Will we see a new era of big games for the amiga ?

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Adrian Browne

Well after Outrun AGA, agermose and I are planning to do a remake of IK+ for AGA.
A lot of graphics, animation and design are already done as it was supposed to be for Vampire originally and then back ported to AGA- but that never materialized. It's already very pretty but it's someways off in the future for now.

Get in tpouch with Sandruzzo, he was having similar plans and maybe a collab can come out of it

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by demether

A question I'm asking myself...


Last big games for amiga, I mean the aga games, like AB3D2, TFX, Virtual GP....


On the ECS machines, great games also (even if they often need accelerators) : Genesia, Frontier Elite 2, Midwinter 2...Universe, lucasarts games...



These days we see a lot of arcade ports, or games wich reminds me the golden age od DP....but not great games anymore.



Do you think we'll see them again on our beloved plateform ?

Trying to shove 3D texture mapped games suited to 486 PC with byte per
pixel mode H VGA into a 2D sloathsome bitplane focussed custom chipset is just setting yourself up for disappointment.

Completely unrealistic unless min spec=A4000

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by demether

A question I'm asking myself...

Last big games for amiga, I mean the aga games, like AB3D2, TFX, Virtual GP....

Do you think we'll see them again on our beloved plateform ?

TFX has had the @paraj treatment and is now playable. AB3D2 is being chipped away at and improved.

Does that count?

[saimon69]

Nah, he does seems to me he want brand new stuff -_-

[Megalomaniac]

Anyone looking to develop a 3D game (especially anything texture-mapped) from scratch nowadays has to know that it can only ever be a small project that might bring in a tiny bit of income - certainly not enough to justify the effort of development by itself. The sheer time required to make everything work is so much higher than for a platformer or shoot 'em up, and the public demand just isn't as high. Make sure you're prepared to devote a lot of time and effort to something that won't bring material rewards. Doing an original game in the style of a classic arcade game that was badly converted back-in-the-day will be enjoyed by a lot more people. Sorry to be a killjoy.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

the public demand just isn't as high.

Did you see the Grind thread?

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Aquabyss is a cool looking game and it's amazing what the team has achieved.

+1 a great new original game that gets better & better with each update! Imagine Elite except with Submarines

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by demether

A question I'm asking myself...
Last big games for amiga, I mean the aga games, like AB3D2, TFX, Virtual GP....
On the ECS machines, great games also (even if they often need accelerators) : Genesia, Frontier Elite 2, Midwinter 2...Universe, lucasarts games...

These days we see a lot of arcade ports, or games wich reminds me the golden age od DP....but not great games anymore.

Do you think we'll see them again on our beloved platform ?

Problem is, that doesn't work out financially.
You need years to get something created with the quality of the top games of that age in your free time. Plus, the Amiga is a difficult platform to develop on if you want to get something out of it that's not average and/or only running on accelerated machines.

And then, you have only around 500 people buying something if it's really good. With a few notable exceptions maybe reaching a 1000. But probably some of those 500 buying two editions of the game are already counted in there as well.

Divide the amount of money you could probably earn through the hundreds of hours it takes to create a game.

So, Amiga game dev makes only sense as a hobby, not a job.

[alexh]

I really thought NO. I thought there would be no new IP, only ports of open source 8-bit retro-remake games that perhaps never came to Amiga (or were terrible) and perhaps Arcade emulation ports. I really never expected new, high quality, IP.

BUT

That was before this game, Aquabyss, which might have been a AAA title back in the day.

https://aquabyss.com/

I had hoped that Amiga might get some OrionSoft ports (they have done Atari ST/Falcon030 games) but it hasn't happened.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by alexh

I had hoped that Amiga might get some OrionSoft ports (they have done Atari ST/Falcon030 games) but it hasn't happened.

Considering how many platform they support, I would'nt be surprised that this is a conscious choice not to port their games on the Amiga. :/

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Considering how many platform they support, I would'nt be surprised that this is a conscious choice not to port their games on the Amiga. :/

[Tsak]

Very interesting thread with many legit questions.
My 2 cents:

1) Will we ever see a new era of Amiga games released on mass?

Well, we are already into it! The past 8 years, gamemaking in the platform has skyrocketed and the amount and quality of released games is increasing every year. Don't believe me? Check HOL and Lemon from 2000 and up to 2014, gamemaking on the platform reached absolute rock bottom with 1-4 games (of ANY size or quality) released per year on average. While last year alone we had 69 releases: that is more games in a single year than all the games released between 2002 to 2012 combined.

2) Will we see a new era of BIG games for the Amiga ?

To answer this we need to better define what we really mean with "big" games. Is it the literal game size (measured in playtime or content)? Is it quality? Perhaps the amount of time or resources (say a big team working on it) needed to finish and release it? Whether it is commercial or not? Whether it is a port or original? Whether it could stand as a release back in the day? Or perhaps all of the above?

Whatever your definition is, I can say for sure that in recent years we had many releases and projects that could -very well- stand against most of the above criteria. And this is not just an one-off trend, in fact we consistently see several releases per year that fit the above definitions. So -in a sense- the answer again is that we are already into this era. Having said that, it's also true that the ratio and total number of 'big' game releases still remains low. So the question then becomes whether there is a critical mass to justify the 'big Amiga games era' part.

3) Will we ever see a new era, where big games released for the Amiga is the 'norm' rather than the exception?

Honestly this only happened when the platform was alive and kicking (that is between '89-'94) where we were getting more than 500(!) releases per year. And even then, only a small fraction of those titles could be considered 'big' games. So if you are expecting something like that, then the answer is definitely no. On the other hand if your comparison is releases happening in the later half of the 90s (say around '98) then I would argue we are already within this ballpark and the scenario is not unlikely. The only factor here is whether the supply and demand will keep growing (as it steadily has for the last years) or not. Good news is that there are already quite many large projects in development (which have good prospects of being completed) so it is almost certain we should expect a steady flow in the years to come.

[grelbfarlk]

They should be big games, in that they are only sold on a stack of floppies, in an NDOS format that is not WHDLoad compatible.

And they are labelled, "Boot Disk, Game Disk, Graphics Disk, Sound Disk, Level 1 Disk... and so on until Level 12 disk."

The true Amigians will have at least three floppy drives set up so they have one disk change after about five minutes from power-on, and walk back not in time to miss the start menus before it begins the game in a very difficult scenario.

[TCD]

You forgot the 244 page Din A4 manual with laminated pages

[demether]

Personaly I would be happy to simply see ports from the PC from the AGA era : Xwing, Inferno, diablo, etc...

But of course original games would be especially nice too. Especially for maxed classic amigas (030 , 8mb fast ram at least).

Overall I'm happy with what is happening these days. With powerfull classics we can enjoy games wich were slow at their release time : frontier elite 2, AB3D2, TFX, Tornado...and a lot of the 3D games from yersterday.