New Game - looking for advice/collaborators.

[Marchie]

Hey Folks,

Looking to get a Run'n'Gun game project up and running, pics attached, video links to a mock-up I've done in DPaint:

[ Show youtube player ]



Attachment 72390 Attachment 72391

So far it's 32 colours (excepting the sky gradient), sprites are 64 & 32 pix wide. Scrolling should be 50fps but DPaint won't scroll an entire screen at 50 fps so this demo is just 25.

So far I have myself doing graphics and a friend doing coding, he's a kick-ass coder but neither of us know squat about Amiga game development, so we're looking for assistance/guidance on how to get started.

I'm the Amiga fan between us and I'm really keen to make the Amiga the lead platform, but it has to be possible to compile for other platforms as well. (I just want to draw a whole lot of animation frames and see them up on my 1084, my friend wants to make a game he can actually show to his Google colleagues )

If anyone wants to join the team that's awesome, an Amiga coder on board would be really good, PM or ping this thread if you're interested.

If anyone can offer us some advice that's awesome too - what's a good development environment to start with? Blitz/ AMOS/ Scorpion Engine?

I'm keen for it to look kick-ass on the Amiga so I'm imagining we'll need to drop in a bits of assembly but (as already mentioned) it also has to be possible to compile to other platforms.

Does anyone here have a game already in development that you could use my art for? Open to that too - let's talk.

Anyhow, hope you all like this modest first effort...

(Pardon the screen photos - I can't help myself, everything just looks better on a CRT, also I just couldn't be bothered dragging all the images back to my PC ) Title is temp too - I mean I like it but I'm pretty sure it's been used before.

[kriz]

Looks very cool!! Btw i searched for Warp gate and seems like there is a board game with that name (but written warpagate in one word) Could not find any computer game

[Samurai_Crow]

Scorpion Engine will be good if you have a Windows machine to develop on. Otherwise use RedPill engine which is written in Blitz.

http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/REDPILLGameCreator

[Mixel]

The "it has to compile to other platforms" part is where I don't know what the answer would be.. Technically I guess there are Windows AMOS and Blitz but are they even that much like the Amiga versions? (I have no idea!)

Scorpion and Redpill are Amiga-centric, I suspect you'll have to make the game multiple times for different platforms?

[jotd]

I don't recommend to try to make the game portable. It will be in spite of performance on the amiga. I wrote some blitter-powered SDL interface for the amiga, but it's far from optimal. That said it allowed to create a multi-platform game in C++ (Bagman).

Best you can do: code the game logic in C or C++, then do the low level in a specific way. Don't even write the object placement as generic, as it is not. Just compute positions in a generic way, then use a specific "update screen" method. Convert the assets specifically for each platform too.

Good mockup! all those parallax layers! and the graphics are great.

[Samurai_Crow]

Re:Windows Amos

It runs in the browser so it isn't Windows specific. It has several features that AmosPro on Amiga doesn't have. DarkBasic went open source when Visual C++ 6 was discontinued but was very Windows-specific

Re:Portability

If you build the levels using Tiled, Scorpion can help you make the rest of the game. You'll still have to translate the scripting and engine features to the other platforms if you choose this route.

Re:Amiga chipset

Amiga chipset came out 9 years before modern 3D acceleration was invented. They are utterly incompatible.

[RoniWorlds]

Visually it looks cool. the color palette is used to make the GamePlay fluid. And on what configuration we will fire it.

[Marchie]

Originally Posted by jotd

I don't recommend to try to make the game portable. It will be in spite of performance on the amiga. I wrote some blitter-powered SDL interface for the amiga, but it's far from optimal. That said it allowed to create a multi-platform game in C++ (Bagman).

Best you can do: code the game logic in C or C++, then do the low level in a specific way. Don't even write the object placement as generic, as it is not. Just compute positions in a generic way, then use a specific "update screen" method. Convert the assets specifically for each platform too.

Good mockup! all those parallax layers! and the graphics are great.

Glad you like the mock-up. It was quite a lot of work!

Yeah I was imagining we might code the logic and stuff in C and then do the Amiga stuff seperate (I don't pretend ot understand all that's involved in that - learning as I go). Hence I'm hoping to get some Amiga-guru level advice.

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Re:Windows Amos

It runs in the browser so it isn't Windows specific. It has several features that AmosPro on Amiga doesn't have. DarkBasic went open source when Visual C++ 6 was discontinued but was very Windows-specific

Re:Portability

If you build the levels using Tiled, Scorpion can help you make the rest of the game. You'll still have to translate the scripting and engine features to the other platforms if you choose this route.

Re:Amiga chipset

Amiga chipset came out 9 years before modern 3D acceleration was invented. They are utterly incompatible.

Thanks for the info Samurai_Crow, my coding friend is leaning towards AMOS so that's encouraging to hear.

Yeah I know the Amiga hardware is completely different to PC, my thinking is that I would love to make something that will really push the AGA hardware, but as far as then running in on a modern PC it's a mostly non-issue since pushing a couple of dozen sprites around is nothing for Ghz+ machine so inefficient code (or even an in-browser emulation layer) will still run the game fine.

Originally Posted by RoniWorlds

Visually it looks cool. the color palette is used to make the GamePlay fluid. And on what configuration we will fire it.

I've always thought of it as A1200 with fast RAM, since I really want to cram in animation frames and parallax (and that's a config that offers so much yet I don't think ever really got exploited), but if it can be made to run on a lower spec that's desirable.

It's a shame 2D games don't scale like 3D ones. It would be sweet if the game could just drop parallax and colours on the A500 and add them back in if it detects it's running on an A1200...

Originally Posted by kriz

Looks very cool!! Btw i searched for Warp gate and seems like there is a board game with that name (but written warpagate in one word) Could not find any computer game

I think there's an obscure portable game if you search hard enough, that may not be a show-stopper though.

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Scorpion Engine will be good if you have a Windows machine to develop on. Otherwise use RedPill engine which is written in Blitz.

We'll almost certainly do the development on PC, so I'll check-out Scorpion engine.

http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/REDPILLGameCreator

Originally Posted by Mixel

The "it has to compile to other platforms" part is where I don't know what the answer would be.. Technically I guess there are Windows AMOS and Blitz but are they even that much like the Amiga versions? (I have no idea!)

Scorpion and Redpill are Amiga-centric, I suspect you'll have to make the game multiple times for different platforms?

Yeah that's going to be the challenge, one we have to solve though. I'm not really interested in putting the effort in if it's not on Amiga at all, and my friend's not really interested if it's Amiga-only.

Is it a feasible idea to just make it for Amiga and then distribute on PC simply using an emulation layer? Has anyone done this?

BTW - when I say 'other platforms' I just mean PC/web. Not planning Amstrad/SNES/Spectrum ports or anything like that!

[Samurai_Crow]

I lean away from Amos on Amiga just because the compiler generates pretty awful code. Blitz is better but none compare to Bebbo's GCC 6.5 cross-compiler. That's what most of Metro Siege is being developed in.

[Marchie]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

I lean away from Amos on Amiga just because the compiler generates pretty awful code. Blitz is better but none compare to Bebbo's GCC 6.5 cross-compiler. That's what most of Metro Siege is being developed in.

Metro Seige looks seriously impressive and is kind of my gold-standard, if we achieve half of that I'll be thrilled. Simply amazing work.

You guys are kind of doing exactly what we're trying to do no? Developing the project on Amiga but then releasing on other platforms too? (If I was listening correctly to your Retro Hour Interview?)

Tell me more about Bebbo's GCC?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Marchie

Metro Seige looks seriously impressive and is kind of my gold-standard, if we achieve half of that I'll be thrilled. Simply amazing work.



You guys are kind of doing exactly what we're trying to do no? Developing the project on Amiga but then releasing on other platforms too? (If I was listening correctly to your Retro Hour Interview?)



Tell me more about Bebbo's GCC?

The main artist on Metro Siege is @Michael Parent and I started out helping him but I couldn't bang the Amiga hardware intelligently enough. @alpine9000 is the lead developer of Metro Siege. I'm not helping with any of Mike Parent's projects right now. I'm ok with that.

https://github.com/bebbo/amiga-gcc is where you download the source code to Bebbo's GCC cross compiler for the C programming language. It generates the cleanest code for Amiga I know. If you want a more hardware-banging environment for C programming with WinUAE integration, check out Bartman's GCC 10 environment instead. It's on the Visual Studio marketplace.

[RoniWorlds]

So A1200 8mb fast should be enough or some stronger 030/040 proc?

[buzzybee]

Nice project, with some promising visuals. I'd be interested to have a look at the art you already created - if there is more than what you are showing in this thread. Maybe we could build something based upon my Reshoot Amiga-custom-engine.

[d4rk3lf]

Wow.
Love the graphics!
Hope you will find some expirienced coder to help you.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by RoniWorlds

So A1200 8mb fast should be enough or some stronger 030/040 proc?

A1200 with fast RAM should be plenty fast with GCC.

[fxgogo]

Originally Posted by Marchie

Yeah that's going to be the challenge, one we have to solve though. I'm not really interested in putting the effort in if it's not on Amiga at all, and my friend's not really interested if it's Amiga-only.

What type of coding framework is your friend most happy with? Are you looking at a game engine type thing like Game Maker on the PC and Amos/Blitz on the Amiga? Or are they comfortable with low level coding in C or assembler?

I presume you both will be doing game design, but are you going to be doing any of the coding or just the art/animation? I would suggest the coder chooses the primary platform for development as they will be doing the work of getting the game working on all platforms. The art and animation can be done on the Amiga not matter what the dev platforms are.

[Marchie]

Originally Posted by RoniWorlds

So A1200 8mb fast should be enough or some stronger 030/040 proc?

I think A1200 with 2meg fast will be heaps of speed and space.

Originally Posted by buzzybee

Nice project, with some promising visuals. I'd be interested to have a look at the art you already created - if there is more than what you are showing in this thread. Maybe we could build something based upon my Reshoot Amiga-custom-engine.

Yeah that sounds like a terrifiic idea. I'd love to explore it. Most of what I've done so far is in the mock-up, although I also have some unused cycles for the main sprite:
* Run cycle
* Split legs/arms to do a shoot-while-walking/running (all the sprites are on layers anyway).

I want to make the explosions a lot bigger too, shrapnel flying across the screen like when you nuke all Lemmings.

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Wow.
Love the graphics!
Hope you will find some expirienced coder to help you.

Thanks, me too!

Originally Posted by fxgogo

What type of coding framework is your friend most happy with? Are you looking at a game engine type thing like Game Maker on the PC and Amos/Blitz on the Amiga? Or are they comfortable with low level coding in C or assembler?

I presume you both will be doing game design, but are you going to be doing any of the coding or just the art/animation? I would suggest the coder chooses the primary platform for development as they will be doing the work of getting the game working on all platforms. The art and animation can be done on the Amiga not matter what the dev platforms are.

I won't be coding. Yes, I think you're right about the coder choosing the platform, but my motivation for the project is seeing it on Amiga, so it's in my interest to research as many good options as possible for Amiga a cross-platform development for the coder to choose from.

Worst case we write in C, compile it for 68k such that only a Vampire/060 can brute-force it all through CPU to run properly, but I'm hoping we can do better than that (as mentioned above, hopefully A1200 with fast).

[buzzybee]

Originally Posted by Marchie

Yeah that sounds like a terrifiic idea. I'd love to explore it. Most of what I've done so far is in the mock-up, although I also have some unused cycles for the main sprite:
* Run cycle
* Split legs/arms to do a shoot-while-walking/running (all the sprites are on layers anyway).

I want to make the explosions a lot bigger too, shrapnel flying across the screen like when you nuke all Lemmings.

Worst case we write in C, compile it for 68k such that only a Vampire/060 can brute-force it all through CPU to run properly, but I'm hoping we can do better than that (as mentioned above, hopefully A1200 with fast).

So far so good. Prior to any further thoughts - you need to be perfectly aware that what you got here, is merely a very rough vision and a few pixels. Nice to look at, but that's about it. This is not a project, and not a gamedesign. Yet.

Designing a new game from scratch, without any assets you could steal or borrow from other sources, is a time-consuming process. Reshoot R took about three years to create, Proxima 3 about the same when it's finished. So there is a long way to go. Very long. I just want to be perfectly clear about that.

If I were you, before I continue working on the pixels: I'd first sit down and write down five reasons, why you want to create your game. Consider your own needs, but also the communities needs. What is special, what shall be the reason that people would want to play it - what is stimulating and unique about it. You then should have defined the games "pillars".

Reshoot-engine could handle such a game on a basic AGA-Amiga, with no Fast-RAM needed. CD32 would be sufficient. The engine is very customized to the Amigas hardware. Porting to other platforms basically means you may be able to modify the original visual and audio assets, tilemaps and basically the gamedesign for re-using. But you will have to re-write large portions of the code, as sufficient speed is only to be gained with Assembler and C-languages.

[Marchie]

Originally Posted by buzzybee

So far so good. Prior to any further thoughts - you need to be perfectly aware that what you got here, is merely a very rough vision and a few pixels. Nice to look at, but that's about it. This is not a project, and not a gamedesign. Yet.

Designing a new game from scratch, without any assets you could steal or borrow from other sources, is a time-consuming process. Reshoot R took about three years to create, Proxima 3 about the same when it's finished. So there is a long way to go. Very long. I just want to be perfectly clear about that.

If I were you, before I continue working on the pixels: I'd first sit down and write down five reasons, why you want to create your game. Consider your own needs, but also the communities needs. What is special, what shall be the reason that people would want to play it - what is stimulating and unique about it. You then should have defined the games "pillars".

Reshoot-engine could handle such a game on a basic AGA-Amiga, with no Fast-RAM needed. CD32 would be sufficient. The engine is very customized to the Amigas hardware. Porting to other platforms basically means you may be able to modify the original visual and audio assets, tilemaps and basically the gamedesign for re-using. But you will have to re-write large portions of the code, as sufficient speed is only to be gained with Assembler and C-languages.

That's all wise advice, appreciated. And you're right, an animation is not at all a game! We are currently playing through our fave platformers and discussing what, to us, makes a fun game.

Whilst I'm interested in the gameplay I'm flexible on it, my non-negotiable is loads of fun animation on Amiga, I'm willing to concede control of most of the rest to the person/s actually doing the coding (and I appreciate it is a truck-load of coding work!).

Being aware it will be a multi-year project we had in mind to perhaps release the game one level at a time. Sort of release a new level pack every twelve months, then combine the whole at the end. I figure most adults are like me and struggle to find time to play through a whole game in one go, so getting short episodes one at a time might work well. (And like I said - we still package the whole game together at the end).

Does your engine do 8-directional scrolling or just left-to-right? Is it tile-based? (is that an obvious question??) I love the idea of building on top of the hard work that has already been done.

[Samurai_Crow]

Here's a clip of Reshoot Proxima 3 AGA: [ Show youtube player ]