Metro Siege: new arcade quality a500 brawler!

[Predseda]

There is a lot going in development of this game. We have constant updates on BitBeam Cannon Patreon website:

https://www.patreon.com/bitbeamcannon

[Marchie]

Sweet, thanks!

[Tsak]

Allow me to get you up to speed then
A lot of progress with this project in general:

- The team is currently working to finish a vertical slice of the 3 first levels of the game.
- We now have a fully scripted and working cutscene system, including dialogue, gfx and actors manipulation.
- The first boss of the game is fully designed and implemented. This fight has two phases for the boss.
- Along with finalising the last details of lv1, the second level is currently worked on. This level takes place inside the Metro station and it is -yet- another impressive technical achievement for the game, showcasing fully animated backgrounds with huge trains coming and going.
- The game's music has been expanded with new parts and tracks.
- Special care has been given to the game's sfx with various custom sets for every cutscene and level. A scripting system for special sfx cases is also currently under development.
- Loads of other stuff implemented like new enemies, expanded enemy and player behaviour e.t.c.
- Fully designed main menus with animated parts.

[alpine9000]

You would think that after being stuck inside all summer due to my city being suffocated in bushfire smoke and now isolated inside due to a pandemic that we would have finished the game by now

As Tsak said above we have been making good progress, but on the coding side lots of work as been put in creating infrastructure to allow new levels and enemy types to be created.

Each level in Metro Siege is almost like a new game from a tech perspective. I created a system that allows me to “plug in” custom code for each level to handle things like scrolling and level specific special effects while still sharing the main game and combat system code between levels.

Each new thug we add can also have it’s own custom set of moves and therefore require custom AI to take full advantage of these moves, so again I have a system that lets me “plug in” code for each thug.

Other infrastructure stuff, Metro Siege is the first of my games where the floppy version will require more than one disk, so I had to add support for disk changing to the NDOS track loader system I use. I’ve made it so it takes full advantage of multiple disk drives which was a bit of a challenge.

And lots of the stuff Tsak listed above is kind of infrastructure (the level scripting system etc) that is now done so hopefully going forward it’s mainly just creating levels.

But the next main goal is to get the “vertical slice” finished which should give everyone a really good idea what the final game will be like.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by alpine9000

Each level in Metro Siege is almost like a new game from a tech perspective. I created a system that allows me to “plug in” custom code for each level to handle things like scrolling and level specific special effects while still sharing the main game and combat system code between levels.

Each new thug we add can also have it’s own custom set of moves and therefore require custom AI to take full advantage of these moves, so again I have a system that lets me “plug in” code for each thug.

Hopefully this system will make coding the sequel easier

I'm a great brawler fan and your game looks extremely promising...actually I'm much more stoked for this than the SoR 4.

As for Patreon, I understand they have to offer some perks to the supporters, so as long there's an occasional update here too I'm ok with that. In fact, I usually don't follow the available update streams for various games because spoilers...initial announcement and an info tidbit/screenshot every now and then is enough for me.

[seuden]

Thanks for the update guys, much appreciated.

[malko]

@Damien : +1

At the end, thanks for the news Tsak & alpine9000. You know people are following you here and that some of us will turn into customers when the time will come . So, waiting for other news and the finished product. What you showed us of the game already rocks !

[DamienD]

All Patreon discussion moved here: Patreon Discussion - Moved from "Metro Siege" thread...

[d4rk3lf]

Great to hear news about the game (I was just thinking these days, to ask on this thread what's going on with the game, but I was too lazy).
All info sounds amazing.
Thank you Tsak, alpine9000, and whoever else works on this, for the hard work.

Any (at least very rough) estimations, on when we can expect finished game?
Also, what's your beat em up influence (or reference) for Metro Siege? I guess, obviously Final Fight. but what other games?

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Any (at least very rough) estimations, on when we can expect finished game?

I'd be completely honest, this is gonna be a looong process. So, not anytime soon

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Also, what's your beat em up influence (or reference) for Metro Siege? I guess, obviously Final Fight. but what other games?

Punisher, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and of course Streets of Rage

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Tsak

Punisher, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and of course Streets of Rage

My favorites too... with addition of Captain Commando
Yeah, I think Punisher got the most variety of weapons of them all. Cadillac, from the other side, was most artistic in a sense (liked the bosses), and it was cool that you need to watch not to burn dino's, and driving car was fun.

[Tsak]

I think weapons are gonna be a thorny issue because there is no plan currently to inlude any (besides specific enemies holding some that is).

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Tsak

I think weapons are gonna be a thorny issue because there is no plan currently to inlude any (besides specific enemies holding some that is).

It's a pity but I guess you can't have everything on poor ol' A500 (or perhaps it's another coding hill to climb). So, no interactive environs, like barrels or some such either?

[d4rk3lf]

Yeah, pity, but that's ok.
The important thing is that the gameplay is nailed, and from what we saw in trailer, it is.
One thing that is important to me personally (and I think it adds to the gameplay). Grab (and hold) move. No Amiga game had a grab move, and I really enjoying it (throwing opponents on other opponents).
Not sure it's called grab either.
You know... when you grab enemy, and you can either kick him 3 times (knee on head), or throw him back or in front of you, or combination (2 knee kick then throw).

[Tsak]

Trashcans (destructible), mailbox (interactive but non destructible) and health item drops are already implemented. There will be more stuff like that going forward but in regards to weapons it's still a question. This isn't 100% ruled out yet but chances are against it.

Ram and performance restictions are the main culprits holding this up (and yes, another coding hill to climb as well).

[d4rk3lf]

Punisher had those "cheated" parts where you are like shooting from the gun, but you don't actually aim anything, or do anything, just mashing buttons fast enough. That doesn't look like a hard thing to implement (but I might be wrong), and it's simple but nice addition to vary the gameplay a little bit, here and there.
Personally, I don't care much about weapons (though, I admit I enjoyed throwing bombs and rocket launcher in Cadillac ). Maybe throwing simple knife also isn't hard... I mean... something where you don't have million bullets all around the screen... just a throwing knife and a bar.

Oh well... you will never please everyone, and finding compromises is hard.
Keep up the great work!

[Ami]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

No Amiga game had a grab move

Franko has it. Hold joystick down + fire.

Tsak & alpine9000: thank you for an update.

[d4rk3lf]

Franko is fun, in his own way, and it have it's own charisma.
Still, not even close to grab move, in any Capcom like beat em ups, where it really adds to the, if I may say, strategy.

[Marchie]

Just awesome work guys. I'll be signing up, can't wait to play this. I've been playing the awful Amiga port of Final Fight for too long now...

[Nishicorn]

.. he has a thing for pushing OCS machines to their limits in order to prove that they could of gone head to head with a snes or megadrive back in the day.

"Could have". There's no such thing as 'could of'.

OCS/ECS Amiga could never have gone 'head-to-head' (what 'head' are we talking about, exactly?) against a Super Famicom, but Amiga versions of Sega Genesis games are usually much better.

Sega Megadrive can give you around 64 colors out of a 512-color palette, if memory serves, so obviously Amiga can match and surpass that with relative ease. Choosing even just 32 colors out of 4096-color palette is going to look better than 64 colors out of 512-color palette, depending on circumstances and graphician.

(This was a tough one to realize back in the day, when VGA games looked better than Amiga 500 games, 'although' Amiga supposedly has more colors (4096 vs. 256). Pure math and numbers don't always tell the whole truth, though, as VGA had 262144-color (18-bit) palette to choose those 256 colors from..)

Now, I don't mind people pushing the limits or the envelope (whatever that means) of a machine - it sometimes almost seems that's what Commodore 64 and Amiga were made for. People are free to do whatever they want, and I encourage this kind of projects, and it can be a lot of fun and gives nice usage and more life to an otherwise possibly a bit abandoned platform.

So anyone wanting to push Amiga 500 beyond its 'expected limitations', as the democoders have done since the eighties, go for it!

However, there's no hope for Amiga 500 to ever surpass what Super Famicom can do, except maybe resolution-wise, and in very specific circumstances (some Amiga versions of games are better in almost every way than Super Famicom versions, but there are many variables contributing to these things).

Soundwise, Super Famicom's only weakness is the small memory - so samples on the Amiga side can probably be bigger, which can create a 'larger sound'. However, Amiga 500 usually has 1 MB memory limitation, and graphics and the code also take a large chunk of that, so a limitation exists there, too.

Also, Super Famicom's sound chip has a 16-bit DSP, completely independent of the rest of the system, and sports 8 channels and built-in effects (such as the perhaps overused delay/echo).

Graphicswise, Super Famicom has Mode 7. Need I say more? It also has a 32768-color palette (versus Amiga's 4096), that you can choose 256 colors for the screen (16, 32 or 64 on the Amiga, and for a game, 32 is probably practical maximum).

The incredibly gorgeous 'Copper+combination while moving a huge object'-effects in Chrono Trigger prove that even in the 2D-world, Amiga can't quite keep up (I have never seen a colorful copperslide-effect that is contained inside an enormous, also otherwise colorful frog while it jumps around the screen and moves independently in relation to the 'Copper-effect' AND the background on the Amiga - I don't even know how that could be created with something like a modern Basic programming language without making the 'copperslide' a memory-wasting animation to sync with the movements).

Amiga is a wonderful computer, but colorwise, Mode 7-wise, and whatever we might call what this copper+frog-example prove about the Super Famicom's graphical capabilities, and debatably also soundwise, the ECS/OCS Amiga can't quite go 'head-to-head' against Super Famicom, or at least I can't think of an example of how it could, if both systems are used optimally and maxxing out their capabilities as much as possible.

But that's why AGA Amigas exist - if you have to go against something that has 256 simultaneous onscreen colors (without counting copper-produced gimmicks), that also looks like it does, you gotta go AGA.

You can prove what the Amiga 500 can do in the right hands (although democoders have sort of attempted to do that already), and you can beat Sega Genesis hands down in many scenarios (though not sure if Sonic the Hedgehog would be possible), but lumping Sega Genesis (especially due to its weak sound that doesn't hold candle even against Yamaha's old OPL2/Adlib) together with Super Famicom and expecting OCS/ECS-Amiga to even be able to complete..

..is not facing the facts (living in delusion of some kind maybe?).

There's only so far you can trim a moped, a fighter jet will always be faster.

As far as the game itself - I read some of the comments before looking at the graphics, and I was impressed - the game looks much better than I thought. I would gladly play a game that looks like this, no problems whatsoever. The graphics are well drawn and look good.

As long as the playability is good, why not? The world can always use another Final Fight-style game (there's not that many of them, at least good ones - Arcade version of 'The Punisher' is probably the best).

To give constructive criticism and my viewpoints;

The fighter character has a bit too much 'armor', and could use a bit more well-defined roundness and character, as the look is very 'blocky' and strange - I am also not sure about that 'motion blur kick', it looks a bit odd. Not a dealbreaker, though.

The 'enemies' look incredibly generic and stock. They're well drawn, but they don't seem to have much 'personality', and compared to Final Fight's weirdos, you kinda miss variety in the enemies (no women to fight? Where's equality?). It's not fun to just pummel the same, generic 'dudes' over and over again.

Look at other similar games, like 'Golden Axe', even their 'generic' enemies have personality and unique style.

Otherwise, everything looks promising, and it seems like an incredible feat to add this many huge moving characters to an OCS/ECS game! So, nicely done!

The more philosophical point, for whatever it's worth, is that for Sega Genesis, Super Famicom, Arcade, etc. there are already a large amount of games like this, that have really well polished gameplay, so although I love this genre, I have to wonder, are many other people really going to choose to play this on an OCS/ECS Amiga instead of playing the optimal versions of games like:

- Final Fight (and II, III, etc.)
- The Punisher
- Dinosaurs & Cadillacs
- Golden Axe
- Ghost Chaser
- Streets of Rage (and II, III..)
- Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers
- Ninja Warriors
- Dynasty Wars
- Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon
- The King of Dragons
- Knights of the Round
- Magic Sword

Not to mention, Final Fight already exists for the Amiga - so, the philosophical question might be asked; besides the technical feat and the female (I assume) fighter, what does this game offer that the other 17 (!) games don't, that would draw in players?

(I didn't even mention the Double Dragon games)