23.Jan.2024
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Preview video: Platform game "Silhouette Threat" for AGA-Amigas
A girl falls into a mysterious world armed with only her raincoat and umbrella while enduring constant attacks by strange, silhouetted creatures. The only way to return to her world is by collecting pieces to eventually assemble the raindrop portal...
This is the plot for the platformer "Silhouette Threat", which 'psquaredish' is currently developing for AGA computers with the Scorpion Engine. Only recently, Erik 'earok' Hogan, author of the Game Construction Kit, pointed out in our article about Video tutorials for the Scorpion Engine that the Scorpion Engine is not only intended for developers: this is the case here. The linked video shows a first, short test level.
His soon-to-be 12-year-old daughter designed the main character and some of the other graphics. As a non-artist, he tried his best to do the rest.
His absolute goal is to write a game that uses the parallax system and to have many large, overlapping levels in the game. As the author goes on to explain, he imagines an AGA game with 6 levels in which the bit planes of the dual playing field are divided into 2,1,1,2,1,1 instead of 4,4. Currently, the Scorpion Engine would limit the number of levels in AGA to 3, with 2 having to be repeated. The game Agony already uses the dual playfield bitplane splitting technique for OCS/ECS with a 3,2,1 split (see also Codetapper's article) and the source code is available here (amiga-news.de reported), which could make it easier to implement. If anyone is interested in helping with the programming of the bitplane splitter, the author would be pleased.
And 'psquaredish' also has written: "What I think might be possible is a tool something similar to the amazing parallax tool that Daniel Stephens has created for Boss Machine (YouTube video). He's able to take graphic strips and move them independently at any speed with a slider. It blew my mind when I saw it and made me think that maybe a similar tool could be made where you can just load any image into one of 6 overlapping parallax layers. Maybe it could be done as a plugin for Scorpion Engine or Redpill or just as a standalone tool, if that fascinates any coders again please let me know."
In the meantime, he plans to continue developing the game with the Scorpion Engine with the 3 layers. One important point was that he taught himself to use Protracker for the first time. He had never known what all the numbers meant, but now he understood it a little. He's put together a simple little sampled track that isn't in the video yet, but he may use it as temporary title screen music in the playable demo he plans to release sometime next month.
As this is his first game, he would welcome any feedback and ideas. (dr)
[News message: 23. Jan. 2024, 10:10] [Comments: 0]
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