new rendition of E out called PortablE that supports all of the next-genration Amigas.

I'd like to get some engines out that use PortablE as a basis but the current betas of PortablE release 6 require C++ as a backend.  Chris Handley (the author of PortablE) assures me that he's interested in doing another version with C as a backend for the Amigas.  It seems he is less interested in teaming up at this time than figuring out some of the techniques himself.  We'll see how PortablE goes.

[kamelito]

I'm American (grew up on the east coast, in Providence RI, lived in NY for a year, California for several), but now live in France.

 Paris, Lyon or Montpellier? I said that because it's where French games developer companies are located.  Kamel

[Michael V. Parent]

I work remotely as a freelancer for predominently American companies, so I can live anywhere.. I live near Vannes, which I find absolutely beautiful.