Metro Siege: new arcade quality a500 brawler!

[btp]

This game looks amazing!
Great to see all those high quality games (Rygar, Reshoot R, Inviyya and others) being developed in 2019 for our beloved Amigas!

[utri007]

Originally Posted by britelite

Well, nothing's stopping you from making your own game targetting AGA-machines

I have bought this https://pixelglass.org/#worthy because I wanted to support amiga devs. I have also bought games from here https://amiga.net.pl/index.php?kwt=4191&lng=eng

I have zero interest for these games. I just hoped that they would start more ambitous game projects like this http://aquabyss.com/ or something wich offers more interesteing (or new) elements. I would pay for a Paradroid clone etc. OR Wolfenstein 3D clone for A500, though I have several 68060 amigas.

No support for 100x seen before games from me.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Are you also using subpalettes of less colors in a similar way to Powder to save RAM and bandwidth?

Nope, no subpalettes.

Originally Posted by trydowave

has this modular approach been used before or is this a first?

Afaik, the modular approach has been used on various Amiga games, especially on bosses. But I'm not sure if any game uses the same method as us or to the extend that we use it.

[Retro1234]

Final Fight did it


https://codetapper.com/amiga/rips/final-fight/

Probably most good fighting games like Fightin Spirit etc used it.

[Tsak]

Yup, Final Fight also uses modularity to some extend (and probably other Amiga beat'em'ups). F.e. if you check Axl's sheet below, you can see (from the available parts) that to do his walk cycle you can use the same upper head, torso and arms parts and only have different frames for the waist, thigh and legs to animate him.



However the method used here is still not fully modular. In effect what you see above are the normal frames from the arcade, recolored and resized for use on Amiga and then split into 16x16 tiles. The majority of these parts, despite being seperate on the sheet, only fit with very specific other parts. F.e. you cannot take a head and pair it with a different torso and you cannot take a torso and pair it with a defferend set of arms. Hense, the available combinations you can do with these parts in general are extremely limited. Which is also why this particular enemy only has like 10 frames in total for all his anims in game (not counting flipped ones).

What we do in Metro Siege is similar (in principle) with this technique but at the same time quite different as well.

[trydowave]

Originally Posted by Tsak

Yup, Final Fight also uses modularity to some extend (and probably other Amiga beat'em'ups). F.e. if you check Axl's sheet below, you can see (from the available parts) that to do his walk cycle you can use the same upper head, torso and arms parts and only have different frames for the waist, thigh and legs to animate him.



However the method used here is still not fully modular. In effect what you see above are the normal frames from the arcade, recolored and resized for use on Amiga and then split into 16x16 tiles. The majority of these parts, despite being seperate on the sheet, only fit with very specific other parts. F.e. you cannot take a head and pair it with a different torso and you cannot take a torso and pair it with a defferend set of arms. Hense, the available combinations you can do with these parts in general are extremely limited. Which is also why this particular enemy only has like 10 frames in total for all his anims in game (not counting flipped ones).

What we do in Metro Siege is similar (in principle) with this technique but at the same time quite different as well.

All very interesting.

am i guessing right when i say you have the arms, legs, head, torso etc all completely separate then move them around individually like old school layered paper animation (modern digital equivalent would be south park) to create the illusion of individual drawings and then when that cant be used redraw the frame when needed?

For example: Modular would be him standing still but rather than being static you can make him breath by moving the arms up and down giving the illusion of different frames of animation

And when a new frame has to be drawn completely: An upper cut etc.

[Retro1234]

Street Fighter 2 and Final Fight aren't very good examples I suspect Fightin Spirit and some other reasonable fighters do it better but I cant find sprite rips of those

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=97847

I'd love to see your sprite sheets but understand you might not wish to share.

[Samurai_Crow]

Look up Spriter on YouTube to see what the original editor can do with rotation and everything.

[BSzili]

Regrettably I'm not into SHMUPs (which is what the Amiga homebrew scene seem to be focused on), so I'm glad someone thought of making a beat 'em up. If it's going to play half as good as it looks, it's going to be fantastic.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by trydowave

All very interesting.

am i guessing right when i say you have the arms, legs, head, torso etc all completely separate then move them around individually like old school layered paper animation (modern digital equivalent would be south park) to create the illusion of individual drawings and then when that cant be used redraw the frame when needed?

For example: Modular would be him standing still but rather than being static you can make him breath by moving the arms up and down giving the illusion of different frames of animation

And when a new frame has to be drawn completely: An upper cut etc.

That's right, we actually have each body part as a seperate gfx. And we don't have the frames just split into 16x16 tiles, actually each part has a variable size which helps to bring down the ram usage even further. Another difference is that within each anim the parts usually overlap each other.
The downside of this method in regards to art is that it's quite difficult to make the parts blend seamlessly with one another in each and every anim (as someone also noticed in this thread), however it's not impossible. You can get near perfect results but it requires a LOT of work (which we haven't 100% finished yet).

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I'd love to see your sprite sheets but understand you might not wish to share.

Well, we don't have "sprite sheets", just individual parts. But I'll present an example here later on to see exactly how we do it, how it looks and what the process requires

[Adrian Browne]

Looks lovely- hope it reaches the finish line- my a500 needs to be fixed for games like this. as its old and crusty now.

[skyzoo73]

I'm excited about how well this game is progressing. And I hope that all Amiga fans can support BitBeamCannon. Personally I am contributing in my small contribution on Patreon. I look forward to getting a physical edition.

[donnie]

will it have a floppy release?

[Tsak]

@Donnie: yup

[donnie]

Awesome. Fucking awesome.

You should hook up with rgcd. I loved worthy. but the but the big box packaging was not as good as the game.

[DamienD]

I didn't purchase the boxed edition of "Worthy" but the box plus all the extras looked pretty amazing from the pictures posted.

Why do you say "the but the big box packaging was not as good as the game" donnie?

[donnie]

Its the big box itself that felt abit flimsy. Basically an unprinted normal cardbord box with a printed slipcase.

Not a big deal. But it could be better.

[duga]

Originally Posted by donnie

Its the big box itself that felt abit flimsy. Basically an unprinted normal cardbord box with a printed slipcase.

Not a big deal. But it could be better.

Much better than a DVD box atleast.

[spiff]

There will be a big box release!?
Please do some sort of pre-sale to estimate demand instead of 50 limited edition direct to ebay scalping.

*edit* Big box still available for worthy, weekend online shopping

[Marchie]

Any news on this one? Still looks amazing.