Mooka - A Side-Scrolling Platformer in Development

In Wednesday's blog post I took at look at "Moebius Goatlizard", a revamped version of the SAM Coupe platform game, "Lost Disks of SAM", currently being developed by Black Jet Software.

Well, it would seem that the guys at Black Jet are keeping themselves busy, as they have another game they're also working on. Entitled "Mooka", this looks to be shaping up into a nice colourful side-scrolling platform game.

Here's the brief background story;

"After finding a small shiny device on the floor of your parent's house, you accidentally push something that changes your location almost instantly.

You suddenly find yourself standing in a strange part of the galaxy and need to find your way back home!"

At present there's no demo available to download, but a detailed development log can be found over on the Black Jet web site.

In the meantime, check out the latest clip of the game in action. This looks like a game really worth keeping an eye on.

Interview With The Sales Curve's Ned Langman

Just a couple of weeks have passed since his excellent interview with Ocean France's Marc Djan was uploaded, and already Codetapper's got another in-depth question and answer session with an ex-Amiga programmer

This latest addition to an ever growing line-up of coder conversations sees Ned Langman of Random Access/The Sales Curve in the spotlight.

Ned was the graphic artist whose name popped up numerous Amiga titles over the years, including Silkworm, The Ninja Warriors, Judge Dredd, NARC, SWIV, Saint Dragon, Double Dragon 3, Rod-Land, Big Run and Indy Heat.

In this interview Ned reveals how he learned to draw, how he got his job at Random Access, his most and least favourite parts of the job and much more.

Games discussed include SWIV, The Ninja Warriors, Silkworm, to name but a few, and if you really pay attention you may even discover how a few references to SWIV crept into the PC title "Forsaken"

For the full interview, point your web browser HERE.

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.

Playable Demo of Amiganitzu Now Available

I've given a fair bit of coverage to the development progress of Amiganitzu over the past few weeks, as the author continues to whet our gaming appetites with news of updates and YouTube clips.

Well, you'll probably be interested to learn that development on the title has reached such a stage that a short three level demo, has been made available for download.

To download the archive, point your web browser HERE. Please note that at present the demo requires Kickstart 2.0+, but this requirement may be subject to change as development on the game continues.

For those of you who've only just stumbled upon the blog, the YouTube clip below shows a recent version of the game in action.



As soon as I hear of any further news surrounding the title I'll post it on the blog.

Moebius Goatlizard - Coming Soon

Today I bring news of yet another Amiga game in the works, and it's from a rather unusual computing platform. Moebius Goatlizard is a conversion of recently released SAM Coupe title, "Lost Disks of SAM".

Produced by Black Jet, they describe themselves as;

"...a bunch of bedroom programmers, designers, musicians, and retro game fanatics, trying to get more people enthused about the wonders and awesomeness of Retro Gaming!"

Here's Andrew, the programmer, explaining why he's porting this over to the Amiga;

"I'm in the process of learning the Amiga architecture and 68K ASM, so what better way to learn than to convert Lost Disks of SAM to the platform ;-) Very early stages, I'd like to draw inspiration from the EFMB PC Remake (have a look at RGCD EFMB for information on that piece of awesomeness and hopefully come up with some new ideas".

"Insatiable lust for all things cosmic brings Moebius to the world of Amiga where he must collect inter-galactic stuff to help feed his dirty collecting habit. Or something along those lines".

Below you'll find footage of the game in action, taken in early September (but a according to the development blog a fair bit's been added since then);


If you'd like to find out more, further information and a 4-level demo of the game can be downloaded from the Black Jet web site.

Backbone Platformer and Tutorial in the Works

A few weeks back I decided to install the final version (before it was sadly shelved) of games creation package "Backbone", on my trusty A1200. It seemed to be one of the easiest ways to put a game together, and I was keen to have a go.

Now, I'm no doubt being thick, but for the life of me I was unable to find any documentation within the archive detailing how you go about creating a game from scratch. Sure, there were some examples of basic games bundled with the package, but as soon as I started making changes to those all kinds of weird and wonderful 'features' cropped-up.

Thankfully, Australian based Amiga user Cammy, has decided that the issue of Backbone lacking some decent documentation needs to be resolved. At the same time, this has meant that a new Amiga platformer is being created.

Here's Cammy to explain;

"[I'm] using Backbone, because Rebel and I are writing a tutorial on Backbone and needed to make an example game to go with it.

All the graphics are by him so far, I'm just working on level design on this one at the moment".

And what lovely graphics they are. Below are three screenshots from the work in progress version of the game, and they really do look lovely.

You'll be pleased to learn that Cammy has kindly made a work in progress version of the game available to download from the following location:
http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/BackboneGame.lha

Have a go, and let her know what you think by dropping her a message on the English Amiga Board.

Dangermouse Adventure - Now With Music

Work continues apace on the Dangermouse graphic adventure, and in his latest "work in progress" update, Christian of AmigaPD.com has uploaded footage of the latest version in action.

It's really nice watching this game progress over the weeks and months since development started.

So, what's new? Here's Christian with the details;

"[I've] now added in game music. The music is from PD game Return to Zantis, as suggested by s2325 from EAB forum.


Apologies for the low music level - whenever I make a video of UAE the sound quality is always extremely quiet".

Christain also comments that he's only recently learned how to add MOD music files to his AMOS productions, and in this post over on AmigaPD.com he explains how he went about it, and what you have to be aware of if you're planning to add music to your own AMOS coded productions.