Earok Amiga Projects

[earok]

Idea stolen from Mr Amiten, here's a portfolio of sorts of various Amiga projects I've been involved in.


FULL GAMES [COMPLETE]

Time Gal
A full length port of the laserdisc arcade cabinet, this came about after Seppo Seppala suggested adapting the Blue Thunder engine (more on that below) for this specific game. The game features 500MB of HAM6 video and will run even on 68000 OCS systems. Cheers to John Tsakiris for providing some UI art.


FULL GAMES [WIP]

AlarCity
Design and art by John Tsakiris, with code by myself. It's a smooth, frantic top down shooter that's set apart from the rest of the genre by it's extensive customisation and powerup system. Heavily uses AGA features such as wide sprites and 8 bitplanes.

Preorders are being taken here


SPECIAL EDITION HACKS [COMPLETE]

Giana Sisters SE
Every art asset from the classic original has been replaced by art either ported from the Nintendo DS edition or designed from scratch by John Tsakiris. Also features some SFX and level tweaks. Galahad cracked it for floppy disk release.

Giana 2: Future World
My first "special edition" was an attempt to restore "Hard N Heavy" back to it's roots as the original sequel to Giana Sisters. The only real changes are the player sprites, names and title screen. Could possibly do with a more extensive overhaul I guess.

Another World: The Lost Level
Using data files ported from the PC version, the level that Amiga owners missed out on is now available on the game's original platform. Note that this release is just the single level by itself - you don't need to play through the entire game again to reach it.

Rise of the Robots SE
Is it possible to polish a turd? Well, I tried my best. While ROTR:SE doesn't fix the major complaints (lack of character choice, can't jump over opponents), it does provide a raft of tweaks to better balance the game and even make it look slightly prettier. AGA and CD32 only at this stage.

Untouchables SE
A suggestion by Vollldo, what was going to be a simple palette fix evolved into a slightly more substantial remaster with difficulty and audio adjustments (including simultaneous music and SFX).

Wonder Dog SE
A palette fix with optional versions for one-button and two-button joysticks. Now, a handful of levels from the game borrow from the more vibrant feel of the Mega CD edition. May have been Cobe's suggestion from memory..?

Dragon Spirit SE
More or less just an Atari ST "Dark palette" fix, with the dragon in the corner scaled down to not take up so much of the screen. (I think Akira suggested this originally)


ON HOLD PROJECTS

Raid Over Moscow
An attempt to finish U.S. Gold's cancelled port, using Adrian Cumming's art from that project for authenticity. Approximately 1/3rd of the levels from the original are code complete.

I'm weighing up whether to finish this, or do Road Avenger, for Christmas.

Area 88: UN Squadron Special Edition
An attempt to make the not particularly popular (but honestly, above average for Tiertex) game more playable and smooth by slowing down all movement. Mostly this is a project that's on hold because the effort-to-improvement ratio is exceedingly low.

Wonderboy in Monster Land
Palette fixes, framing fixes and control fixes to be playable on CD32 pads. Mostly on hold because of losing substantial progress on it in a Hard Drive crash. May see release as a ReImagine effort one year.

Gloom Construction Kit
Designed to facilitate the complete creation of an entire Gloom mod, including art, audio and levels. On a rainy day I'll bundle it up for "final" release.


RAPID PROTOTYPES

Blue Thunder
A super rapid prototype to see whether or not I could pull off a non-CDXL powered FMV engine in Blitz.

Simple First Person Shooter
An attempt to make a super smooth, though extremely limited, first person shooter engine.


OTHER

CD32.co.uk
Misc unofficial CD32 conversions. A collaboration with SteveUK, Cobe, Scorpion, Kloks and many others.

Defender of the Crown: Extended Collector's Edition
Assisted in mastering the 3rd disc (menu and emulators for PC and Mac, original game bootable on CDTV and CD32, extended intro)

Projekt Lila
[ Show youtube player ]
Converted IndieGO! opening sequence to CDXL, and created a world select menu for the game (I think this world select menu wasn't on every copy of the game due to a mastering issue, but you can see it in the video).

Tales of Gorluth 2
Not totally sure it ended up in the final release (need to double check), I created a basic CPU and language selection screen for the game.

SibWing
Can honestly only claim credit for finding it on a hard drive backup that had been supplied to me! Galahad/Scoopex did the hard work in mastering it for release.

Gloom source code
Another little discovery.

CD32Load
Minor tweaks and updates to JOTD's WHDLoad clone project. Mostly bringing virtual mouse and virtual keyboard functionality to it.

Pizza Connection English translation
More or less just an investigation to see if it was possible to produce an English language patch for the game.

A similar project for Helicopter Mission also never really got that far.


Misc CD32 tools

"NVFile" for saving generic files to NVRAM (in order to enable saving on CD32 editions of Lemmings 2, Breathless and others). "WaitJoy" for detecting joypad presses to be used in batch files. These don't have an official home anywhere but can be found on various compilation discs.

[Gzegzolka]

You are very creative in good way there's lot of projects I would like to see finished.

[Amigajay]

Amazing amount of Amiga work produced for the Amiga community, many thanks for that and personally for the help with my CD32 projects.

oh and go Road Avenger! :-)

[Amiga1992]

Thanks for your work earok!

Originally Posted by earok

I'm weighing up whether to finish this, or do Road Avenger, for Christmas.

I hope you decide to finish this for Christmas. As much as those anime style FMV games are fun to look at, I never enjoyed this type of game, there's not much to it. Raid Over Moscow is a damn fine game though, and would love to see a proper 16 bit port! (let me know if you need help with it )

[funK]

Originally Posted by earok

Idea stolen from Mr Amiten, here's a portfolio of sorts of various Amiga projects I've been involved in.

FULL GAMES [WIP]

AlarCity
Design and art by John Tsakiris, with code by myself. It's a smooth, frantic top down shooter that's set apart from the rest of the genre by it's extensive customisation and powerup system. Heavily uses AGA features such as wide sprites and 8 bitplanes.

Preorders are being taken here

Wait, was that already known or is this a stealth preorder announcement?!
Woah, I'm definitely going to browse that link as soon as I'm done posting this!


EDIT:
... aaaand preordered!
Also seen this on the very same site, sounds an intriguing game, too:

16.05.2017: Lumberjack Reloaded game for Amiga CDTV and CD32
The upcoming Lumberjack Reloaded game will release on a bootable CD that can be run on Amiga CDTV and CD32. Stay tuned!

[tolkien]

Impressive! Good work aerok!

[Tsak]

3 cheers to Earok for his diverse and on-going service to this community! And a personal thanx for the wonderful cooperation we're having since last summer (and hopefully for the years to come) through Pixelglass/Reimagine games! It's been a blast so far!

Road Avenger & Raid Over Moscow are 2 titles we're considering for a next Reimagine release. Road Avenger should be an easy one now we have the Time Gal experience. Still, my vote goes to Raid Over Moscow (agree with Akira's points) though there's much work to be done for this to be completed and it's a more ambitious project overall. I guess time will tell

@funK : thanks so much! Preorders for Alarcity has been announced since Christmas publicly in this forum, various other sites, facebook e.t.c. but response has been moderate so far. We hope we'll get a good boost of publicity as soon as we release the long promised demo so as people can witness first hand the overal quality of this title and generally the amount of work we've put into it since it's initial announcement. You can follow the game's development here btw: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=84261

[earok]

Thanks guys I appreciate the kind words.

I count two votes for Raid Over Moscow and one for Road Avenger heh. Though I'd love to see both released. One will be this year (after AlarCity) and one sometime during the next I suppose.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Tsak

my vote goes to Raid Over Moscow (agree with Akira's points) though there's much work to be done for this to be completed and it's a more ambitious project overall. I guess time will tell

I reiterate my offer to help with graphics or music. I mean it.

Keep up the good work either way

[Amigajay]

Also Road Avenger would be more noticeable in the retro community news, would bring in more people to your site!

btw never knew it came to Sega Saturn, 3DO and Playstation too under the 'Road Blaster' name in Japan

[AmigaBill]

OMG! It is Christmas in May! Thanks a million Earok. I can't wait to go through all of these. I have already played a few, but not all. TimeGal is my favorite game of 2017! Yep, even better than that Player Unknown's Battlegrounds thing. Not joking! Thanks for everything. You are a legend

[earok]

Cheers guys!

@Akira I'll post on the ROM thread when we're starting up work on that again, although I wasn't planning to add much in the way of graphics or music as I was planning on keeping it simple and faithful - we've already got a (virtually) complete art set from the canned port, and the original never had any music.

SFX will be needed though, and there is the possibility of following it up later with an unofficial spiritual sequel where we could use HQ art and audio.


@AmigaJay I think it was only ever called Road Avenger on the Mega CD to avoid confusion with Atari's 'Road Blasters'... but there's a lot of elements I want to borrow from that version specifically (intro music!), so if I do it I'll probably use that name as well.


@AmigaBill Cheers! Let me know if you'd like me to join in on a live stream sometime to chat (I always try and join the live streams by you and Amiten but I always seem to be asleep or occupied when they're on, but give me a day or so advance notice and I'll see what I can work out)

[saimon69]

I like Super don Quixote and Esch's Aurunmilla: those were kinda cheesy but funny
will leave LD youtube for future references here
[ Show youtube player ]
[ Show youtube player ]

[AmigaBill]

Originally Posted by AmigaBill

OMG! It is Christmas in May! Thanks a million Earok. I can't wait to go through all of these. I have already played a few, but not all. TimeGal is my favorite game of 2017! Yep, even better than that Player Unknown's Battlegrounds thing. Not joking! Thanks for everything. You are a legend

Sweet! I will take you up on that! I am having a party at my house in a couple of weeks and TimeGal will be up and running on my A1200!

[earok]

^ Added a few more projects to the portfolio (all of them contributions to commercial releases)

@saimon69 oh man those look so cheap, but pretty funny haha.

@amigabill sounds great!