Amigo the Fox (Scorpion Engine sample game)

[jotd]

hardware sprites save a lot of blitting so it's worth. But my (failed) experience shows that you can't easily use them for enemies like you can for blitter objects. You can't blit a sprite, you have to duplicate the memory of each instance because the size is followed by the bitmap data, which (probably) explains that most games use sprites only when they can multiplex them (backgrounds, bullets) or for the main character (using 2 or 4 sprites to use 15 colors and big widths)

(also a lot of games were crap ports from the ST that explains the other half )

If I was to create a game engine, I'd limit the sprite usage to those above.

[earok]

Yeah... there's advantages and disadvantages with sprites. No blitter time (though some DMA time of course) and no need to 'redraw' the underlying tiles is a nice advantage, but the limited number, palette restrictions and inability to easily draw them underneath a bob or foreground tile is another thing.

I think, I need the ability to be able to 'tag' which animation frames should be rendered with sprites instead of bobs. At the very least, that would save me blitting (and redrawing the tiles for) between 1 and 8 bobs, maybe more with clever multiplexing.

It'd be so much easier if I just dropped OCS support and went full blown AGA 16 colors for sprites anywhere in the 256 color palette range, separate palettes for even and odd sprites, and 64 pixel wide sprites.

[earok]

I feel so dumb..

I implemented the plant monsters in such a way that the full plant monster is rendered every frame, even when going up and down the pipe, because the pipe is blitted as a foreground tile over top of the plant monster.

This meant that, whenever the plant monster was moving up and down
- The monster would have to be blitted at full 32x16 pixels
- Four background tiles would need to be redrawn (fast unmasked blit)
- Up to to two foreground tiles would need to be redrawn when moving up and down (slow masked blit)


Although Scorpion doesn't (yet) natively support any kind of "cropping" method that would allow me to hide the bottom of the plant inside the pipe, there was no reason why I couldn't simply implement an up/down animation that scales from 1 pixel high to 16 pixels high. Which means that, other than the monster, I never have to redraw two background tiles to render it, and no foreground tiles at all. So I've done that, and it was (from a coding point of view) a much simpler solution. Doh.

[Dan]

Nice debugging @earok !

[earok]

First alpha release of Amigo (six levels) is in the zone.

I'll take a breather for a couple of days, before I collate any feedback and release an update to the Scorpion Editor that includes all source assets for the game.

(Edit: Whoops. Missed a bug, will reupload soon)

(Edit 2: Done, reuploaded)

(Edit 3: Crap, removed again)

(Edit 4: OK NOW should be good. Bad versions either had a purple outline or started on the wrong level (the one with the smiling cactus things). Going to bed, will do a new upload in the morning if there's any obvious breaking issues)

[zzbylu]

and small gameplay :-)
[ Show youtube player ]

[earok]

Cheerss zzbylu

Alpha V2 is out and in the zone. Jump controls have been much improved, there's also a handful of minor tweaks such as this 'idle pose'




I should have posted a list of acknowledgements and sources. This is what went into the game:

Music: JMD
Original project: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/mario/source.html
Fox sprite sheet: https://opengameart.org/content/harv...haracter-sheet
Tileset 1: https://opengameart.org/content/kenney-16x16
Tileset 2: https://opengameart.org/content/supe...-land-tilesets
SFX: https://jdwasabi.itch.io/8-bit-16-bi...d-effects-pack

[nikosidis]

Yes, much better Now it is enjoyable to play. I would put less time on when cactus go down. Boring to wait

[zzbylu]

alpha v2 - gameplay:
[ Show youtube player ]

[Predseda]

Just played it. Works ok on 030/50MHz.

[BippyM]

do you want this thread renaming?

[earok]

Cheers all!

@nikosidis That's fair. I'll do some tweaks to monster speeds/timings as part of the V1.0/source project release.

On that topic, anyone - let me know if there's other tweaks you'd recommend. I'm not going to spend too much more time on it before the release of the project assets, but I could do a little more.


@zzbylu Most of the way there! I think you reached level 4/6

@predseda great! I'd be embarrassed if it didn't run well on a beast of an Amiga like that

@BippyM Yes please. Is "Amigo the Fox (Scorpion Engine sample game)" OK?

[lilalurl]

Title changed

[gimbal]

Thank god for platformers without inertia Looks absolutely great. That opengameart site looks fantastic too.

[Gzegzolka]

Yes, looks and plays great I wish there would be some way to have that animated grass from original source and maybe add some colorful gradient in background.

[nobody]

Runs mostly 50fps (smooth as butter with vsync 50hz on my monitor) on WinUAE, 68000 at 4x a500 speed, 1mb chip/8mb fast, KS 3.1 (tried to match my A500+ with ACA500+). But if you run at A500 1x speed, 1.3, 512+512k will have slowdowns when 3-4 enemies move.

[earok]

Working on the next update to the game in tandem with the next update to Scorpion Engine.

[Gzegzolka]

Very cool

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by earok

Working on the next update to the game in tandem with the next update to Scorpion Engine.

Wow, that's definitely improved a lot since the original release

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Wow, that's definitely improved a lot since the original release

Yep, that looks so crazy good...