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#21 |
Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2014
Location: Warszawa / Polska
Posts: 1,872
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Play it for a while in winuae, very interesting game. Long jumps might be binded to second fire button for more comfortable controls.
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#22 |
Retro Freak
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Slovenia
Age: 51
Posts: 1,705
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On a very fast amiga it runs veeery fast, like twice the frame rate
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#23 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Plymouth, UK
Posts: 32
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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.
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#24 |
Retro Freak
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Slovenia
Age: 51
Posts: 1,705
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Runs at correct speed now on fast machines ! Thank you !
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#25 |
Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2022
Location: Eastbourne
Posts: 1,200
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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. |
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#26 |
Registered User
Join Date: Aug 2023
Location: Bytom/Poland
Posts: 2
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Looks great
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#27 | ||
Thalion Webshrine
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Oxford
Posts: 14,624
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Quote:
Quote:
He and his brother did an interview in 2021. He's on LinkedIn |
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#28 |
Registered User
Join Date: Oct 2021
Location: England
Posts: 1,318
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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. Last edited by DisasterIncarna; 29 July 2024 at 13:08. |
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#29 |
Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2022
Location: Eastbourne
Posts: 1,200
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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.
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#30 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Plymouth, UK
Posts: 32
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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! |
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#31 |
Registered User
Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Omnicorp
Age: 45
Posts: 6,027
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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. |
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#32 |
Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 3,454
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Cool game!
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#33 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Plymouth, UK
Posts: 32
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Did think about adding a long press or double tap or something like that but it isn't quite so easy, because the standard jump triggers immediately when Button 2 is pressed. I could do something that waits a frame or two before processing the jump in order to check for a long press/double tap, but then that would add a delay to the controls. Alternatively it could support Button 2 just for power jump but then normal jump would have to go back to Up, for which there will be pitchforks and also opens the question of how you'd cycle weapons with the joystick/pad.
Getting into the realms of needing to support a CD32 controller which isn't out of the question but... maybe for another time. The idea of crouching before power jumping makes sense to me anyway because it's like the droid is adding extra spring to the jump. You can hold down, down/left, or down/right and press button 2 simultaneously so it doesn't have to be done as two separate direction/button presses. In the original ST game the weapon/energy/ammo drops are entirely random, sometimes you'll get some good ones and other times are handed out real duffers that aren't at all helpful. I wanted to make things a little more deterministic and dispensed with the item drops and kept them as collectible throughout the areas. You're not limited to the single shot weapon for long, there's a "bomb" weapon upgrade fairly early on in area 1. Didn't really like the weapon sprite overlays (you can tell which weapon you're using by looking at the status panel or pressing fire if you have some ammo), and thought the flashing-when-hit thing was distracting. The background fire animation has always been there to look nice, I didn't think it would add anything to make it deduct energy. Esc to quit is a cool idea, have implemented that and updated the attachment - which I'm finally calling v1.0. Last edited by junosix; 31 July 2024 at 10:30. |
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#34 |
Registered User
Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Omnicorp
Age: 45
Posts: 6,027
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Oh, I see down/left, or down/right and press button 2 does work well, I thougt you had to only press down before long jump.. All good there now..
All the rest is good. Well done on the release |
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#35 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Warsaw/Poland
Age: 56
Posts: 2,115
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From my memory some Amiga games used 2 quick/fast pressing of fire button for long jump, and single fire pressing for normal jump.
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#36 |
Registered User
Join Date: Nov 2018
Location: Belfast
Posts: 1,554
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I was trying to check this game out on my WB 3.1 060 A1200. But I couldn't get it to run.
I initially mounted the ADF an copied the contents to my HD and then went into run the droidse exe but it would freeze. So I tried it a different way and booted into early startup, booted with no startup sequence and then tried to run from cmd line. The game would start, but after pressing fire to begin, the graphics would all corrupt and I would then have to restart the Amiga. Anyone know what I'm going wrong? I see others have got the game to run using their A1200's. |
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#37 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Plymouth, UK
Posts: 32
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The game doesn't wait for the blitter, in order to try to get 25fps on a standard Amiga. That's probably why the screen goes haywire. I'll have a go at adding waits and seeing how that affects performance on anything unaccelerated, but if it does end up dropping frames on typical setups then I may have to file '060s under "non-standard wild and weird configurations".
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#38 | |
Registered User
Join Date: Nov 2018
Location: Belfast
Posts: 1,554
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Quote:
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#39 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Plymouth, UK
Posts: 32
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Just watching Amiga Bill's latest games roundup video and he had to hold both mousebuttons on boot and disable CPU caching in order to get rid of graphical glitches, might be worth giving that a shot.
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#40 |
Retro Freak
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Slovenia
Age: 51
Posts: 1,705
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