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Thursday 15 November 2012

Final Fight AGA - Early Demo Preview Download

(Note: The image thumbnail to the left is a screenshot of the title screen from the arcade version and not the humble Amiga)

Since starting this blog back in early October, I've been amazed at the number of Amiga games projects that suddenly spring up from nowhere, and which have been months in development.

Final Fight AGA is one such title, which was announced yesterday on the English Amiga Board.

Here's EAB user and game programmer, Lielo, with the details;
"[I] started work on this in about February. Finally getting it to a stage I consider presentable...

Number of enemies are selectable via the joystick at the start to a maximum of 8. There's only one character and he's missing one of his moves. For a complete set of moves do a quick search - it's a two button game, one for attacking one for jumping, both for the "panic" move.

There are a number of issues, but the moves all do something akin to what they should.

Considering this a benchmark - if you can get it working I'd love to hear how you get on.

On my 030 I can get 6 enemies on screen with music playing and occasional slowdown of the mod playback. 5 enemies with no sound disruptance.

Download from http://www.lostinthefens.com/finalfight.lzh"
If you're not able to get the archive installed on a real Amiga or an Amiga emulator you'll be pleased to learn that YouTube user s2325 has kindly uploaded footage of the game in action.


Following his initial post Lielo dished out further details;
"This project was started with the intention of creating a decent side scrolling beat-em-up for the Amiga. There have been some notable attempts but for me there was always something missing! Final Fight was one of my fave arcades of the era and after plugging away in Amos Pro for a couple of weeks I switched to Blitz Basic2. So I'm not an amazing programmer and this is my first attempt using BB2.

I haven't posted before now as I'd hate for this to become another one of those projects that just runs out of steam. I think now that even if Final Fight becomes out of reach there's enough here to begin creating something decent for the Miggy.

I'm definitely interested in making another game either after this or as soon as it becomes too much. Bearing this in mind, If someone wants to help with graphics or improving the code then that would be great. I'm sticking with FF for now... Good learning curve!

Technical stuff that should help explain some of the issues:

Dual playfield display - one for bobs (the baddies) and one for the background.
2 Palettes of 15 colours (minus colour 0 in each case)
Player is a 64px wide sprite sharing its palette with the parallax background.
The parallax layer is made of 3 colour sprites and sits behind both playfields.
The player sprite is displayed either in front or below the bobs playfield to add the illusion of depth. The remaining bob priority is controlled by selective blitting - which I've made as fast as I can whilst sacrificing a bit of accuracy.

It aint perfect!"
As always, I'll bring you more news on this project as and when it becomes available.

2 comments:

  1. Looks very promising so far! A fast moving action game like this written in higher level language like Basic, impressive how fast it is!

    Are you making this for Amiga 4000 or 1200? How much RAM does it currently use for 2 characters? If you get short on RAM, I think you could make each section have 2 kinds of minor bads and 1 big guy, and change it up for every section, like River City Ransom. This will keep the player interested to see more different guys. Also in Final Fight they saved memory by using head swaps and palette swaps for more variety.

    There are many game assets available for this game type for the OpenBOR engine, I think they can be extracted and converted for your engine without too much difficulty. If you get discouraged because your version seems inferior to the original, you could try doing a remix of Final Fight 2. That game was way too easy and boring on the SNES, so you could make the first good version of FF2, and complete a worthy trilogy. :-D

    The Amiga supports 2 button joysticks, so no need to limit yourself to the 1-button controls of the OCS port.

    I moved to Australian wilderness in 1988 and missed all the post-600 models. :-(

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  2. I'm writing it on an A1200 with 030 accelerator, but the target system is currently A1200, likely with fast ram and HD. Characters typically use between 60-120kb. The latest version has 5 characters in memory with no palette swaps. It's interesting that you mentioned 'head swapping' as I was thinking I could use something like that, I had no idea they used that in the original. It would more likely be 'torso swapping' for this version I think. I'm sure they used something similar for Strangers AGA.
    The game engine uses 2 button as standard, and most of the moves are in there for all characters in the first slum section. Objects are ready to go in; I'm just working on the collision detection now. Fingers crossed the speed remains good especially when 2 players are in. Originally I wanted 3 players, that's not a priority now as I've upped the graphical stakes a little and want to keep the specs at a minimum.
    There are lots of little touches I'd like to include; increased combo potential, maybe a completely new stage and boss, a special Amiga 'beast' mode with one life and high scoring potential. But that's too far off yet.
    I got an A500 when PC's where making the Amiga line go out of fashion. One of my mates had an A600 and A1200, so I got my hands on those for a while too, but it wasn't until 2011 that I got an A1200 for the first time! Would love to write something for the old A500.

    This conversion is most certainly going to be inferior to the original, but if I can nail most of the gameplay then I'll be happy.

    Cheers for your comments, I'll try to get all the mileage out of this that I can. ;)

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