Hi all,

after about 12 years (happily) spent making games for the Commodore 64, AmigaOS 4 and other PC systems, I'm returning to the "classic" Amiga - something I've been itching to do for a long, long time. In the last 10 days or so I have created the core of a new game for standard A1200s - and that's what you can see in this video.

The game, called SPEEDGRID (working title), is going to be of the casual, score-attack type based on the catching/dodging of hexagonal cells representing various bonuses and maluses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69zl4HYAShI

Technical bits shown in the video:
* 3 parallax layers scrolling at a variable speed (up to 16 pixels/frame - such limit is not technical, but only to keep the game playable);
* 1 fixed layer for the HUD (and possibly other graphical effects);
* real transparencies (any color can be freely assigned an opacity value between 0 and 255);
* a 16 colors sprite + a 3 colors sprite.

Things I plan to add:
* occasional meteors zipping by;
* bosses to fight against when time expires;
* procedural generation of the middle layer graphics;
* some "special" music (if I manage);
* any other cool feature that will come to mind.

Note: the current tune is just a placeholder, and it's the fabulous tracker module "Cortouchka" by El Mobo (Frédéric Motte).

Last edited by saimo on 03-Jul-2018 at 11:36 AM.
Last edited by saimo on 07-Nov-2017 at 06:04 PM.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

Looks cool. So the top layer is sprites and the bottom two use the built in parallax support, right ?

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José

@Jose

Quote:

Jose wrote: @saimo Looks cool.

Thank you :)

Quote:

So the top layer is sprites and the bottom two use the built in parallax support, right ?

Nope: the sprites (0 and 1) are used for the ship and the flame.

Last edited by saimo on 07-Nov-2017 at 06:05 PM.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

Nice parallax. What screen mode is the game running in?

@Rob

320x256 PAL

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

I should have watched fullscreen. It looked like HiRes laced in window mode.

@Rob

Background is a bit trippy looking. But nice to see people come back to amiga

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@Rob @g01df1sh

The YouTube compression totally devastated the video. The original I uploaded was a lossless 2 Gb file, but the wild reencoding makes it difficult to appreciate the graphics.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

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@Jose

You don't need hardware parallax (dual playfield) to do hardware parallax Can even be more flexible than built in one. You could have 5 + 3 planes, 4 + 2 + 2 planes, 4 + 3 + 1, 4 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. All you need is screenmode with number of planes == sum of planes in all parallax layers and correctly set up palette. And you can have ~special effect colors: semi transparency, lighten/darken, color tint, etc.

Disadvantage is that horizontal shift registers are not per plane, but only per odd/even plane. So further tricks may be necessary for some planes if you scroll horizontally, too.

@saimo

That's a lot of work in ten days. Sounds amazing. When I saw the title I thought it was it a car racing game.

@Hypex

Yeah, I'm not satisfied myself with the name, but it's just temporary.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

how’s about Flight Grid AGA...at least keeping AGA in the title will stop all the ‘does it work on OCS/ ECS’ questions

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c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
mancave-ramblings
X1000 I BELIEVE

@klx300r

"Flight Grid" is not bad, but still not good enough. The "AGA" tag would start the "where's the ECS version", though (and doesn't look elegant) ;)
Thanks for the suggestion and no worries, I'll eventually come up with a suitable name!

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

Flight Commander

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c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
mancave-ramblings
X1000 I BELIEVE

@Georg
Got it, but that's not complete parallax, for example you can't have full opaque layers.

@Saimo
Call it Atomic War.
:)

Last edited by Jose on 10-Nov-2017 at 06:55 PM.

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José

@Jose

Quote:

Jose wrote: @Georg Got it, but that's not complete parallax, for example you can't have full opaque layers.

You can have any opaqueness degree you want.

Quote:

@Saimo Call it Atomic War. :)

Sorry, it is totally unrelated to the game.


@all

Although I appreciate the effort, no need to make suggestions: I'll come up with a good name (and I actually want to choose the name myself ).

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@Jose

Real dual playfield is basically just a way to save palette entries. 6 plane (3 + 3) dual playfield (or non dual playfield) normally requires 2^6=64 palette entries so the hardware knows for each possible bit combination in the planes, what entry/color from the colormap this shall result in. It's basically like a second lookup to reduce the required palette entries to 2^3+2^3=16 palette entries. This way you also don't need to use palette entries which are also used by sprites.

For some reason it seems large palette is/was costly hardware wise, otherwise things like EHB would not have made much sense either (why not a full 64 entry colormap?)

So dual playfield is a much simpler hardware feature than one might think. It's only some kind of palette ~compressor.

@saimo

It seems funny, but I guess you should add something to shoot to, or it will get boring in a very short time.

Moreover, being various is what makes a "catch or avoid" game a success. Just think about Trailblazer.

@paolone

Quote:

It seems funny, but I guess you should add something to shoot to, or it will get boring in a very short time.

Yep, that's why I wrote:

Things I plan to add:
* occasional meteors zipping by;
* bosses to fight against when time expires;

Quote:

Moreover, being various is what makes a "catch or avoid" game a success. Just think about Trailblazer.

Fully agreed.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC