[WIP] Creeping Me Out!

[Mixel]

Today I’ve mostly been animating things.. (click the skull he only looks good in motion, haha)

Meet Skull jerk. (He’s really going to be a pain, by design..) and flappy door. Most of my updating is going to be piecemeal little things like this.. I think I’m aiming for monthly progress videos? That way there’ll always be a substantial enough amount of stuff to show, in theory. ?

[Mixel]

Hahhahaha.. I assume you've all been keeping up to date with Scorpion engine's thread so here's me experimenting with it's new copper support..

I'll obviously not use it this.. intensely. this is just for fun..

Also first look at the slowly evolving statusbar.

[Mixel]

Just to illustrate how freaking rad the copper support in Scorpion is already..

Why on earth didn't amiga games do this back in the day? Im only aware of AGA and OCS/ECS versions, not like, a universal version that uses the full power of both!

at Earok!

This is the same .exe with zero adjustments on my end, running on an A3000 profile and an A1200 one..

I haven't made any cloud tiles (these "clouds" are recycled from my caves!) as I wasn't expecting copper yet, but I think it's great how much depth copper effects can add to a scene. Without it my exteriors looked a bit flat.

[ma693541]

Will the music for the game be some sort of spooky Halloween type?

[saimon69]

I would suggest Danny Elfman and Medievil stile

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by ma693541

Will the music for the game be some sort of spooky Halloween type?

Ooh a music question! Short answer: largely.

Needlessly long answer I’m going the turrican route of a track per level, so a lot of it will be spooky, but some of the levels planned for later in the game are way spookier than the opening few so I don’t want to start too spooky? Got to build up to it for maximum effect. I hope, as a whole, it’s musically castlevania/ghosts n ghouls-ish, so.. kiiind of spooky in context, but also atmospheric/adventure-y.. The earliest tracks are supposed to convey that.

So far the only music I’ve (partially?) composed specifically for this is like some chiptune goth two-step thing.. [ Show youtube player ] - this is when you’re way underground. The track immediately proceeding it will be way jauntier.

I haven’t fully decided on a style for the overall “sound font” (I don’t know the real term!) of the music but Toni Galvez reached out with some great suggestions and sample sets.. I think I’m maybe combining very tiny chip samples and megadrive samples, but depends how I go with the md ones, and if I run out of chip ram after all the nonsense I’m adding.

I also have the entire st-xx sample set from aminet so, literal thousands of samples, so I’m going to immerse myself in that. Music is part of the process I’m looking forward to most, as I have no idea what’ll happen. (Worst case scenario I give up and hand the job off to someone else, but probably not!)

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by saimon69

I would suggest Danny Elfman and Medievil stile

Those are excellent suggestions and there will probably be a bit of that sort of vibe some of the time.

[commodorejohn]

Yes, definitely looking forward to hearing what the musical style of this ends up being. And yes, the Copper effects are quite nice

[saimon69]

Actually, after let it simmer on my brain soup for the night, would suggest you to mix the Danny Elfman thing with a comedy horror movie of the 50 like The Munsters so to have a gothic style Rock and Roll that should fit the modern environment (and be more manageable for trackers) ^^

[Mixel]

[ Show youtube player ] dying is fun!

Slime behaviour is improved a lot now and dying is almost finished.

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

[ Show youtube player ] dying is fun!

Slime behaviour is improved a lot now and dying is almost finished.

Oh wow, those bones look really cool

[manossg]

I just love these little updates!

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by manossg

I just love these little updates!

Thanks.


One thing I haven't mentioned here is any of the little clips ive uploaded lately, here, twitter.. etc. They're now all performance on an unexpanded A1200. So I'm still not sure exactly what the final performance will be like but it doesn't seem like base A1200/no fastram is out of the question for very nice performance. Might maybe chug in boss fights, but hell, lots of games did! I might still recommend fastram by the time I'm done but I'm very happy where things seem to be heading.


I've spent the last couple of days cleaning up and improving beetle and slime logic and jeeez. I see why so many games just had creatures go left and right now.

Originally Posted by earok

Oh wow, those bones look really cool

TY! They're a little less bouncy now.

[Mixel]

[ Show youtube player ] - nothing much new to anyone who’s following me here or on Twitter but it’s nice to roll it all into one video. I forgot to add the sliding platforms though, booo.

[malko]

More it goes, more it look good and cool !
Continue the good work.

[DamienD]

This sooooo good. Nice innovative ideas, great graphics, cool enemies / animations etc.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by malko

More it goes, more it look good and cool !
Continue the good work.

Thankyou! Going to possibly show some stuff that's from after/outside the demo soon because there's a whole bunch that I want to be a surprise.

Originally Posted by DamienD

This sooooo good. Nice innovative ideas, great graphics, cool enemies / animations etc.

Thankyou DamienD! Really glad you're liking it so far..

I'm really glad I edited this together as when I've been adding one or two tiny things every day it doesn't seem like I'm doing that much but put it all together and the passage of time begins to make sense.

In re: 2 MB amigas.. I think the problem I'll have making it run on 2MB amigas is loading levels.. So it looks like its running fine but switching from one level to another is often when it kicks you out. Particularly once I've added all the sound, music etc I don't reallllly see it running on 2MB amigas now but .. Not 100% out of the question still. It performs fine on them from a fps perspective, it's just I'd probably have to limit level size etc. We shall see!

[Tsak]

No worries mate, once you're there and ready we can help you optimise the whole deal (from gfx to music). It would be a massive shame for this game needing extra ram if it performs fine on vanilla 1200. And from what I've seen so far there seems to be absolutely no reason for it not to fit. Level sizes don't really play much role in this. Unless you're using new tiles or extra enemies that is.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by Tsak

No worries mate, once you're there and ready we can help you optimise the whole deal (from gfx to music). It would be a massive shame for this game needing extra ram if it performs fine on vanilla 1200. And from what I've seen so far there seems to be absolutely no reason for it not to fit. Level sizes don't really play much role in this. Unless you're using new tiles or extra enemies that is.

Thankyou so much! It'll be nice to aim for 2 because then people can play it on CD32. (and tbh, this definitely isn't going to fit on a single floppy, so CD32 is my most logical stock target config)

At one point I had trouble figuring out which of my levels is which in regard to the .gfx files.. Now I know it's the order they're listed in the Maps tab, in which case my world map is huuuuuge.. despite being dimensionally tiny. I guess it doesn't use many repeating tiles, but it's still drastically big compared to the rest. - quite easy for me to fix by making it more densely packed. (now I know what's actually going to be included in the world map that's much easier to do!) I have some other map optimisation ideas too.. Fingers crossed.

[saimon69]

A bit OT but i finally found the webcomic online [was under archive] to get a better overlook of the story and will tell you what i think:
You soon will NEED to do a prequel game linked to it also to fix narrative holes in the comic and if you plan to publish commercially is a good idea to bundle things like short comic books to it! (btw am doing a test mod with several tunes to give you an idea of the soundtrack mood and style i built in my own head - may differ substantially from yours though)