Anyone still making Amiga games for 500 / 1200?

[rockersuke]

Originally Posted by amigapd

That would be really helpful -

In the zone right now! Bad news are that they're both totally uncommented , and good news are that I'm highly procedural when doing AMOS stuff, so there's a fair chance to get at least a slight idea of what's going on.

Good luck with your projects and keep the text adventure spirit alive! I've been adding things here and there to my WIP again this evening, and knowing that other people are even just considering doing something similar is helping to keep me motivated!

[alkis21]

Well, my story is, I made an Amiga game about three years ago. Nobody seemed to care or even bother to try it, so I took the hint and never made another one.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by alkis21

Well, my story is, I made an Amiga game about three years ago. Nobody seemed to care or even bother to try it, so I took the hint and never made another one.

It is basically because people dont like christmas

[amigapd]

Originally Posted by alkis21

Well, my story is, I made an Amiga game about three years ago. Nobody seemed to care or even bother to try it, so I took the hint and never made another one.

I did try it and was impressed that you had the patience to make it with Backbone -

Your game did inspire me to attempt a metal slug clone using backbone but I got no where with it and decided to start using AMOS as it would give me more control over the game design process. This then led to me getting close to finishing my first game - 1980s Football Manager. Slight change of direction from a platform game but still fun to do.

Sometimes the internet can seem a bit faceless as you don't actually see people downloading or playing your game unless they leave feed back.

I would love to play another one of your platform games if you have time to make one - if you were to attempt a Green Berret or Metal Slug clone that would be bril.

[rockersuke]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

If anyone finds that AMOSPro comes up a little short of their requirements, I have written a few extensions to the language for my own personal use, so if there are any new commands anybody wants, I might be able to provide.

I'm currently working on some code for linked lists, which I was contemplating working into an AMOSPro extension. The lack of dynamic arrays was always a bit of a bind, as well as the only way to reserve memory being by using memory banks, which are limited in number.

The thing I've always missed the most in AMOS was some kind of "Select-case" block support. In my case (writting text adventures) working with "On... gosub" sentences and zillions of "If... then" lines does work, but is slooow and awkard ^_^' I don't think AMOS actually needs more modern niceties usually found in current OOP languages, but a "Select... Case" sentence was almost a standard of most BASIC type languages of its own era which would make author's lifes way easier!

Thinking of all these things I took a look this morning into the AMOS factory, where I hadn't dropped by for quite long, and found some exciting news!

Exciting news at the AMOS factory

This could open a wide range of posibilities!

Originally Posted by alkis21

Well, my story is, I made an Amiga game about three years ago. Nobody seemed to care or even bother to try it, so I took the hint and never made another one.

I feel a bit silly telling you this right after amigapd has done the same, but I actually tried the game and, as I publicly stated here at least a couple of times (as this one) I enjoyed it a lot! So it wasn't strictly "nobody"

I can sympathize with your posture, anyway. Lack of feedback can be as painful and frustrating as a negative review. In fact, a bad review shouldn't even be necessaryly painful if it is honest, goes to the point, and avoids any hostile or dismissing tone... but in our case, silence can kill.
I could count on one hand's fingers the comments and bug reports on my Amiga Christmas Story text-adv, so at least I knew a few people out there had played it, but when I first announced Haunted House Remix no one even blinked and I had the very nasty feeling that it had gone totally unnoticed.
It wasn't true, of course, later on I received messages from people mentioning it, so they were aware of its existence (uuf!), some of them even found it interesting (heey!) and a few even liked it (yaaay!!!). Still, I could count the comments on one hand...
Net forums tend to be some quite endogamic playgrounds. Often, if you're not into some circle of regulars people would act as if you don't exist or, in some extreme cases, would make you feel like a monkey talking to a wall. Several experiences of that last extreme kind at different sites made me take a rest of it all and try to get some perspective.
In our case, "perspective" includes how many times we have tried some homebrew stuff without giving feedback to the authors, or whether, and we could debate about it, we are doing this kind of stuff just for our own enjoyment or we do care, and how much we care, about our estimated target opinions about it. I'm not sure where the balance point is, if it exists at all.

Aaah, so many things to think about...

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by rockersuke

The thing I've always missed the most in AMOS was some kind of "Select-case" block support. In my case (writting text adventures) working with "On... gosub" sentences and zillions of "If... then" lines does work, but is slooow and awkard ^_^' I don't think AMOS actually needs more modern niceties usually found in current OOP languages, but a "Select... Case" sentence was almost a standard of most BASIC type languages of its own era which would make author's lifes way easier!

Unfortunately that isn't really possible to do in an extension. You can't write new program flow statements. At least, there's no documented way to do it as far as I know.

I found writing a text editor without resizable arrays was a bit of a challenge. In fact cases where you might want an arbitrary number of objects are fairly common. One of the things that forced me over to asm to begin with was an inability to load procedures in from disk... Mr Beanbag's game engine stores the code to handle the bad guys in the data for the levels they appear on.

I have an extension with an early version of Mr Beanbag's scrolling routines in, I might dust that off at some point.

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

If anyone finds that AMOSPro comes up a little short of their requirements, I have written a few extensions to the language for my own personal use, so if there are any new commands anybody wants, I might be able to provide.

I'm currently working on some code for linked lists, which I was contemplating working into an AMOSPro extension. The lack of dynamic arrays was always a bit of a bind, as well as the only way to reserve memory being by using memory banks, which are limited in number.

I have written my own AMOSPro extension too, though it was largely as practice for me to learn ASM (this was back around 2009, IIRC). Don't forget to make sure the commands compile into an executable. I have several extension which work wonders in the editor, but because they messed up the end of the extension (e.g. error message code) it crashes the compiler and/or executable!
Whilst I'm no pro coder (in AMOS or ASM), I'd be happy to lend a hand if needed

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Unfortunately that isn't really possible to do in an extension. You can't write new program flow statements. At least, there's no documented way to do it as far as I know.

I agree. I don't have any documentation on how to do that, and if it was to be done I suspect it would require rewriting the AMOSPro.lib (special extension) as the first few "commands" in that are actually related to the editor syntax!



Regarding game ideas, I wouldn't recommend sticking any original ideas online anywhere. I have seen plenty of ideas being mentioned online and then being used by some unrelated company.


Sounds like this thread may have kickstarted some people into making more games

[amigapd]

Originally Posted by Lonewolf10

Sounds like this thread may have kickstarted some people into making more games

Hopefully.

Below is a link to a video showing some skelton routines for the following tpye of games

Shootem up
Maze Games
Platform games
Text adventure games

[ Show youtube player ]

they are all written in AMOS by Jason Holborn and were included in his excellent Ultimate Amos book.

The disk can be downloaded from the Amos Factory - see my other post in the request section - and contains all the source code.

Fingers crossed this might inspire some new coders to try a few simple projects which might develop into new games.

This thread and Jason's basic source code have already got me thinking about a text adventure / RPG game.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Lonewolf10

Regarding game ideas, I wouldn't recommend sticking any original ideas online anywhere. I have seen plenty of ideas being mentioned online and then being used by some unrelated company.

I'm certainly not planning on any original ideas! Classic genres done well is more my aim.

Still, the chances of some unrelated company trying to make a new Amiga game for profit seem pretty slim to me.

[Amiten]

Check this http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=13117&page=2

Regards

[amigapd]

http://amigapdgames.weebly.com/

I ve started an extra website to track my progress on my Amiga game projects and also to include resources that new programmers may find useful.

At the moment it just contains the development of my football manager game but over time it should contain the Adventure Game and some more useful resources for new Amos programmers.

If I get more skilled in programming I may move onto Blitz Basic but that is a long way off at the moment.

[rockersuke]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Unfortunately that isn't really possible to do in an extension. You can't write new program flow statements. At least, there's no documented way to do it as far as I know.

Originally Posted by Lonewolf10

I agree. I don't have any documentation on how to do that, and if it was to be done I suspect it would require rewriting the AMOSPro.lib (special extension) as the first few "commands" in that are actually related to the editor syntax!

Ow! I had a feeling it was going to be like that! After all, if it were that easy it would surely have been done long ago in any of the many extensions available. I'll stick with good old On-Proc and If-Then for a while, they do the job, but... (just whising out loud )

Originally Posted by amigapd

The disk can be downloaded from the Amos Factory - see my other post in the request section - and contains all the source code.

Thanks for pointing at it. Adventure source codes are something I'm always hungry for!

[Jack Burton]

As for myself, I'm still working on my game project (I've been working on it in my spare time for a couple of years). It's a game of the goose set in a Heroic Fantasy universe. The specs are more than modest, 16 colors, no scrolling, no sprites, no use of copper or blitter... I've deliberately chosen the simplicity to be able to complete it one day. And yet I can't believe how much work it is (I've more than 10 MSWord pages of notes), and concerning gfx, which is the only thing I can do, it's a lot of work too. I plan to learn BlitzBasic because I know that coders prefer to work for their own projects, and those who could eventually help, have generally 2 or 3 projects going...

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Kola

Anyone still making Amiga games for 500 / 1200?

Well, this one needs a little push:

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Thanks for the feedback so far, the plan is to make it a bit more colourful, at the moment its only in 16 colours, and I want to change it from letters to shapes, anything to make it a bit more interesting.

But obviously its only worth taking it further if theres actually some interest to playing it, which I don't think so far there is.

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

I'm certainly not planning on any original ideas! Classic genres done well is more my aim.

Excellent

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Still, the chances of some unrelated company trying to make a new Amiga game for profit seem pretty slim to me.

You misunderstand. I'm suggesting they may steal ideas for modern game consoles and/or the PC. How many original ideas do we see these days?
Alot of games are sequels or old games that have been ported and/or upgraded graphically.

Originally Posted by amigapd

Below is a link to a video showing some skelton routines for the following tpye of games

Shootem up
Maze Games
Platform games
Text adventure games

Hehe, I already wrote a maze game in AMOS back around 2002! It's called Alutia's Jewels and is on Aminet as part of my Games Vol. 1 set (see my signiture for link). It is a bit crap, but it was a test to see how good AMOS was and was the first time I did any programming since on my spectrum in the early 90's.

[amigapd]

Well this thread has inspired me to finish off the last bits of code for the 1980s Football Manager Game.

http://amigapdgames.weebly.com/download-game.html

Will spend tomorrow and Monday play testing - any amendments now will be just correcting errors which prevent the game from working.

As I mention on the webpage I could be tempted to make a sequel - 1981 manager as the changes I would like to do (adding FA and league cup - away fixtures - adding correct player names - team playing styles) would require changing the structure of the main programme - which is a major rewrite not just a simple bolt on. The only minor change I might make is to change the font used as that seems to be the most commented aspect on various websites which have mentioned the game.

Two things to remember when playing this -firstly this is my first ever game and secondly it was only me developing it and not a large software house so it was always going to be more similar to football manager on the 8 bit computers rather than championship manager on the pc / modern consoles.

Anyway hopefully it might inspire others to have a go at making games on the Amiga - the first project is definately the most difficult but boy have I learnt a lot about how not to design and make a game.

[ElectroBlaster]

I am currently setting up and getting into the Reality Game Engine which I know is based on Amos. What im trying to suss out is how to create my own music and soundbanks? seeing as the reality kit had this part locked down with their own stuff, their *.MUS" music files are just ambk banks but you cannot make your own within it. This has always put me off and I never bothered going any further.

So fast forward many years and I stumble upon reality again... I managed to create a protracker music bank using amos pro but it does not work within reality?

Im a total noob with all this, but im determined to give it all a bash even if it turns out rubbish lol.

Anyone able to advise me?

EDIT: Tried using the tracker converter program with Amos and that doesnt work

[ImmortalA1000]

I would probably go for Blitz BASIC as it gives you less of a PD look than Amos generally but whatever you prefer I guess.

Anyway my idea was to make a game making tool that would allow you to churn out Cinemaware style games. I figure if I could do this via both the logical code and a suitable kit of graphics to make lots of characters in the game etc I think it would be great, we could make our own Cinemaware style games, and with some tweaks even get the 'look' from 5 different games in there for a DIY toolkit chop and change type experience.

[commodorejohn]

"Churning out" is not what we need. A good basic framework for things like I/O and scripting can be a big help to quality game development, but make a system specifically geared towards one type of game and all you'll get is a flood of shovelware, like RPG Maker games. The Amiga deserves better than that.

[Coagulus]

Blitz is installed on WinUAE and I'm back coding again. My first release in over 13 years will be out hopefully in the next week. Just got a few more bits and bobs to do. Managed to get the game working (in a cut down way) even on an unexpanded A500 in WinUAE, I just hope it works on real Amigas! I may have to dig out my A600!

(I also had to convert the mods to MED format as the PT player wasn't great in Blitz)

edit - my game is an Amiga conversion of my PC remake of the Spectrum Game Timebomb - phew!