Decided to release an old game
 

Hi,

Even if this is my first post here I have read the boards a lot, and got a bit of inspiration from Mrs Beanbags release of PuzCat, I decided to dust of an AMOS Pro game I worked on a couple years ago and release it as is.

I consider this a version 0.9 of the game but I'm not sure I will ever do any more work on it, even if it's very nearly complete. The game can be finished, it's mostly polish that's missing.

If you play the game and encounter any serious bugs, please let me know and perhaps they will get fixed.

The reason development sort of died of was in part by there being an odd bug that I have only ever seen on my A1200 when I disabled my Blizzard 1230 and ran as an unexpanded A1200. There are some minor flickering on one of the sprites and I have no idea why, and never managed to fix this bug. It doesn't occur on any other machine I have tried it on. Another thing was that it runs a bit slow on a 68000 machine, and I really tried to keep the system requirements down since I wanted it to run on a A500 but unfortunately it runs a bit slow in most rooms.

Anyway, please try it out, I think it's a quite fun platformer - heavily inspired by You Have to Win the Game even though I actually started working on it before that game was released.

I never got around to actually naming the game so it's just called "The Game" for now :) And if I ever was to do any more work on it I would like to add some simple story and come up with a better name :) If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Also, the music is kinda crappy and done by me as placeholder music, if anyone wants to do some music I would happily make an update for that atleast!

The game can be downloaded from here.

Cool, will give it a try. Thanks.

s2325, youtube time!

No, there were few months without my single Amiga recording.

c'mon!

Cool game! Will play it properly this weekend :)

Added some screenshots to the "webpage"!

Nice release, thanks!

Thanks for showing Your work, it looks cool :)

good graphics!

when you say sprites flickering, are they actual sprites or bobs?

I decided to not use any bobs at all for this game, instead limiting myself to sprites and only use 8 of them (in 3 colors) and go for a retro-look to make the game as fast as possible, since I wanted it to run full speed on a 68000 (which it unfortunately still doesn't :( )

It's always the second sprite that is flickering, the one that shares it's palette with the player sprite. So my first thought was that I had used the wrong sprite number somewhere where I'm placing the player sprite and if the timing is a special case the second sprite gets overwritten with the player and disappears, but I have checked through the code a couple times and it don't seems like that's the case.

The odd thing is, the problem doesn't show on a slower machine, or any of my 68030 or 68040 amigas, or even UAE emulating a vanilla A1200 (I think? Haven't tested this in a long time), and it doesn't show on my A1200 with my Blizzard 1230 activated so I have no idea what could be causing it. Perhaps it's an AMOS bug?

If I recall correctly, it doesn't happen on my clean A1200 if I'm running it within AMOS through the intepreter.

just been playing it, it is good but very hard especially playing it with the cursor keys! i need a proper joystick

can't think what could be causing the sprite problem, i think i'd need to see it.

I would bet it has something to do with dual playfield. (just guessing with bottle of beer in my hand, dont take me serious).

Well, yes the game is quite difficult in places, but because you have unlimited lifes and checkpoints are most everywhere I still think it's not unfair. But some rooms are definitely very hard, sort of in the vein of "modern retro games" like VVVVVV and You Have to Win the Game.

I can try and film my TV-screen to show the problem some day, but I don't have my A1200 connected at the moment. I can share the source-code aswell if you'd like to help tracking down the problem, I have been thinking about releasing the source but would like to clean it up a bit before I release it to the public.

I should try it on my CD32 some day and it would be interesting to see if the problem shows up there aswell, but I don't have any CD-recorder in any of my PC:s anymore :/ But it would be fun to see if my NVRAM stuff actually works and the game can save on the CD32.

No Dual Playfield used in the game, it's a technically very simple game, I opted for making a fun game (I hope) instead of trying to show of technically impressive stuff :)

Nice game. Just tried it under WinUAE CD32 setup. First I tried to see if it will work from RAM and got I/O error. Guess 2mb aren't enough for that. Then I ran it normally. I created empty cd32_detect_file in game's directory. But after the first screen where Status Bar turned red, instead of writing to NVRAM, game obviously wanted to write something to disc cause I got Amos's System Requster window with message "Volume TheGame is write protected". And checked with SnoopDos. It wanted to write savefile.data.

I definitely thought it should work from RAM: on a 2MB machine, will have to try this out myself. Also, did you have nonvolatile.library in libs: when you tried saving?

This got me interested, gonna do some WinUAE testing.

Okay, did some WinUAE testing.

NVRAM saving seems to sort of work, I can see that the NV text in the bottom right corner of the WinUAE-windows flashes when NVRAM is accessed, and it seems to load back from NVRAM just fine. I can quit the game and launch it and the save is still there.

However, if I reboot then the save is gone, and I can't see that any NVRAM file shows up anywhere on my PC so I'm hoping it's a problem with my WinUAE setup. Gonna try it out some more later on.

Copying the game to RAM: worked just fine for me when I tried.

One strange thing was that AMOS throws up requesters about "no disk" in DF0:, CC0: and CD0: (I used a harddrive with read-only for testing), gonna see if I can fix that and dig up some of my old CD-recorders and try the game for real on my CD32.

Playing round some more with WinUAE, actually made an iso of the game and booted that and voila!

http://www.driar.se/thegame/thegamecd32save.png

Here's a download link for my quickly made iso if someone wants to try it for themselves!

I actually made a "special" CD32 build of the game trying to get rid of that AMOS requester that popped up in the beginning, but it's one more of these things that doesn't make sense to me, so I just supressed it with NoReq, quick and dirty solution that works :)

*edit*
Just verified it by burning this to a CD and booting on my CD32, the game works fine - couldn't see any flickering sprites, saving to NVRAM works. It takes a little while to start since there's lots of copying of small files to RAM: but once the game has started it never loads again!

My bad... sorry. I tried again. And it worked from RAM for me to. And NVRAM saving works too, I just didn't have nonvolatile.library in libs...
I got that no disk in cd0: requester too when started it from write protected hdd. Then I renamed volume to "cd0" and it didn't pop up any more.

Good to hear that it all worked for you, and also interesting to hear about the popups after renaming the volume. I was also using a write protected hard drive for testing.

While playing around with the game some more on the CD32 I decided it does need a small update, right now the games autosaves every few minutes (can't exactly remember the time but I think it's about every 5 minutes) but there's no way to manually save on the CD32 (on an Amiga with a keyboard the game saves if you quit by pressing escape) so I'm gonna map a button on the CD32-pad to quit and save.

I have already done some tweaks to the statusbar, added some copper-effects to make it look a little nicer atleast, and also removed the room coordinates and the red effect that signals autosave since those where just debug stuff anyways. This is how it looks now:
http://driar.se/thegame/statusbar.png

Will (hopefully) have an updated version done tonight.