If you were a fan of Oil's Well on your C64 you're going to love playing Gemdalus on your 68k Amiga coming soon from RETREAM

Here's a screen pic from Level 1 and a cool initial game play preview from Amiga Bill's Twitch channelstarting at 1:05

Last edited by klx300r on 25-May-2025 at 04:08 PM.
Last edited by klx300r on 12-May-2025 at 09:18 PM.

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@klx300r

Thanks for letting the Amiga folks know.


@all

Short gameplay preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVycPY78rqE

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

Some gameplay snippets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz6nm0MxYT8
And also a look at one of the thousand old versions of the menu screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTK5vRsItmc

Last edited by saimo on 22-May-2025 at 04:55 PM.
Last edited by saimo on 22-May-2025 at 04:52 PM.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

The game is out: https://retream.itch.io/gemdalus
Enjoy!

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

l
@saimo

Simone thanks yet again for an original top quality game for our AMIGA'S both 68k and PPC !!!

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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

Heartfelt thanks to you for your continued support!

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

Thanks for all the top quality games and apps you've produced over the years for us Amiga users both 68k & PPC it's truly appreciated

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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

@saimo

I'm looking for a suitable game for hiscore hunting at events. This looks potential and would be fresh, but I'm wondering how long a session in this game takes?

If casual visitors pop up and want to participate what could be expected gameplay length when they don't know the game that well? Or how long a game can take when you get good at it?

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- The wiki based MorphOS Library - Your starting point for MorphOS
- Software made by jPV^RNO

@jPV

Thanks for your interest and the idea!
The duration of a game depends exclusively on the skills of the player and on how much they have been exposed to it (even by just looking at others play). It's hard to make estimates. I'd say that a completely inexperienced player who has average gaming skills should complete at least 2 or 3 levels, for some 15-20 minutes of play. When you get good at it (i.e. besides being able to control the harvester properly you also know all the mechanics and have developed the right strategies), the levels could become 20+ and a game could last 1 hour or more.

Last edited by saimo on 26-May-2025 at 04:13 PM.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

Thank you for your estimates. I asked before trying myself, because we have a tradition to participate to a public gaming (LAN) event each year and arrange an Amiga stand and competitions for three days there. This year's event starts next week, so I don't have that much time to test new games thoroughly if they're suitable for a competition.

Based on your estimates I'm not sure if the game would be suitable... I guess it would be quite fine for daily visitors who'd be there just for a shorter time, but then for gamers that will be playing the whole three days, it might get a bit too long per try. Maybe I'll just buy the game and see if I have enough time to test it myself, unless you have anything against for this kind of use :) In any case we're looking for new games to our selection, and always open for good suggestions. And we also have shorter one-day events coming too, where people don't have that much time to learn a game.

In general, I'd hope more games that are suitable for this kind of action :)

Quickly thinking the requirements would be something like this:
- Easy to "jump in" without too complicated controls and learning
- Limited gameplay time (max 1h or so to complete the game, shorter the better)
- Progressive difficulty curve (easy to start, but limit the length by raising the difficulty, and to avoid it getting repetitive and boring at a hectic event)
- Player's end score should be left visible until player decides to restart (very important!)
- No score "milking" (no endless enemies that you can kill for points etc.)
- No chance for a draw (decision or time based elements too)

Now that I think about it, why couldn't games have a "compo mode" which would contain only selected amount of levels or something like that? But then a longer (normal) game for those who want to spend more time on it.

BTW. Volfied was a hit last year. It's difficult enough, but still addictive even for less skilled players.

Aaand multiplayer games for competitions would be cool too :) A bit different requirements for it, but basically more the players the better and a clear statistics who wins. Either head-to-head matches (like in Stunt Car Racer) or all simultaneously (Super Skidmarks).

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- The wiki based MorphOS Library - Your starting point for MorphOS
- Software made by jPV^RNO

@jPV

Quote:

Maybe I'll just buy the game and see if I have enough time to test it myself, unless you have anything against for this kind of use :)

I'm fine with compo use at parties (as long as the game doesn't get copied, of course).

Quote:

Quickly thinking the requirements would be something like this: - Easy to "jump in" without too complicated controls and learning - Limited gameplay time (max 1h or so to complete the game, shorter the better) - Progressive difficulty curve (easy to start, but limit the length by raising the difficulty, and to avoid it getting repetitive and boring at a hectic event) - Player's end score should be left visible until player decides to restart (very important!) - No score "milking" (no endless enemies that you can kill for points etc.) - No chance for a draw (decision or time based elements too)

Gemdalus ticks all the boxes except for the second one, as it's virtually infinite. Oh, well, in theory draws are possible, but in practice it's extremely unlikely that two players end with the same score (and at the same level).

Quote:

Aaand multiplayer games for competitions would be cool too :) A bit different requirements for it, but basically more the players the better and a clear statistics who wins. Either head-to-head matches (like in Stunt Car Racer) or all simultaneously (Super Skidmarks).

I have another game (ArtPazz) that ticks these boxes, but not everybody might find it appealing.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

Quote:

klx300r wrote: If you were a fan of Oil's Well on your C64 you're going to love playing Gemdalus on your 68k Amiga

I played it initially on Atari 800 XL but still play it even today.

I immediately got it on itch.io because there's only very few remakes of this.

Hopefully it'll work under WinUAE without issues.

Is there a longplay vid somewhere ?

@Heimdall

Quote:

I immediately got it on itch.io because there's only very few remakes of this.

Thank you!

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Hopefully it'll work under WinUAE without issues.

The game has been thoroughly tested to work perfectly on real hardware. If it doesn't work on WinUAE, then chances are that it's a WinUAE problem.
That said, the game has been mostly developed on WinUAE 5.3.0
I also tried it on the latest beta of WinUAE 6.0.0, a little graphical glitch showed in the menu screen and also once the audio channels synchronization during the game was broken. I guess those were due to the chipset emulation, which has been rewritten from scratch.

Quote:

Is there a longplay vid somewhere ?

Not from me. There are other videos on YouTube, but none shows how to play the game correctly - edit: and actually neither my video does! I didn't want to spoil the fun of discovering the best strategies and also wanted to show what happens when one makes mistakes.

Last edited by saimo on 29-May-2025 at 06:03 PM.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

Somebody in a forum and others privately expressed their appreciation of the game music. I thought that the technical details might be interesting to everybody, so...

Right from the start, I wanted:
* the game to run on stock machines;
* the game to run at 50 fps;
* music and sound effects to play at the same time, without music instruments being cancelled by sound effects;
* the music to change dynamically depending on the game situation;
* the game to fit on a single floppy disk;
* to have everything load at boot and thus avoid loading while playing.

The unusual route I took was the easiest on the hardware: pre-recording the music as various sound samples to play on 2 of the 4 Paula channels, thus leaving 2 channels free for the sound effects.
This allowed the music to be made of virtually infinite channels. Therefore, I went for 8 channels: 2 for drums (I could have used more to be honest, but, really, it would have hardly made much difference), 1 for bass, 1 for strings and 4 for the melody synth (given that the instrument echoes, it needed space). Of course, more notes and more instruments could have been added, but that would have made the music too intrusive, whereas I wanted it to be just a background accompaniment.

Here is the "normal" music (i.e. the music that plays when no bonuses or maluses are active): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNRSgg_GnWI.

The downside of this choice is that the samples take a lot of space - especially considering that I went for a rather high quality: 28604 Hz. As a consequence, the music is mono (this halves the amount of data) and shortish (each tune lasts only a few seconds). The fact that music is mono is hardly a problem: since it is just a background accompaniment, the subtleties of stereo are not that important. The fact that the 5 tunes that the music is comprised of are short is counterbalanced by their frequent switching from one to another due to what happens while playing.
In the end, the music ended up taking 1304526 bytes (i.e. almost 1.25 MB), for a total duration of 45.6 seconds. Such size was the limit to leave enough CHIP RAM for the rest and to have the data fit on the floppy disk.
By the way, to actually get the game to fit on a floppy disk, I had to compressed the tunes. Luckily, I had some methods and tools ready, as I had originally developed them for SkillGrid (that game also uses pre-recorded music, although it is stereo and decompressed in real time): I just had to choose those that would produce the best results and write the unpacker routine that would decompress the data at startup (unfortunately, I did not have it for the method that produced the highest compression ratio). Compressed, the music amounts to 622067 bytes (about 52.3% compression ratio).

Side note: I used the same compression method also for the other tunes (which are combined toghether into a regular tracker module) and the sound effects.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@ saimo

thanks music and effects sound great

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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

@saimo

Congratulations on a full release!

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