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Mixel

Posted Wed Feb 03, 2021 10:29 am

https://github.com/earok/scorpion-editor-demos It’s freely available there in beta form.. :)

It’s growing features at an alarming rate. The demo games are really good for learning from, and Earok’s really helpful with queries.. I can likely answer some questions too, if anyone has any.

Also for Mac people I’ve run the editor in VMware Fusion (free for intel macs) and it works great, you just need to not attempt to use WinUAE in the VM to test the exported Amiga .exes - as that runs horribly.. Use FS-UAE on the Mac side for testing the games. <3

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McTrinsic

Posted Wed Feb 03, 2021 3:23 pm

Could you cycle through some red-ish colours to create an illusion of movement in e.g. the pic you show above with the flames at the ground?

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Mixel

Posted Wed Feb 03, 2021 11:25 pm

McTrinsic wrote:
Wed Feb 03, 2021 3:23 pm
Could you cycle through some red-ish colours to create an illusion of movement in e.g. the pic you show above with the flames at the ground?
I could! I think I’ll load it into dpaint at some point and see what insanity i can do with animation. 🙂 I’m not sure what scorpion does with anim files yet. It definitely supports them.. I need to check that out.

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Mixel

Posted Thu Feb 11, 2021 8:45 pm

Most of the work I’m doing atm is either under the hood or semi secret, but a lot is happening.. And earok has been adding features like crazy.

We now have copper gradients!
DF01BA32-30E4-441A-A3DF-8F658E2AF2C7.png
- this is the game running on an AGA Amiga.. and here’s the same .exe running on an OCS one!
1AD05849-F5D4-47F7-A197-14DAE0951F8D.png
Also the evolution (but not final form) of the statusbar!

Here’s a few second teaser capturing my A1200 via OSSC with scanlines enabled. I’m really happy with how it looks on real hardware. 😊

And the first .mod I’ve made in decades.
https://youtu.be/aTH7ZmO8uTw

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Mixel

Posted Fri Feb 19, 2021 8:59 pm

Tiny little update here.. it’s coming up to a month since my first video and I’m trying to do monthly dev updates collecting everything together.. as when I’m working on it most days it’s really difficult to see the big picture and what I’ve actually been doing! Until I’ve put that video together though..

The last couple of days I’ve been concentrating on perfecting the beetle and slime behaviour.. I don’t know why I started with two of the likely most complicated enemy types, but here we are.. 😂 It’s all really useful, transferable knowledge though I’ll be able to apply to other enemies. I accidentally made really nice bat behaviour when messing with slimes so that’ll be good eventually!

Bugs come in two sizes. Tiny, who wander back and forth, but sometimes randomly jump, and can latch on to you like ticks, hurting you more if you struggle.. (they don’t hurt you at all after the initial bite if you stand still) but these guys can also take off and fly directly at you, but their turning circle is quite big so they can be avoided quite easily. In their flying state sometimes they get bored and revert to walking. Their airborne attacks cause them to bounce off you.. So that’s 3 states of tiny bug. (These are sometimes generated by hives, much like in Turrican2 and Lionheart) - they also have a couple of other secret behaviours/properties.

Then there’s the big bugs, who take multiple hits.. they wander about (occasionally randomly changing direction) - they hurt you if they hit you, but they can also randomly hide in their shells (and immediately hide if you stomp on them).. when they’re in their shells they can’t be hurt, but they wave their antenna and do vertical electrical wave attacks.. occasionally if you kick them enough (or wait long enough) they’ll come out of their shell. Often when you attack a non hiding beetle it will also take off and fly.. And they’re way more direct than the tiny ones, so harder to avoid. But they move about less erratically,

Slimes on the other hand can start in four states. Tiny, medium, large, and ceiling crawlers.. ceiling slimes drip blobs down at you. If you hit them they fall down and become large slimes. Large slimes are slow, barely jump and can’t hurt you much. You can use them as trampolines.. if you let them approach you they’ll hurt you slightly and squeeze under and past you. Hit a big slime and it becomes a medium slime, the most dangerous type as it jumps about a lot. Hitting that makes it into a tiny slime which hurts on impact but you can just stand on them.. They also jump about a little.

Rats just walk left/right and bounce off walls.

Here I am letting some slimes kill me.

https://youtu.be/v22yed0xKk4

I’ll be back at making maps soon.

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Mixel

Posted Mon Mar 01, 2021 5:24 pm

I missed my Feb progress video, but will do one soon. :D I'm pretty distracted. But I have got an absolute ton done in Feb, so it's all good.

Today I've been working on the copper gradients and had been trying to find a good way to edit them.. I downloaded everything, tried DPaint, PPaint etc with no luck, closest I came to an ideal solution was Brilliance but I was having some issues doing what I wanted..

So now I'm using... Pro Motion NG? Which I'd never used before, but now my toolset for making this game is PPaint (occasionally) Aseprite (a lot) Pyxel (for tile editing) and Pixaki on iPad (actually most of the graphics start this way and then get tweaked as Pixaki doesn't support indexed palettes) and Pro Motion (so far just for gradients!) So that's confusing, but fun!

A quick rundown on how I use ProMotion to edit amiga gradients, because it's kind of neat? PM lets you set the RGB bit depth on the channels so you can get an OCS 4096 colour pool..

Then I make a canvas at my game window's height (in my case ~180px) and use a gradient consisting of the entire palette and do a vertical gradient fill.. (the photo here was at the wrong dimensions but you get the idea)

Then I can spread ranges in the palette.. And when I need dithering, simply drag the colours around in the palette viewer and their new order is immediately reflected in the image. :D Scorpion engine reads the PNG files to get the copper skies..
IMG_0552.JPG
Screenshot 2021-03-01 143146.png
Hopefully I'll have a video ready soon.. It'll be a couple of days though.

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Mixel

Posted Thu Mar 04, 2021 4:23 pm

https://youtu.be/_GxLe6wbrjw Nothing new to people who follow me here and other places probably, but it’s nice to have much of it in an easily digestible package. :D

One of these days I’m going to stop showing the same bits of the same levels, haha.

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Mixel

Posted Sat Apr 17, 2021 3:50 pm

Again nothing new if you follow me on twitter, but thought I'd do the rounds and check in various places so ppl know it's coming along okay. :D (apologies for regulars of all the boards this is quite cross-posty!)
Screenshot 2021-04-17 225924.png
Mudmen are tough, and fling crap at you. If you get hit by it all it can sometimes lead to you dying in a single hit. Ouch.
Screenshot 2021-04-17 224905.png
Very nearly finished my first proper parallax backdrop.
You can see it in action here: https://youtu.be/7BLvghb0xs0
Screenshot 2021-04-17 223946.png
Very recent addition is the (needlessly OTT, as always) front end menu system. "About Demo" will actually be "Password" in the final game.
Screenshot 2021-04-17 223904.png
More front end because why not.

Will I hit my April demo goal... I have no idea. I do know I wont be doing any monthly update videos until the demo is ready though as it's getting so close the that finish line now and I want to keep a lot of it a surprise. :D

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Wavemaker
Poland

Posted Sat May 01, 2021 8:39 am

I guess you didn't but no hurry. Would love to review his for our magazine.

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Mixel

Posted Sat May 01, 2021 8:57 am

Wavemaker wrote:
Sat May 01, 2021 8:39 am
I guess you didn't but no hurry. Would love to review his for our magazine.
Sorry for not updating here!

Thank you for the interest. :D It is coming along very well, but the final stretch is stretching slightly, partly I've been of changeable health so haven't been as consistently productive as I'd like, but mostly I'm improving a lot of things around the demo.

It's not far off now. I've mostly been quiet because I feel like sharing too much at this point is just going to spoil it. Some parts of it are much nicer than the WIP versions I've shown so fa. I probably won't mention dates anymore because that was silly, it was nice to have a target but I can't predict that accurately. I'm in the last 5% of the demo for sure though, just needs a little while longer. :D





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