The Retro Remix Amiga Game Making Competition

[doble07]

Hi Jack Burton!

I am pleased to hear it. Many years have been passed to still working on them AmiPCE is a bit advanced with Sprite support, but it works very slow

Don't worry, my MSX game remake is a Konami one!

Au revoir Michel!!!

Juan

[rockersuke]

IMHO, a jury of "selected EAB members" is not necessarilly a good idea. This is not meant to be an "EAB-only" competition, it is been promoted and disscussed at some other places, so a jury of EAB people doesn't actually make much sense.

I'm aware a voting-page is open to evil-intended voting, but then any other alternative I can think of has also its inconveniences which could distort the results, so if Arcade Underground thinks that's the best option, It's OK to me.

There is something I would like to suggest, anyway, in which this "EAB wise team" could be actually useful. I mean giving feedback to authors in form of as detailed and unbiased (as humanly possible ) public reviews of each entry (preferably after the voting phase).

I know it also has its own risks, as authors taking negative criticism as a personnal offence turning into endlessly useless flaming (but then that's how the internet goes ), but I think it's worth a risk in order to promote disscussion and people receiving as many opinions as possible from their works.

Just an idea!

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[viddi]

Cammy, your new compo is awesome.
And so are your rules.




I also want to be a respected EAB member.




Hey alkis21, your game is great. Don´t miss this competition.
I´m really looking forward to seeing new greek stuff.

[Jack Burton]

Originally Posted by doble07

Hi Jack Burton!

I am pleased to hear it. Many years have been passed to still working on them AmiPCE is a bit advanced with Sprite support, but it works very slow

Don't worry, my MSX game remake is a Konami one!

Wow ! Thaaaannnks !!! You are the best !

Au revoir Michel!!!

Juan

Merci, et à bientôt !

Mich'

[AB Positive]

My ASM-fu is terrible, but I'll throw my hat into the ring. If I just throw tons of nekkid womenz in there I'll win, right?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AB Positive

If I just throw tons of nekkid womenz in there I'll win, right?

It's worth a try Looking forward to see your game

[Cammy]

Hi everyone,

Since it seems like there haven't been any entries submitted and it looks like two months isn't enough time for this competition, we decided that we will extend the Retro Remix Amiga Game Making Competition for another month to give more people time to work on their entries and polish them up. The competition will now end on the 30th of April.

I'll repost the rules again just so everyone is clear on them. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about the rules, I want this to be a fun and enjoyable competition for everyone!

1. This time, we're giving you two months to work on your game. If your game isn't finished by the end of the time limit (April 30th), upload it anyway but have at least one playable level or a demo of the game completed.

2. The game you make for this competition must be playable on either classic OCS or AGA Amigas. This way, it'll reach more people who have classic hardware, or have access to UAE. If you want to port your "remixed" game to another system - AROS, MorphOS or OS4, feel free to as long as your final competition entry will work on a classic Amiga.

3. The game you "remix" must be based on an already existing game on any system (including Amiga) and you must clearly state in the ReadMe file which game you are basing it on too. For example, a remake of arcade classics such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders or any game you like. Sometimes the more simple games are more fun!

4. Ripped graphics are allowed, but keep in mind that enhanced or new graphics can sometimes improve your chances in the competition.

By the way, any programming language and game-making tools you want to use for the competition are allowed as long as the final game runs on a classic OCS/AGA Amiga, either on real hardware or through emulation. This includes the use of game editors such as Backbone, GRAC, GRAAL, SEUCK and Reality.

Also, here's a link to the previous competition page - http://amigachristmastree.condor.ser...mpetition.html in case anyone missed it and needs inspiration/motivation to work on games for this Retro Remix competition. If you need help at all, please ask on the forum too, I'm sure there's going to be someone who can help you out!

Thank you to everyone who offered prizes for this competition, it would be very much appreciated by the Amiga community and myself. If you have a serious offer for donating prizes, please private message me and let me know so I can add it to the prize pool. Maybe having more prizes will motivate people more.

[rockersuke]

Originally Posted by Cammy

Hi everyone,

Since it seems like there haven't been any entries submitted and it looks like two months isn't enough time for this competition, we decided that we will extend the Retro Remix Amiga Game Making Competition for another month to give more people time to work on their entries and polish them up. The competition will now end on the 30th of April.

Sorry, I stated I would send an entry and I had theorically plenty of time for my project, but real life interfered the (very) hard way. When I finally decided a game to remix RetroMadrid focused all my attention for two weeks even though this year I was only assisting as a mere visitor. Right after that there were two consecutives deaths in the family in less than a week, both long awaited after long exhausting terminal phases, but no less devastating anyway. When It was all over, there was the affair with a rather obscure bug in the AMOS compiler wich prevented the compiled version of my christmas non-entry game to work on 68000 based Amigas. Thanks to the help of the people at the AMOS Factory a workaround was found (now you can find version 1.00 at its page). When I took a breath, deadline was just a few days ahead.

Now thanks to this extension my project still goes on and an extra month will be more than enough (I hope!!! ^_^'). By the way, It's going to be yet another text adventure (it's just my favourite genre!), so sorry for those of you who don´t like that kind of games, I really hope there will be more entries closer to your tastes!

I received some nice feedback from my last christmas adventure in the form of several bug reports (which were much appreciated!) but all of them came from non native english speakers. I would just like to know how terribly wrong my english actually sounds to all of you so I can have a glimpse of how much effort I should invest in a proper proofreading this time. I'm thinking of fooling the corporate english teacher at my job into making a proofreading of my adv as an exercise for his class, so I could simultaneously have some fun with my fellows at job, proofread the thing, and make some proselitism of retrogaming, text-adventuring, and the Amiga itself all at the same time . But first of all I need some honest opinions about how badly it was done from anyone who played it (native english speakers preferably), I mean just bad? horribly bad? unacceptably bad? you know...

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[Hungry Horace]

i might have something for this by the end of June, but April seems unlikely

[rockersuke]

...And now I'll tell you how it's all going on, which is, essentially, really bad! Real life has also kidnaped me for good this extra month, at least most of the time for happy reasons. I've also got myself into some crazy project of mine about making an Amiga setup which I could carry to local retro-computing meetings and this has eaten most of my free time (yeah, that's me, always having the right ideas at the wrongest moment ). So, just a couple of days before deadline my entry is hardly in its barebones ^_^'

Time to make a decission, then. The game I was remixing was a little text adventure originally meant to be played in a 4Kb machine whose plot I pretended to expand a bit. In fact the game had almost no plot at all and my idea was somehow to build a story mixing fantasy elements with real memories from my younghood on a map based on the original scenario. No time at all to do that, at least the way I intended, but there's still something I can acomplish. Instead of making an ellaborated remake I can go and try to do just some plain basic port, totally playable at least as much as in the original. The game was so brief (in current terms) that I can do it in time and maybe I'll be able to add some little enhancement just by recycling the engine from my last Christmas adventure.

At that point I considered yesterday to use some adventure creation tool as that could help to speed things up. I took a look at my copy of Aegis Visionary, which could do the job fairly well, but hard drive installation was sooo messy that trying to do it in a rush just gave me a big headache! So I finally switched to AMOS again. I hope anyway I could make some amiga games in the future with this kind of utilities, just to prove the effort invested into them back in the days was worth.

There goes some pics from my cellphone taken just some time ago while using spare time at job to make some progress. There is the game emulated and a WinUAE running AMOS window. If everything goes right I'll write the really expanded version not much later so we could all compare! Now I've got only this evening and tomorrow to finish... I could use also friday, but I've got a ticket to assit to Iggy Pop playing live on Apr the 30th. Hey, it will be my first Iggy concert, and you never know when, and if, he will tour again through Spain, so I cannot miss it!

What about the rest of you? Anyone out there making a game for this comp? Share your game-making experiences, that's also part of the fun!

(and I still would apreciate any honest comment about how bad my english sounded in "An Amiga Christmas Story", that's a feedback I really need!)

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[Amiga1992]

I just found out about this.
Maybe I can do something

[rockersuke]

So, I didn't make it! eeer, but Iggy was great! One of those hundreds of hands is surely me!!!

[ Show youtube player ]

Well, I retreated cowardly. I could not even finish a basic port of the game, and entering with something with a final message of "Congratulations, you've just finished the unfinished demo of an incomplete thing!" didn't sound fair to me. But the most overwhelming reason to step back was that debate about game making tools. Everybody everywhere discussing about the best way to achieve complex parallax scrolling and hundreds of gargantous sprites handling... and there I was with a tiny text adventure. Shame on me, I felt totally out of place.

So I took a break, breathed long, postponed everything, and hop! a remake of a retro machine game for another retro machine is born! It's still the basic port of 1979 TRS-80 "Haunted House" adventure, but in a not-so-embarrasing state as it was a couple of weeks ago.

If I sum the amount of time I've invested in it, I guess It would not exceed 3 weeks, so a couple of months (+ one extra month) was not such a misguided time limit. Anyway, even if the comp is long over and gone, now a (little) game exits as its result, for which I sincerely thank AU people!

And now the page with the game details and download -> here

And a bit of auto-hype in form of a "making of" youtube -> [ Show youtube player ]

The clip has english subs... which served to make me realize I suck at subtitling ^_^'

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[rockersuke]

Originally Posted by rockersuke

The game I was remixing was a little text adventure originally meant to be played in a 4Kb machine whose plot I pretended to expand a bit. In fact the game had almost no plot at all and my idea was somehow to build a story mixing fantasy elements with real memories from my younghood on a map based on the original scenario. No time at all to do that, at least the way I intended, but there's still something I can acomplish. Instead of making an ellaborated remake I can go and try to do just some plain basic port, totally playable at least as much as in the original.

Just to share with you where it all leaded to! Last year I made the remix of Haunted House which was basically the original game with multumedia enhancements and an auto-map feature. I wanted to add a plot, but hadn't the time.

Then, some weeks ago an interactive-fiction speed-comp was organized at IF forums. Its premise was entering with a work made using a language you had never used before, and that happened to happen at the very same time I was giving my first steps with Inform 7! To cut a long story short: now I have another Haunted House without any multimedia enhancement but with the kind of story I would have liked it to have the first time. Yeah, someday I'll made the final thing with both, but don't hold your breath...

The reason to tell you about it all here is that, against my own predictions, this latest version is playable on accelerated Amigas! After all, Inform 7 produces Z machine files, which are playable through Frotz. Frotz works on any Amiga with kickstart 2.x or bigger. I was afraid that, z machine or not, the load of code added by the internal Inform 7 libraries (which is way bigger than Inform 6 which is itself way bigger than Infocom z-machine games) would make it actually unplayable... Well, it was not so bad when I gave it a try! The game works with a reasonable (if not 100% optimal) speed in my 50 MHz 68030 : a couple of seconds of delay on average commands, 3-4 on the most complicated ones.

This is, of course, because my game is a short story and has been compiled in Z5 format. Other Inform 7 options (Z8, glulx files, multimedia, etc...) are probably out of the question and I wouldn't even try with mega-epics Inform 7 works as Blue Lacuna and similars.

Some pics:

Haven't tried with my A600 with ACA630 accelerator, I guess it would run noticeably slower.

The thing is here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LCGO6LA6

and the required interpreter to play with it in Amiga is:

http://aminet.net/package/game/role/Frotz

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[rockersuke]

Originally Posted by rockersuke

Haven't tried with my A600 with ACA630 accelerator, I guess it would run noticeably slower.

Just a quick note about it: I tried just a short while ago and, again against what I expected, not only there isn't any noticeable slowdown but also I have the really strange feeling that it actually runs a bit faster. It looks like Frotz is a program that do like all those optimizations Jens uses in his cards!
And now I know my Inform 7 things are playable in an Amiga 600 too!

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