A bit of a short news story for this one, as trawling through Facebook, we've found out through Earok who created the Scorpion Engine, that Basement Ape is working on what looks to be a new beat 'em up platformer for the Commodore Amiga, using yes you guessed it, the Scorpion Engine. While there is very little to go on, and the game doesn't even have a name yet, you can at least check out the early footage below, and the details from Earok himself.
And here's the details... "This is not really announced, it maybe doesn't even have a name yet, but this is a very cool project by Basement Ape. Love the use of white on the bar to indicate damage. Runs in a mere 8 color mode on OCS Amiga, though I believe it uses sprites beyond that to have around ~24 colors". And that's all there is to say about the game, but once I found out more, I'll make sure to update the news!
Nice use of pixel art to get around the color limitation. Everything looks fast and super smooth. Always Great to see devs using Scorpion Engine to make good looking OCS games despite the Engine's limitations.
ReplyDeleteVery good!
ReplyDeleteCan't wait for a playable demo version.
I like it!
ReplyDeletehhhmmm it doesn't excite me
ReplyDeleteLove the pixel art.
ReplyDeleteLooking very nice so far. Pixel art is great, and its really smooth.
ReplyDeletePixel art is amazing
ReplyDeleteWauw, just wauw!
ReplyDeleteBeautiful 8-colors graphics for the background! And it looks it uses the same 8 colors for the enemies too! Only the protagonist uses different colors (maybe the game uses dual playfield mode to draw the main sprite in the second playfield so that it can use the other 8 colors of a 16 colors palette...). Anyway, why so few colors? Probably this is to get the game work at solid 50fps in any situation, even on an OCS machine, despite the Scorpion Engine limitations?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words everyone :) Didn't expect this to make news, early as it is. Yeah, the zombies and backgrounds use the same 8-color palette, being blitter objects. The player, ghost, and impact effect are sprites, so they get to use separate 4-color palettes. It's all done this way to save chip memory more than anything. The lower color mode also helps a bit with performance, but chipmem is the main concern
DeleteYou're going to run out of chip mem pretty quickly with those backgrounds. The idea of using tiles is re-use. As far as I can tell none of those tiles are re-used. Good luck.
DeleteIs the chipmem conservation priority because you want to target 512K OCS and not 1MB?
DeleteThat background is intended for a boss with its own level, so that's alright. I'm using it here because I'm still stress-testing :) Far as I can tell one tileset of 64 tiles takes about 6kb chipram and I got 256 unique tiles there now, so four times that. I'm trying to stick to the 512kb b/c I get a kick out of trying to push the A500 to its limits, but it's also beneficial in other ways. Like, you probably heard the old phrase limitations breed creativity. Imo it breeds structure and focus too. Harder to get lost in the reeds when it's very clear cut what you can and cannot do, is the thinking :]
DeleteThanks for the effort and amiga support but you cannot push OCS with scorpion engine really. In our days using 512K when OCS can use more does not make a lot of sense but its your game and we respect that but really limiting OCS while you effort is great its not practical. Check elfmania a game close to NEO GEO quality presenting what A500 is calable of. Once again thanks!
DeleteHmm, comparing this to Elfmania doesn't make sense to me. You don't see an 8 color palette used in such a way very often, it's an art form of it's own to get a game to look good with a limited palette like that. I love seeing this kind of direction explored in such a meticulous manner. The graphics and animations are gorgeous! Have fun, basementApe!
DeleteI'm going for 256 tiles (16x16) in my 8-way scrolling platformer that I'm working on that's single playfield (4bpp), but it's all in assembly and destined for OCS. Far more flexibility than using an engine...
Deletegreat news, amazing fighting game, great graphics and sensation of hitting the enemy/monster...!
ReplyDeleteThe use of the chromatic palette reminds me of an old Amiga shoot em up, Phantom Fighter! Maybe they use the same technique? This game seems really cool but....where is Rastan remake? I hope Basement Ape is still working on it!!
ReplyDeleteYup, I'm doing this partially to ease myself back into Scorpion and learn some new tricks. Rastan got unwieldy to the point I almost couldn't bear the thought of working on it anymore :/ It needs some substantial internal restructuring. But yeah, I *am* coming back round to it
DeleteI hope you will finish Rastan...the first level demo was really amazing,believe me! The scene needs someone who will push ocs to the limit and i think you can do it! Maybe take a look to the old ms-dos version or the Apple 2 gs one and i think you will find some answers,at least from an artistic point of view! I know scorpion engine has a lot of limits but you are not obliged in using only the 512kb chip mem!! Good luck for this new project, man!
DeleteThanks a lot, I appreciate it :) I have a better understanding of some things and got some new ideas already on how to structure the code so it's easier to work with. I did look at both the ms-dos and Apple2 versions a while ago, they're solid yeah. Gonna give them another look when I get back into it :)
DeleteAbout the Scorpion engine being limited, hmm. I've seen a lot of people mention this and it makes me scratch my head a little :D I think it's limited compared to building your own engine from scratch, where you have low level control over memory registers etc and can in theory, write any graphical effect and rendering system that you want (within the confines of the hardware ofc). But there's a question of practicality too I think. Time spent learning all the ins and outs of the hardware at such a low level and learning Assembly itself is time *not* spent working on gameplay, assets, design direction etc. It's not for nothing that the indie game developer scene exploded when Unity came around :)
Amazing job!
ReplyDeleteFinally something with potential to do Amiga justice...
ReplyDeleteWell, that looks gorgeous. Back in the day, reduced colour palettes in Amiga games (like in dual-playfield mode) used to look washed out and ugly. But that was mainly because very few Amiga artists had any idea how to use colour. Basement Ape does, though - and this shows that you don't necessarily need lots of colours when you have good design skills.
ReplyDeleteLooks wonderful. Very polished looking and the use of palette is excellent. I just hope Rastan doesnt get pushed to the side? Thats the game im most pumped for.
ReplyDelete