Hyperborea Resurrected - real AGA bullet hell danmaku WIP

[Daytona675x]

@aros-sg

You can still blit interleaved bobs one plane at a time. But maybe that's too slow.

Yes, but the whole point of interleaved is to avoid seperate blits in the first place for performance reasons, that's why I said "cannot".
But even if there was a performance gain, the price of the uglyness would be unacceptable.

Your analysis comes somewhat close but only to some degree
My plan is to add a section to the final game's manual to explain the technical details.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Rochabian]

Impressive job, well done

Could parallax scrolling be added additionally or is that too much for a stock 1200 ?

[Daytona675x]

@Rochabian
Thanks
Regarding parallax scrolling, it's possible, to some degree:
Stuff like e.g. a transluent cloud layer can easily be done and comes at practically zero performance penalty (actually, performance even increases a bit because the ground enemies are 3 bitplanes only then).
Also, stuff like "floating" hill sections or so can be done (actually, Torben already drew nice graphics for this, will probably be inside the next demo video).
What's not really possible is another full background layer. That's mostly because all sprites are in use and cannot be "abused" to form a background layer. So the blitter would have to do it, and that would cost too much performance here.

[skyzoo73]

Fantastic, it is really impressive what you have managed to squeeze out of the 1200. My hope is that in the graphics compartment there will be a Japanese-mecha style, it would be very nice to see this style in an Amiga game, it is something that has almost always been lacking in both EU and US productions.

[AlphaAmiga]

Game is coming along spectacularly, amazing what you have been able to squeeze out of a stock A1200.

If only studios had been getting this sort of quality out back in the day (alongside some of the other great AGA games we have had in last couple of years), they may have help sell a good few more A1200's, expanding the userbase and allowing developers to concentrate more on AGA only titles for our beloved systems!

(Although I still feel Commodore should have made AGA more of an upgrade than what it was).

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by AlphaAmiga

Game is coming along spectacularly, amazing what you have been able to squeeze out of a stock A1200.

If only studios had been getting this sort of quality out back in the day (alongside some of the other great AGA games we have had in last couple of years), they may have help sell a good few more A1200's, expanding the userbase and allowing developers to concentrate more on AGA only titles for our beloved systems!

(Although I still feel Commodore should have made AGA more of an upgrade than what it was).

Amen! Getting AGA support back in the day was like pulling teeth! Nobody would do it.

[buzzybee]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Amen! Getting AGA support back in the day was like pulling teeth! Nobody would do it.

Maybe it's because I live in Germany, but the situation felt different to me. I think back in 1993 - 1995, we had many enjoyable AGA-ports and some very playable exclusives like Skeleton Crew, Banshee, Roadkill, and Seek & Destroy, to name but a few.

There has not been much AGA stuff coming along in the past years, though. It's about time that new games show what AGA really can do.

[Cris1997XX]

I really wish we'd get more CD32 games in general. I know most people prefer MOD music over redbook audio, but a CD can store a lot more data and the developer wouldn't need to release the game over multiple floppies

[albino]

I you are ino finish contact with cope com team, why not try to finish what was already started whithe battle squadron 2 OCS of course.

[Daytona675x]

@all
Thanks, guys

@AlphaAmiga
@Samurai_Crow
@buzzybee
IMO AGA's commercial life span was just too short to result in many high quality productions back then.
Also IMO, whereas some of todays coders like myself want to explicitely show off what can be pulled off of a stock A1200, back in the days the companies would likely just have put a "030 / FastRAM required" sticker on the box; the motivation was different.

@albino
The team "Torben - Daniel" has nothing to do with games planned by the team "Torben - Martin", of course.

@Cris1997XX
I prefer MOD music too, but on the CD32 it's a good idea to at least convert the tunes to CD audio to free the audio channels for sfx.
And yes, mostly due to the music the game will probably end up requiring 2-3 floppy disks.

@skyzoo73
I think Torben wants to go more into the "The Thing" direction

[Daytona675x]

Hyperborea News #3

[ Show youtube player ]

What's new?

Apart from some internal improvements and smaller addons / changes:

- fat laser shot
This is your secondary weapon. It's stronger than the spread-shot, but - guess what - doesn't spread. Also, your ship moves at half speed when this is fired. Very good to dodge dense bullet curtains.
A double-click toggles between the two weapon types. Don't worry: your gun will still continue firing when you shortly lift your thumb for this action.

- sprite priorities
In 2p mode the player / player-shot sprites' priorities are alternating each frame now (well, technically it's the hw-sprites and some colors that are toggled). So in even frames all the stuff of player 1 is drawn on top of player 2 and in odd frames player 2 and its shots occlude player 1. This effectively results in both player-ships and -shots being visible all the time.
Before this change player 1 and its shots always overpainted all the 2nd player's stuff.

- a logo screen

- main menu (not fully functional as of yet)

- oh, and I finally found a 2nd player so that I don't have to handle the handy and two joysticks all by myself

Cheers,
Daniel

[Toni Galvez]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

Hyperborea Resurrected - real bullet hell for stock A1200

Some years ago Torben B. Larsen from Cope-Com, the graphician and designer of titles like Hybris and Battle Squadron, and I decided to team up to make a new shmup.
I quickly came up with some prototype code and Torben drew quite a lot of gfx for the first level.

Unfortunately real life kicked in and so the project went into hibernation - until recently.

My nephew Tom had to do a two weeks school internship and he had asked me if he can do it at my place. Sure thing
Of course I wanted to show him how to code games for the Amiga. Hm, well, Souverän Soccer wasn't well suited for that task - much too complex and big and everything.

Eventually I decided to resurrect Torbens and mine project "Hyperborea"
The internship began end of october and some days before I had written down a new design plan for that game. I trashed everything of the old code and started from scratch. Well, not exactly. Some helper functions from Souverän Soccer were copied over, of course

When the internship ended we had an intro-screen, main menu, highscore management, a scrolling tilemap, music, explosions, players and player-weapons. And Tom knows quite a lot about sprites, blitter, registers, multiplexing and bug-hunting

Anyway, the next ~ 4 weeks I spent tweaking and adding all the missing parts. And this is the result:

A real bullet hell / danmaku style shmup for stock A1200 and compatibles.

• 304 x 256 PAL @ 50 fps (almost always )
• vertical scroller with additional horizontal scrolling (384 pixel wide levels)
• 1p and 2p simultan mode
• 100% flicker free bullets and enemies
• tons of bullets - and I mean it!
• note: current music is a placeholder from mod archive for now, te-x-mas 6 by xtd / mystic & the grid

Status: technically pretty much complete.
Torben is on board again and tomorrow I'll tell him how the new engine works and what that means for his artwork.
I think he'll be quite happy to hear that the strict color limitations of the old version are gone

The game is mostly done in C++ with maybe 10% asm.

The video shows the current test-level with some enemies and many many bullets on my A1200 with the turbocard / fastram deactivated.

[ Show youtube player ]
Like if you like

Cheers and happy xmas in advance,
Daytona675x

p.s.: yes, Souverän is being worked on too

Looking great, good work!!! Graphics are nice, action is nice, I love to see that amount of sprites and I really love you copy the japanese shooter style. There is one thing I would like you to do, to make the music on japanese games style, more melodic, less like a demo.

I love the music of Hybris and Battle Squadron as well, they are into the game and gives the sense of epic/action.

[buzzybee]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

Hyperborea News #3

- oh, and I finally found a 2nd player so that I don't have to handle the handy and two joysticks all by myself

Congrats, cause having fun is what it's all about.

This looks better than ever. I adore the bullet pattern from 3:11 onwards. This is a sight to behold, something never thought possible on an Amiga, ECS, AGA or whatever. The framerate apparently keeps a steady 50 fps. Do you think this would work on a stock A1200?

The score display temporarily seems to work as an object counter. >200, that's double the max. number compared to RP3. I would love to learn more about your game object management structure. Are you iterating through a dynamic object table? I guess there is no need to sort objects by their y-position, as I did in RP3 due to bullets being displayed by sprites.

I noticed that the bullet pattern (3:11 onwards) looks different as soon as the scrolling slows down to a halt. Is this intentional? With RP3, I added scroll speed to the y-acceleration at the bullet's spawn time to keep the pattern visuals consistent.

Anyway, cannot wait to play this.

[Daytona675x]

Before it gets burried above:
[ Show youtube player ]

@buzzybee
Thanks

The framerate apparently keeps a steady 50 fps. Do you think this would work on a stock A1200?

Of course. This was recorded on an unaccelerated Amiga 1200.

>200, that's double the max. number compared to RP3

Oh, if I'd reduce the bullet size to match the small ones in RP3 that counter should go up to more than 350 (I just tried, it's almost 450 with 4x4 bullets) in that situation and of course without any position restrictions. Maybe I'll do that in the next demo video

I noticed that the bullet pattern (3:11 onwards) looks different as soon as the scrolling slows down to a halt. Is this intentional?

That's because I threw in that test-enemy-type and its test-pattern in less than 10 minutes and forgot about the v-scrolling for that situation

I would love to learn more

As I told you, I plan to explain the technical details / tricks in the final game's manual

Anyway, cannot wait to play this.

Unfortunately you will have to Only the game's engine is nearly completed.

@Toni Galvez
Thanks
Regarding music: it's way too early to think about that. For that a level (even better: the whole game) should be almost fully designed in all other aspects so that the musician can create a perfect fit and I can exactly tell him the technical restrictions, especially regarding Chip RAM.

[TCD]

Looking forward to this The graphics really have that Battle Squadron vibe.

[Amigajay]

Looks amazing! Not my cup of tea (prefer non-bullet hell stuff) but enjoying watching the progress and how you push the Amiga!

[vulture]

450 bullets? That's astonishing!

[Tsak]

Let me also say how freaking awesome this work is! Well done Daytona675x (& team), super impressive stuff!!!!

It's probably early for this (or you might have thought about it already or plan to do it): would be nice if you animated the muzzle flashes and impact effects, including more frames. Currently and due to high rate of fire they do tend to appear static, which negates a bit the effect. Same could be done to projectiles, especially the new fat laser shot, so it doesn't appear horizontally flat-cut near the bottom (or when the player is too close to an enemy).

[redblade]

Looks amazing.

How much CPU does the music player use?

Will you have the fat purple laser on Raiden 2, which looks on to a enemy while you smash the fire button and creates a big snake as you move back to the players ship?

[str0m]

As a long term fan of CAVE bullet hell shooters, this does look amazing!