I'm posting this in several forums to reach the largest audience. I've been developing this idea for a while, and I think it's something we really need for the Amiga community. My idea is for a new Amiga games company/developer/producer/publisher made up of anyone who wants to join. At first it will most likely be non-profit, but there's always the potential to earn money down the track if we manage to put out some good games.

I'll call it a team rather than a company from now on. So the team will be run through a website and forum where Amiga games coders, artists, musicians, playtesters and anyone else interested in developing games can come to discuss the games they're working on and help each other out. There are plenty of Amiga users out there with talents in a certain field but who don't know how or where to apply their skills. There's no use being an artist if you can't think of anything to draw, or a good coder whose game may go unrecognised because they couldn't find someone to draw some good graphics for his game. And I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who may not have the time or skills to make games at all, but who have lots of ideas for cool new games or just like to play and test them out.

The forum would be a part of the site itself, and themed the same way. It wouldn't be a part of AmigaWorld or any other Amiga forum. I think it's best this way because it allows the group to be a little bit more private, but isn't biased towards or against any Amiga sites (because there are too many wars and rivalries going on in the Amiga community now). The forum will be private, so people can only read it if they've signed up, but anyone who is genuinely interested in helping out is welcome to join. The main site will have a main page with news and updates on upcoming games, as well as separate pages for each game in progress, complete with screenshots, demos and any other downloads we want to share. As well as a page for each game, we could have a profile page for each member of the team, listing their skills, talents, and other portfolio information for any team member wanting to advertise themselves. And also we would have a guest book, for people to comment on the games or whatever.

Underground Arcade is the name we've chosen. We'll have our own logo and intro screens, as well as a set of standards that games must require to be published under the Underground Arcade label. It's just a way of keeping some quality control in the games, and making sure nothing is released until it's finished and nicely polished. Hopefully with all the help from a large, international team of Amiga enthusiasts, the developers of the game will have the backup and support to push them forward and finish their games properly, rather than releasing them half-finished. We will need lots of playtesters to sign up!

If anyone out there has a game they're already developing, we're very interested in bringing you onboard. I myself have been trying to help out with a few games for a few different people, and find it sometimes hard to come up with new ideas (I've been pixelling graphics, but can't always come up with ideas for characters to draw) and can't draw fast enough to keep up with the demand, and I know other people are trying to get their games made but really just need a bit more help and support before they can go any further with their games. The more people we have onboard, the faster we can get these games out there.

Ultimately we would be releasing full commercial quality games with an assortment of payment and delivery options, including printed, boxed games with extras as well as immediate downloads. We'll have PayPal payment options as well, and people can donate towards games in development if they want to encourage us to finish them (we could even offer discounts to people who prepaid or donated towards games). We would also offer freeware games as well.

Here is an idea of the kind of people we need to join the team:
Coders (Any language, as long as you can make an Amiga game with it)
Pixel Artists (For sprites, blocks and anything else in pixels)
3D Artists (Game intros, rendered graphics, or 3D polygonal games)
Real Artists (Box artwork, backgrounds, character designs)
Mod Musicians (For most ingame music)
Other Musicians (For CD32 versions of the games)
Dreamers (For some good ideas of what to put in a game)
Gamers (To test our games and tell us how crap they are)
Designers (If anyone can help out with designing a website, for example)
Wealthy Investors (Why not?)
Amiga Games That Weren't (And someone to finish them so we can release them)

We hope to have our first game demo available by the end of this month. It will be a simple, freeware platform game, and a Halloween present to the Amiga community.

@Rebel-CD32

great idea!

I will be ready to do the DTP for the packages/documentations

_________________
Amigalement,
Jean-François "voxel" Bachelet, Amiga NUTS since 1985.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to Happy Computing : Amiga! (© 2

@voxel

Good move. Nicely planned.

_________________
Quote:

Easy Pocket Money, Freelancers & Experts Online

MiniMig FPGA, Sam440 Flex 733Mhz PPC, Amiga OS 4.1 Update 2, MorphOS 2.4, Other - AmiKit + Cloanto Amiga Forever 2008 + E-UAE, AmigaSYS

@Rebel-CD32
Sounds like a great idea! But what kind of amiga will you be targetting? A standard a1200 or a system maxed out with accelerators and similar? I would definitely pay for new releases providing that it runs on my a1200 with 68020 accelerator and 4 fast meg.

@Rebel-CD32

Sounds like a great idea to me. I am more than willing to write music for games people may be working on.

_________________
Questions are a burden to others.
Answers are a prison for oneself.

Two A2000's with no working harddrives.
One Efika with MorphOS 2.2
One HP Netbook running Amikit.

We'll definitely need some design and music guys onboard. Our first game is codenamed "Halloween Nightmare", which is a cutesy platform game like Wonderboy or Brian the Lion (but much less impressive), and it's based around a Halloween theme.

The premise goes something like this:

A young girl wants to go Trick or Treating, but evil forces have awoken and are filling the town with nasty ghouls. And what's worse is an evil witch has used a magic spell on all the other kids in town to make them bring all the candy to her. Using a variety of weapons and costumes, you must make your way through various monsters, helping kids and collecting candy along the way until you reach the big baddie at the end.

The story hasn't been written yet, so we'll clear it up a bit. What we really need for the game right now is some music, some sound effects, and some title screens and intro animations. Here are a couple of early screenshots from the game to give you an idea of what the game looks:



We also need playtesters, so if anyone can help us out, we'd really appreciate it, because we'd love to get a demo out by October 31st (Halloween). This game will run on any Amiga with a Hard Drive, but extra RAM and a faster CPU will help since the game is made in Backbone.

Sorry, I forgot to mention that we aim to release games that will work for as many Amiga users as possible. Whenever we can, we will provide A500 versions, A1200, CD32, and expanded versions if we can.

Last edited by Rebel-CD32 on 17-Oct-2007 at 02:01 AM.
Last edited by Rebel-CD32 on 17-Oct-2007 at 01:58 AM.

@Rebel-CD32

Is the website created yet?

_________________
Questions are a burden to others.
Answers are a prison for oneself.

Two A2000's with no working harddrives.
One Efika with MorphOS 2.2
One HP Netbook running Amikit.

Keep it simple and you might be on a winner here.

Make your games, if possible, exactly like they used to be. OCS, ECS, AGA and now Minimig compatible. Obviously Minimig is OCS but you can target the MM user and be the first to do it [think marketing!].

I don't use an Amiga anymore, at least not unless it's emulated, just wish I had the time to commit.

Good idea, go for it.

The website isn't made yet, but we've started to put together a forum and a MySpace page for it (I can't stand MySpace, but it is a good way to get the word out).

If anyone wants to join or check them out, here are the URLs. Remember, we only just started them so the layout and content will be fixed as time goes on.

The forum - http://amigaarcade.proboards54.com/index.cgi

The MySpace page - http://www.myspace.com/undergroundarcade

As for the games themselves, if we can get some more coders onboard, I'd definitely love to make sure as many games as possible are compatible with the MiniMig, as well as other Amigas. Wherever possible, there will be an AGA version and an OCS version. Sometimes RTG if someone wants to try and code that nightmare. The games we love most are the oldschool kind, and the idea of Underground Arcade is to bring out games that look and play like they were ported from an arcade machine or console.

I was actually thinking about the whole MiniMig thing lately and if there ever happens to be a fully pre-built system sold, I'd love to include some original games with it as a package deal just like in the old days.

@Rebel-CD32

Nice initiative, and the "Halloween Nightmare" shots look great! :)


Just a comment on your list of people you search for.

Think about replacing the cathegory "Dreamers" with these two:

Game designers (game concept, gameflow, texts)
Level designers (level creation, possibly also scripting of level events)

Should you be short of people, one talented guy can cover both the professions.


Dreamers often don't have an idea what can be done to meet the hardware or development time limits! ;)

@kvinkunx

Actually you're quite right about the dreamers, they might not have a firm concept of the system's capabilities, but they can come up with some good ideas from time to time.

If anyone CAN design levels and games, then of course they're more valuable, especially if they're hard workers.

@Rebel-CD32

Looks really good.

It's a nice idea for a game.

_________________
Sam

@Rebel-CD32

I will sign up for the forum today. I'm also going to install Backbone this evening. I assume 2.10 is the most recent version.

_________________
Questions are a burden to others.
Answers are a prison for oneself.

Two A2000's with no working harddrives.
One Efika with MorphOS 2.2
One HP Netbook running Amikit.

@Rebel-CD32

I usually have big doubts when it comes to all these "let's start game company" -type ideas, and with reason.

But I must say that those screenshots don't look bad at all, better than many commercial classic amiga games. Good luck with future developments!

Also it feels like you're targeting exclusively(?) classic amigas. Ever thought of widening the target audience to OS4, MorphOS, AROS or even beyond?

Sure, classic amigas have, let's say "less-than-good" SDL support, especially without graphics cards. But I guess it would be possible to do some kind of "middle layer" in C that would redirect graphics, input, sound etc. to either classic hardware or SDL.

@Rebel-CD32

Good idea, but you must target OS4 too otherwise we won't see original any Amiga OS4 games happening.

I am definately a dreamer and a gamer!

and possibly a real artist:

http://www.loriano.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

_________________
www.loriano.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

@TheDaddy

I like the case design. Did you ever build one?

_________________
Questions are a burden to others.
Answers are a prison for oneself.

Two A2000's with no working harddrives.
One Efika with MorphOS 2.2
One HP Netbook running Amikit.

@Beamish2040

No, never built one.

_________________
www.loriano.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

To be honest, we can really only develop games for the systems we own, and between the people who are already involved we only have classic Amigas, a Blitz Basic programmer and a couple of slow pixel artists. If anyone has the skills to make OS4 games, we'd love to have them onboard and will fully support them, but for now we're going to try pumping out some decent games for classic systems and hope that someone can help port them to PPC/OS4/AROS or whatever else.

@Rebel-CD32

Sounds like a great idea, and its great that the games will run on standard Amiga 500/600 computers too.

What would be really really cool though (and the icing on the cake in my mind) is if the games could be distributed on floppy disk, proper Amiga style.
I understand that downloads may be cheaper, and obviously CD versions will be created for CD-32, but do you have any plans to release games on 3.5" disk?

Best of luck!

_________________
Founder of NWAG - North West Amiga Group

Night Operations

A1200 020/28MHz + 64Mb / 4Gb CF / OS 3.1.4.1 / 1438S
A500+ / 2Mb
A600

@Earthling

Maybe the games could be distributed as ADF files along with an image file for the disk label?

_________________
Questions are a burden to others.
Answers are a prison for oneself.

Two A2000's with no working harddrives.
One Efika with MorphOS 2.2
One HP Netbook running Amikit.