Hello,
I have just released a new little game for AGA Amigas. It's a simple puzzler where the player has to reconstruct a picture split in a number of tiles -
here's a video that clarifies the concept perfectly.
If you feel like, go get it from
https://www.retream.com/ArtPazz - it's free
SOME FEATURES
* Besides the 10 default images, the player can add more images by just dropping them into the appropriate directory (the pictures must be 320x256 pixels and have a depth of up to 64 colors).
* Likewise, it is possible to add more music modules to the appropriate directory.
* Up to 8 local players can challenge one another.
* Joystick/joypad and/or keyboard and/or mouse are all supported; they can all be used at the same time; any single device can control the game entirely (in the joystick case, two buttons are required).
* It comes as an: LHA archive, ADF image, ISO image.
BACKSTORY
In 1995 I made Puzzly, my third little game for Amiga (while, instead, I should have studied for the high school exit exam). It did not look good (although my eyes could not see that back then) and it had a very annoying feature that was even totally superfluous, but it was fun enough and I actually enjoyed it with some friends in a few of occasions. The game was written with AMOS Professional.
11 years later (2006), I worked on a project for the local department of the Ministry of Heritage. I had a technical role and I was surrounded by art experts. The project was called ART-PAST. It was so badly planned, the resources were so scarce, the salaries were so low and the demands on my colleagues were so huge that we soon ended up calling the project ART-PAZZ ("pazzo" means "mad"/"crazy" in Italian, and "pazz'" is the way it is spoken in our dialect), as those people were being driven mad and the overall atmosphere was totally crazy.
Now, 15 additional years later (2021), during a break from the writing of a novel, I found the perfect time for a small project like this. I rewrote the game from scratch using ALS, a graphics engine for AMOS Professional I released in October 2020 (rewriting the game using CSS, the ALS predecessor, is something I had been wanting to do for ages), keeping it as simple as I could.
I chose the name ArtPazz because the game might actually drive crazy, because "Pazz" (in Italian) sounds similar to "puzz" in "Puzzly"/"puzzle", because I threw some paintings in the mix and because it gave me one more reason to have a good laugh with some of the old friends involved in the ART-PAZZ... erm... ART-PAST project.
TECHNICAL NOTES
As indirectly stated above, ArtPazz has been written with AMOS Professional (version 2.00, to be precise). However, thanks to the self-produced ALS engine (https:www.retream.com/ALS), it is a proper AGA game - in fact, it:
* uses 8 bitplanes;
* uses 24-bit colors;
* allows 6-bit images under a 2-bit overlay with partially transparent colors.
Note: the overlay colors are white, gray and black; that is not due to technical limitations, but to ensure that the overlay looks fine regardless of the hues of the underlying images.
