SkillGrid - new AGA game in the works
 

Hi all,

after about 12 years (happily) spent making games for the Commodore 64, AmigaOS 4 and other PC systems, I'm returning to the "classic" Amiga - something I've been itching to do for a long, long time. In the last 10 days or so I have created the core of a new game for standard A1200s - and that's what you can see in this video.

The game, called SPEEDGRID (working title), is going to be of the casual, score-attack type based on the catching/dodging of hexagonal cells representing various bonuses and maluses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69zl4HYAShI

Technical bits shown in the video:
* 3 parallax layers scrolling at a variable speed (up to 16 pixels/frame - such limit is not technical, but only to keep the game playable);
* 1 fixed layer for the HUD (and possibly other graphical effects);
* real transparencies (any color can be freely assigned an opacity value between 0 and 255);
* a 16 colors sprite + a 3 colors sprite.

Things I plan to add:
* occasional meteors zipping by;
* bosses to fight against when time expires;
* procedural generation of the middle layer graphics;
* some "special" music (if I manage);
* any other cool feature that will come to mind.

Note: the current tune is just a placeholder, and it's the fabulous tracker module "Cortouchka" by El Mobo (Frédéric Motte).

Hi Saimo! Quite an interesting game you've got there! Very cool visuals & concept. Wish you the best! :great

Thanks, Tsak!

Looks cool :)

Looks promising.

Thanks for making a classic Amiga game! As others have said looks promising and very original!

Looks playable and polished.

Hey Samo! Se ti serve musica fai un fischio ;) [i offered my musician skills]

Nice one Saimo, great to see you back doing some classic Amiga stuff :)
The transparency effect is very interesting, need to read up more how that is achieved.

@all

Thank you for the nice comments!


@saimon69

Thanks for the kind offer, but I want to take care of that bit myself as well. Also, I'm thinking of something quite unusal - dunno if I'll manage to pull it off, but I'll try.

Excellent to see one more C64 established coder migrating to Amiga. After 30 years history cycle repeats :) Just to name a few, Majicyeric and Lazycow are already here, OmegaMax is around too... I hope this trend will continue. I enjoyed QIE and this preview looks awesome too.

To be honest, I never really left the Amiga, neither I'm leaving the C64 ;)

Thanks :)

The preview looks mature. I'm interested in the finished product.

Very nice!

@demoniac

Glad you think so! To be honest, though, the game is not even 2 weeks old, so it's far from being mature.


@vulture

Thanks!

@saimo

So, if 16p/frame isn't a technical limitation, what the full rate could possibly be? Just curious.

Interesting visuals. Bravo.

@vulture

Currently the limit is given by how many hexagons can be blitted in a single frame. Given that, at the moment, the Blitter is not doing anything else, not much else is going on in general, and that the hexagons layer is made of just 2 bitplanes, I guess that the scrolling offset could be huge - like, half screen or more.
When/if (it depends on the available RAM) I add the procedural generation of the middle layer (and possibly of the bottom one as well), the Blitter will be much busier.


@LeCaravage

Thanks!

@saimo

Sounds like an awesome effect! Here's a suggestion if I may: in between levels (if there are any) you could have the ship travel ultra fast to the next destination just for the wow of it :)

Sorry, there aren't going to be levels: the game is meant to be a simple play-and-score-as-much-as-you-can-in-one-go.