The Amiga is certainly living the high life at the moment, what with all the homebrew games previously released, ones yet to come and of course the many mentions of unreleased games finally seeing the light of day. But there's another game that may grace our Commodore screens at some point in the near future, and that's Hyperborea Resurrected; an upcoming Amiga game from GoldenCode which is classed as a bullet hell shooter that requires at least a stock A1200 or above! Sound like your sort of game? Then make sure to check out the developer notes and footage below.
Daytona675x has posted on the EAB forums and he had this to say about the game. "Some years ago Torben B. Larsen from Cope-Com, the graphician and designer of titles like Hybris and Battle Squadron, and I decided to team up to make a new shmup. I quickly came up with some prototype code and Torben drew quite a lot of gfx for the first level. Unfortunately real life kicked in and so the project went into hibernation - until recently. My nephew Tom had to do a two weeks school internship and he had asked me if he can do it at my place. Sure thing"
"Of course I wanted to show him how to code games for the Amiga. Hm, well, Souverän Soccer wasn't well suited for that task - much too complex and big and everything. Eventually I decided to resurrect Torbens and mine project "Hyperborea" The internship began end of october and some days before I had written down a new design plan for that game. I trashed everything of the old code and started from scratch. Well, not exactly. Some helper functions from Souverän Soccer were copied over, of course "
"When the internship ended we had an intro-screen, main menu, highscore management, a scrolling tilemap, music, explosions, players and player-weapons. And Tom knows quite a lot about sprites, blitter, registers, multiplexing and bug-hunting Anyway, the next ~ 4 weeks I spent tweaking and adding all the missing parts. And this is the result":
- A real bullet hell / danmaku style shmup for stock A1200 and compatibles.
- 304 x 256 PAL @ 50 fps (almost always )
- vertical scroller with additional horizontal scrolling (384 pixel wide levels)
- 1p and 2p simultan mode
- 100% flicker free bullets and enemies
- tons of bullets - and I mean it!
- Coded in C++ with maybe 10% asm.
- note: current music is a placeholder from mod archive for now, te-x-mas 6 by xtd / mystic & the grid
- Status: technically pretty much complete.
Impresionante gracias por seguir haciendo juegos para amiga gracias desde españa
ReplyDeleteso good, looking forward to this..
ReplyDeleteThat many bullets and decent performance from C++, I find this amazing!
ReplyDeleteThere's no collision with enemy bullets with the player, so it's actually a good indication of performance until all those aspects are implemented.
DeleteHere's an explanation on how collision detection vs bullets works. Seems plausible that it costs no measurable performance.
Deletehttps://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=1660184&postcount=12
Please,give us a REAL sequel to Hybris and Battle Squadron,not a generic "danmaku"!!!
ReplyDeleteI'd say it's an Above Average danmaku :D
DeleteOf course "above average" but only if we talk about the Amiga ones...After all we got only "Mega Typhoon" in the genre,if i remember well...but a TRUE sequel of "Battle Squadron" Will be Amazing!!!!
DeleteAmazing graphics and the "spirit" of Battlesquadron/Hybris is there! Hope it's not too hard...Your gamers base wasn't Danmakus native...:)
ReplyDeleteoh wow! new shmup, really nice
ReplyDeleteThis is Looking Excellent..I knew it had to be from someone experienced. I want to ask...is it possible to have an NTSC version 60hz and take off the Score Raster that is all black on the top stealing pixel action and instead fill the screen the rest of the way up.....THEN overlay that same score raster floating above the gfx so that you can see the level still scrolling behind it. and a few more animations running in the back. I love the look of the Space ships...very unique and large. I like the slightly Bitmap Brothers gfx look too! However I see ZERO reason why this can not be on an ECS Amiga also? in 64color EHB mode perhaps? Come on Man!
ReplyDeleteThanks :)
DeleteNTSC version:
technically this would be no big deal but it's way too much work to design all those levels with the bullet patterns to be nicely playable with both with / without those 50 lines.
So no. The game will be designed for best PAL experience, that's already a huge enough pile of work.
But fortunately you can switch your NTSC machine to PAL in the early startup.
Score overlay:
I'd love to have an arcade like overlay, but there are strong technical reasons why it is as it is.
1. hardware sprite limitations.
All 8 sprites are in use and heavily manually multiplexed via copper.
A transluent score overlay realized with sprites is therefore only possible at the price of ugly side-effects. The best you could get would be flickering player shots at the score area plus the player ships being restricted to not reach that upper screen area.
Not worth it.
2. blitter / CPU budget / color limitations.
Alternatively I could do a bunch of masked blits every frame to display the score panel, either by blitter or by CPU. While this would work, it would come at a price, namely less blitter / CPU budget to draw more interesting stuff.
And while this could be acceptable, the remaining issue is not: colors.
Such a score panel inside the graphics would mean that it has to use the same palette as the other graphics, so some colors would have to be reserved only for that overlay.
So no, not possible, we need all colors for more interesting stuff.
Anyway, that current opaque panel only takes up 8 display rows, has no side effects and can be updated / rendered very quickly.
A very good compromise.
Slightly Bitmap Brothers gfx look:
:) Don't let Torben hear this! It's pure CopeCom style, naturally ;)
ECS:
This game fully exploits certain AGA features, requires lots of Chip RAM and definitely also needs some sort of 020 or above.
Just no, impossible. Unless you can live with a totally down-stripped, uglified version (like a typical A500 -> C64 port). I certainly can't live with that ;)