Double Dragon - Development has resumed to develop an Arcade classic over to the Amiga using the Scorpion Engine

Even to this day, if you ask someone what they thought of Double Dragon, and they'd probably tell you of an awesome Arcade beat em up released in 1987, that gave you the option to play two twin martial artists who could kick, punch and throw enemies off scene through many different levels. Well if you had this game on pretty much every system going but felt the Amiga version was lacking, well happy days! As it looks as if ElectricCafe has resumed his project to develop his Arcade quality port over to the Amiga, but this time using the Scorpion engine.

Video Link for Mobile Users

While ElectricCafe originally announced way back in 2020 to deliver a worthy port to the Amiga and developed in C, it wasn't until this month after a long period of not hearing anything from the developer, that he has resumed his work on the project using Earok's fabulous Scorpion Engine. As noted by his post on the EAB forums, he decided after watching many videos online including the recent Street Fighter 2 demo by Neeso Games, that he could speed up development by bringing their existing assets into the Scorpion Engine, which is a fast and flexible game creation kit for Amiga, offering a modern Windows IDE for development. This in turn takes the hassle out of many graphic & tech related tasks and offers many clever speed optimizations.

Double Dragon on the Amiga - Developed and published by Melbourne House in 1989

Furthermore the developer was also quoted as saying "The editor is a fine piece of kit designed by Erik Hogan. So I spent a weekend setting it up, including the tiled level 1, a player and some enemies. After some intial tests at 50fps it was clear that with Amiga 500 + expansion settings it wasn’t going to be able to support it without slow down. Luckily the Scorpion Engine has a 25fps option (this was the frame rate we were initially targetting anyway). Using this option the game runs solid and feels fantastic, being able to support many characters on screen at once without any obvious signs of slow down. This is important as if a framerate is established from the start, your eye gets used to it and it feels good..

So yes certainly one to keep an eye on through the months ahead, but in the mean time do make sure to check the website below and the relevant EAB discussion.

Links :1) Discussion 2) Website