Hyperborea Resurrected - real AGA bullet hell danmaku WIP

[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

[utri007]

Looks nice!

[Megalomaniac]

Looks awesome. If the level design, difficulty curve, extras, collision detection and variety can match the game engine and basic visuals (I'm not asking for much, am I?), we'll be in for a treat. Can't wait to play the result.

[lionagony]

Amazing, it's ironic that we were just having a discussion about the most objects on screen in an Amiga game in another thread and now I see the bullet counter hit the 170's around the 1:00 minute mark here. This might take the crown. It looks awesome, with Reshoot R, Reshoot Proxima 3, Inviyya, Boss Machine and now this we are in shmup heaven these days, can't wait.

[sokolovic]

What a gigantic new !!!

[ransom1122]

WoW thats impressive

[redblade]

Amazing, if the source code and gfx of that was slapped on a Amiga magazine in December 1992...

[Predseda]

AmigaBill will be blown off, he LOVES this type of games!

[Gzegzolka]

Technically that looks gorgeous I hope that one day we could play it.

[aros-sg]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

tons of bullets - and I mean it!

Is collision detection for all the bullets active/executed (and just "ignored" for some) in the video?

How much frame time does it take?

Is it using the point vs rectangle (insead of rectangle vs rectangle) trick?
(google: "contra collision detection")

[carrion]

Looks super good!
I'm a huge fan of bullethell shmups. Can't wait to play it.

[Daytona675x]

@all
Thanks guys.

@aros-sg
For the video I activated invincible mode for the players. Simply because it was hard enough to hold the mobile phone in one hand and to somehow move the ship around with the Competition in the other
The collision detection is almost a NOP, it takes no measurable frame time at all.
As with all decent Danmaku games (which happens to be pretty much the only type of game I play regularly), only a tiny dot in your ship's center is vulnerable. It's just a matter of detecting a pixel change at that point after drawing certain types of objects, that's it

[dreadnought]

It's amazing that old pros are still coming back to Amiga

The art & motion look fabulous - kinda makes me wish it wasn't a danmaku, since these games are just too much for my old, frazzled brain (even with tiny hitbox). Still, looks like it will be a blast, even if I only last half a level.

[DanyPPC]

WoW !

A new AGA shoot'em up

Looks promising !

[jotd]

great! I don't know how you manage so many objects on screen on bare A1200. When I ported Xevious it started crawling at 64 relatively small objects, using dual playfield (so only 4 bitplanes) and FMODE=3...

[kriz]

Amazing !!

[Tigerskunk]

Amazing effort, Daniel....

[4pLaY]

Looks sweet.

[Lord Aga]

Great stuff

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

• note: current music is a placeholder from mod archive for now

The music was one of the hilights in Hybris and Battle Squadron for me. Brilliant and inspiring for me at that time!