Amigo the Fox (Scorpion Engine sample game)

[Dan]

linking the start and exit points of pipes

Aha!
Logically seen, that's how the middle point of the pipe is calculated, for the Amigo to slide down.

I guess, for horizontal pipe, the star would be at the bottom ?

Anyway it's nice to see how other approach the level logic.

[earok]

Ah yes, so - each pipe has two symbols. The symbol on the left side of the pipe is the kind of pine (entrance, exit etc), the symbol on the right is the link to the adjacent pipe. This seems to be true except for end level pipes, which have an entirely unique symbol.

It's quite a clever way of handling it really, it means that you can implement the entire level as just tiles without needing to apply 'metadata' on a tile by tile basis.

In Scorpion I've implemented the pipes a little differently - "in" pipes are still flagged by special tiles, but once you trigger them I've hard coded where each tile leads.


Getting through level 2.




Edit: Fuck it, going to scrap Mario character because lawyers.

[TjLaZer]

^ No! Keep it the same as the 1994 port. N does not care about the Amiga or the 1994 PC DOS port.

[earok]

Originally Posted by TjLaZer

N does not care about the Amiga or the 1994 PC DOS port.

I tend to agree, but I'm honestly tired of every second person on social media threatening that N is going to shut down my life for porting a 25 year old fan game to an obsolete computer.

[TjLaZer]

Originally Posted by earok

I tend to agree, but I'm honestly tired of every second person on social media threatening that N is going to shut down my life for porting a 25 year old fan game to an obsolete computer.

There was a lot of fake news about the Commodore 64 port about N threatening action or forcing the download links down, but that never happened.

[earok]

Originally Posted by TjLaZer

There was a lot of fake news about the Commodore 64 port about N threatening action or forcing the download links down, but that never happened.

I know.. that's something that people have thrown in my face as if it's a real example of Big N taking action.


But still, here's the thing.

The game isn't just meant to be a "Mario game, but for Amiga". It's meant to be a Scorpion demo/sample that anyone can download and remix into a different game.

By all means, anyone is welcome to put Mario art back into it and release their own thing when it's done

[Lineof7s]

Call the cat/fox thing "Mario".

[demoniac]

Originally Posted by earok

By all means, anyone is welcome to put Mario art back into it and release their own thing when it's done

I was going to suggest that. Just need to have the same assets available somewhere.

[Gzegzolka]

That replacement was a wise move.

[skan]

Originally Posted by earok

By all means, anyone is welcome to put Mario art back into it and release their own thing when it's done

...or you could just hide the artwork inside as an easter egg and let the players switch on the fly kinda cheat mode...

[earok]

ehh, it's kind of too late now, I didn't think to take a backup of the Mario art before I started replacing it (having said that, everything I did was a copy+paste from a sprite sheet and a slight resizing from 20 pixels wide down to 16)

[Lineof7s]

No, you're absolutely right to swap it out. Anyone commenting on what it looks like is spectacularly missing the entire point of you showing it off.

Better to avoid that distraction.

[jotd]

Reminds me of Moktar that gave birth Titus the fox (it wasn't for the same reason)

Personally I'd like to have Mario graphics somewhere available. GG Sisters was sued even without Mario. And if the original DOS port wasn't sued, I really don't think that one will be.

[Dan]

I thought, because the Gred sprite format would be easy to convert, to write one.
But the second thought was: Look if someone has done it, already.

And someone did !

Personally I'd like to have Mario graphics somewhere available.

Programming Nostalgia: revisiting Mike Wiering’s Mario game written in Pascal

At the end of the article, there is a downloadable source code of the converter for the Gred sprites.

Luckily the code does not need to be compiled, to view the graphics or sprites.

[earok]

The sprites are already here - https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc...s/sheet/91898/ - though I did manually print screen some that aren't present (such as the glitter effect when you pick up coins)

Anyway, little gif trailer thingy.

[jotd]

how many colors are there? this palette looks so perfect!

[earok]

Originally Posted by jotd

how many colors are there? this palette looks so perfect!

It's a 32 color palette. Scorpion now has some automatic AGA enhancements, so it'll show as 24 bit on AGA and 12 bit on OCS/ECS.

Source: https://opengameart.org/content/kenney-16x16

Honestly, the performance isn't so great on A500 settings, but it is what it is. I figure it could be squeezed down to 16 if I used less variety in colors for the enemies, backgrounds etc.

[jotd]

I know, right! wizards can make a game look good on A500 with proper colors & speed. Us other mere mortals need a more powerful machine... Even with 16 colors I couldn't get a decent speed for my Bagman game, using C++ and blitter all the way...

Your engine looks excellent. Too bad I can code in asm / C / C++ so I'm not allowed to use it Is it using interleaved bitmaps? cos it could then use one blits for all bitplanes, allowing faster/parallel processing with the CPU with only one blitwait before the blit. Since it's an engine, it's worth doing.

[earok]

Originally Posted by jotd

I know, right! wizards can make a game look good on A500 with proper colors & speed. Us other mere mortals need a more powerful machine... Even with 16 colors I couldn't get a decent speed for my Bagman game, using C++ and blitter all the way...

Your engine looks excellent. Too bad I can code in asm / C / C++ so I'm not allowed to use it Is it using interleaved bitmaps? cos it could then use one blits for all bitplanes, allowing faster/parallel processing with the CPU with only one blitwait before the blit. Since it's an engine, it's worth doing.

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one that struggles with speed haha. And yes, it's 100% interleaved.

To be honest, I guess it doesn't matter too much if the first release needs an A1200 to be enjoyable. The engine will gradually be more optimised, and perhaps someone can help in the future squeezing it down to 16 colors. There's also no support for HW sprites yet which'll definitely need to be done in future.

[Cobe]

I can use Blitz but if I'm ever to make platformer I'm gonna use this