New game: Droid Special Edition (Atari STE conversion)

[Gzegzolka]

Play it for a while in winuae, very interesting game. Long jumps might be binded to second fire button for more comfortable controls.

[tomcat666]

On a very fast amiga it runs veeery fast, like twice the frame rate You can check this with winuae and 040 full speed and all accurate chipset timings off.

[junosix]

Have updated the link in the first post to beta3, should run at correct speed on faster/accelerated machines, have tested on a few configurations. Also noticed a small bug with display of energy meter upon player losing life, so have fixed that.

[tomcat666]

Runs at correct speed now on fast machines ! Thank you !

[Megalomaniac]

Nice work, especially if you have no previous Amiga experience, you've clearly had to gradually master the machine's quirks to get it running correctly on all OSs and processors.

Kudos to Miles Lord for the original too - as mentioned its pretty original and inventive for a PD game (aside from the actual droid looking very similar to the one in Killing Game Show), with a better feel than many ST action games, and a lovely moody colour scheme which can compete with the Amiga's larger palette. The controls take some adjusting to, especially as some of the caverns are quite tight and most ledges are very narrow. Looks like Miles did a sequel later for the ST, there's your next project. Do we know where he is now?

The improvement from the ST original is clear - as mentioned, the ST can't do smooth multidirectional scrolling, or music or sound effects of this quality, whereas the STe probably could.

[Komoda & Amiga]

Looks great Keep it up.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Kudos to Miles Lord for the original too - as mentioned its pretty original and inventive for a PD game (aside from the actual droid looking very similar to the one in Killing Game Show), with a better feel than many ST action games, and a lovely moody colour scheme which can compete with the Amiga's larger palette.

Definitely. Him and his brother Patrick.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Looks like Miles did a sequel later for the ST, there's your next project.

Oooo yes. Droid 2

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Do we know where he is now?

He and his brother did an interview in 2021. He's on LinkedIn

[DisasterIncarna]

Droid2? nice, would certainly be a welcome addition if we got it, this version of the first ones pretty damned good tbh.

EDIT: having played more on both pc + handhelds it would be nice to have a setting/option for alternate ways to power jump, some of my handheld devices have such crappy dpads that i end up falling off ledges while trying to down/up, maybe extra options such as Hold Fire+Press up, can help with such issues, on bog standard PC when i use keyboard Down>Up works perfectly fine.

[Megalomaniac]

Thanks Alexh. Cool that Miles had a career in programming, though largely not in games, and neat that his LinkedIn mentions that ST Format published his game. They clearly both enjoyed their time with home computers, interesting that they seem to view the lack of custom hardware on the ZX81 / Spectrum / Electron / ST as making it more enjoyable to work with them than the Amiga or C64 would have been. I should have picked up on Flood as an influence for the appearance. Incidentally, kudos to Bullfrog for their features on programming, in both ST Format and Amiga Format at different times - and their giving MC Diskett and Demis Hassabis their first industry jobs through that Amiga Power competition.

[junosix]

Have uploaded another version, attachment in the first post. Now included is the option for an alternative control layout using Button 2 to jump. It was a great suggestion, it's really nice to play it like that.

Thanks again for the nice words! The original game is a great bit of design to begin with so it was a good base to work off. Droid 2 improved on things quite a bit with a large scrolling playfield but by Miles' own admission it's not quite as polished as the first Droid. He did a nice save-'em-up game called Hoog (I appropriated the character for the ending scene on Droid SE), kind of a platform Lemmings-type thing, semi-similar in concept to something like Benefactor. He's a good designer, it would have been good to have seen interest from commercial publishers back in the day.

I've had a riot doing this on the Amiga, never touched it before beside a light bit of disassembly a few years ago when I was contributing the audio routines for Lotus STE [ Show youtube player ]. I thought it would take me 6 months to get even as much as a pixel on screen but much of it came a lot easier than I thought, learning the quirks was indeed a big part of the challenge. Finding Phx's ptplayer music/sound effects system to plug into it was a phenomenal help, and EAB's a fantastic resource too!

[ransom1122]

Beta4 is much better then before with control 2.

Any thoughts on adding "Control Method 3"
Short Press 2nd Fire Button = Hormal jump
Long press 2nd Fire Button = High Jump
To avoid having to press Down on every high jump?

Also comparing with ST version...

... When you pick up the Single Shot Weapon. Its not mounted on the character like the ST Version?

... Player Flashes when hit in ST but not on Amiga

... Enemies drop weapon addons in ST but not on Amiga.

Here I have 3 shot weapon upgrade from killed enemy weapon drops in the beginning of level 1 where access card pickup in ST version. Amiga Version im stuck with the single shot weapon throughout level 1?

ST


Amiga


... Also is the fire on level 1, doesn't kill you is that normal? I take it that it is because ST Version fire doesn't kill you as well...

... Other small benefits may be to add "ESC" key to quit to menu. As only way to do this is to force die.

[Pyromania]

Cool game!