Wolfchild Maps Now Online

Here's an update I originally meant to post way back on the 30th of January, when the news broke, but for one reason or another I didn't get around to it. Sorry!

Core Design's "Wolfchild" has to rank as one of my favourite Amiga platformers. It looks great, plays well and features some fantastic music. It's one of those games that even now I'll fire-up a couple of times per year to have a go on. So, when English Amiga Board member CodyJarrett, announced that he'd ripped and uploaded the maps to the game I was extremely interested.

You can view the results of CodyJarrett's efforts by pointing your web browser over to the following link on the Amiga Hall of Light web site: http://hol.abime.net/1745/gamemap. Once there you can look through the layout of each level separately, or download the complete game map in one convenient zip file.

I don't know how long it took CodyJarret to rip the maps and get them into a suitable format for on and offline viewing, but I'm sure it wasn't a five minute job.


I always found Wolfchild to be an absolutely rock hard game, so I'm not convinced that the addition of a map to my gaming arsenal is going to change things, but you never know.

Right, time for another go!

Final Fight AGA - WIP 2

Just when you thought that the Engligh Amiga Board's Lielo had given up on his Final Fight AGA conversion, he returns to the EAB with news of what's been updated since he last posted, along with a new work in progress video.

Here he is to bring us right up-to-date;

"3 months on and here's a quick update on the current state of this project.

Firstly, my thanks for the support/advice from all of you that have taken a look here, and my apologies for any misunderstanding on my behalf. The Blitz Support Suite provided much insight besides the cia tracker player whilst other considerations have led to the development environment becoming slightly more user friendly and in time customisable. I've been re-configuring some of the graphical aspects and doing some 'destruction testing; putting as much as I can into the memory and tailoring to suit where I can.

The demo shown here now uses 5 bitplanes with a layer of 8 attached sprites for the parallax, and runs at 50 fps for the most part, although enemy collisions were turned off some time ago during the testing process. I now have an 020 testing machine using an external FD to load the adf as the internal is unreliable. Results on this and 030 are similar, the 020 showing slowdown when other objects are blitted on top of 4 enemy onscreen with busy AI. The 030 showing slowdown when pushed a little more! The most recent development is the mapping of the first 'slum' section to save memory, I'm glad it works. Of course I may return to aspects of the previous graphics setup depending on several things, but this is the development setup for now. The development will focus on producing a playable game for the 020 which is optimised for 030. I'm considering using fast ram 030 blitting for static objects and stuff like that.

I'm thinking there will be a 'modern' options screen where various optimisations/comprimises can be considered e.g. force 50 fps/ blit every frame, max number of enemy.

There is still plenty of memory to play with (now) although the characters happily eat memory - atm just over 930kb left after loading from workbench.

The next thing to do is put the 'Hollywood' character in there and then the rest of the objects, then work on the AI and object interaction, if there's room then I can add some 'palette swap' characters before finally adding the little touches like enemies emerging from doors, and maybe some energy bars!? To me it's worthwhile spending a lot of time on this first section of the game as that's the core from which the rest of the game will build. It's been said before, (Bippy); but Final Fight is basically made up of variations upon a theme. Once the characters and weapons are in there the development should speed up.

I'll get another download going soon. Thanks for taking a look"

Footage from the latest version of the game can be found below.


As soon as I hear anything further regarding the Final Fight AGA project I'll let you know. In the meantime, you can follow the development thread for this title over on the English Amiga Board. Simply click on THIS link.

Passing The 10,000 Views Milestone

Wahey! The blog's recently passed 10,000 views!

When I started this blog around the middle of last October I did so with the main aim of encouraging myself to keep up to date with what was going on in the Amiga gaming scene. If one or two individuals also stumbled upon my postings and found them interesting or useful then I felt that would be a bonus.

As the days and weeks went by and I became familiar with the Blogger interface I started to keep an eye on the viewing stats. Initially the number of daily visitors to the blog was in single digits, but as time went on this quickly grew, and now it averages at around 90 to 100 page views per day. This number may seem low to many, but it's beyond anything I ever anticipated.

Since setting this blog live I've also discovered just how vibrant the current Amiga game development scene is. Sure, it's nowhere on the level of the ZX Spectrum homebrew scene, but it's still a bustling little side of our much loved machine.

Another interesting side to the Blogger stats are looking at the referring site information. So, where do the majority of visitors come from? Well, it didn't come as much of a surprise to see The English Amiga Board coming in at first place. It's more often than not the first place where news of a new Amiga game first lands, and out of all the Amiga forums I've visited the people there seem to be the most supportive towards new projects.  If you ignore the various google site referrals, second place goes to the Amiga.org forums, with the excellent Amiga link portal Brutal's Amiga Links, coming in a close third.

I'd just like to say a big thank you to all the people who have sent in comments or emails of encouragement over the past few months. The feedback has been amazing, and as long as the Amiga gaming scene continues to be as vibrant as it has been over the past 4 or 5 months I'll continue to update the blog as often as I can.

Here's hoping 2013 will be another exciting one for Amiga gamers, and here's to the blog reaching 100,000 page views!

Tales of Gorluth Official Trailer

In Friday's blog post I updated you all on the development progress of Backbone created RPG "Tales of Gorluth", which I originally looked at way back on the 2nd of January.

Well, since my post on Friday there have been further developments, and yesterday Viddi, the developer, uploaded a really professional looking teaser trailer for his forthcoming game.

Take a look below, and make sure the speakers are turned up!

The music playing in the above trailer isn't some tune ripped from another source. No, this is actually taken from the soundtrack to the game! I personally feel this is some of the best music I've heard on the Amiga in many years, and can't wait to hear the rest of the tunes.

If you want to follow the development progress of "Tales of Gorluth", I recommend visiting this thread over on the English Amiga Board. If you've not read through the thread before you'll find it a fascinating document detailing the highs and lows of the development process, and I'm hoping that in a future posting Viddi reveals some details relating to the development of the music. Well, I can hope!

In the meantime, you may want to bookmark the official "Tales of Gorluth" web site, which can be found at: http://www.talesofgorluth.de

I'll bring you more news on this as and when it appears.

Lack of Updates - A Quick Explanation

Regular readers of the Amiga Gamer blog will know that I try my very best at updating it roughly every other day. Now, the more observant of you will notice that this is my first posting since Friday.

I must apologise for the lack of updates over the past few days. I've recently got myself a new job and have been busy getting back into the world of full-time employment.

Please understand that I'm not losing interest in the blog, but it is possible that I may not have as much time to devote to it as I have done previously. I shall ensure the blog is updated as often as I can. It's just that it may not be as often as it was before.

We shall see!

Tales of Gorluth - an Action Adventure created with Backbone

Way back on the 2nd of January I reported on the development of an as yet unnamed action RPG created entirely in Backbone. Since then Viddi, the author of the game, has spent hours and hours developing the title still further.

A few days ago he was kind enough to release footage detailing how far he'd progressed, as well as revealing what he has planned as development continues.

Since Viddi's initial update back at the start of January he's now reduced the size of the playfield to ensure the game retains a decent speed. He's also created a new status panel, which you can see at the bottom of the screen.

Other updates include the squashing of a number of programming/development bugs, the addition of new monsters, weapons and items, and 12 levels have been designed and implemented, with work on level 13 now underway.

Viddi also tells us that "The soundtrack is going to be enormous", and that there are 12 tracks so far. The music is one of 'the' things that really stands out about this release. Yes, the graphics look lovely, but it's the music that's absolutely gorgeous. I don't know if these are compositions he's put together or if they're tunes he's 'borrowed'. I'm thinking (and hoping!) that it's the former.

Check out the latest footage of the game in action below, and make sure the volume's turned up;


Further developments include the registration of www.talesofgorluth.de, the addition of an online manual, the completion of the game's logo, and the main menu structured and implemented.

Could this be one of the Amiga game highlights of 2013? It's certainly starting to look that way.

To follow the progress of Tales of Gorluth, visit this thread over on the English Amiga Board.

Amikill Vers 1.0 (Demo) Released

Fans of Operation Wolf style games may be interested to learn that a demo of Amigakill is now available for download.

Coded in AMOS, this zombie shooter is still in the very early stages of development, but progress so far seems to have been extremely swift.

There's currently a short thread discussing the game, over on the English Amiga Board forums. If you'd like to take part or simply read what's been talked about so far, I suggest visiting this link.

So far, the main subject of feedback has been the suggestion that the digitised backdrop is replaced with a nice pixelated image instead. At present things do look a little odd as the backdrop is a scan whilst the enemies are animated hand drawn sprites.

If you'd like to get the demo up and running on your own Amiga you can find the download link at http://clubamiten.blogspot.com.es. Amiten, author of Amikill, suggests that the game is run on at least an A1200.

Those of you who don't have access to an Amiga, or simply don't have the time or inclination to install this on your system can find footage of the game in action below.