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Mixel

Posted Sat Jan 16, 2021 6:33 pm

fxgogo wrote:
Sat Jan 16, 2021 5:11 pm
Looking fab Mixel. So if this needs a beefier Amiga to run I am interested to know why you went with OCS and not say AGA? This scorpion engine sounds interesting, can you fill us in more on it?
Oh no, I hope you're prepared for a wall of text.. :lol:

I initially thought to use AGA for a game like this (I started making assets with an AGA style 64 colour palette over a year ago) but I'm a big EHB64 fan and have been using that mode for almost all my Amiga art (and the visual novel) - and after some experimentation with that same palette in Scorpion I found it actually performs well - so far..!

And a pretty looking game that runs on every fast Amiga and not just AGA amigas sounds good. People with accelerated OCS machines, and A3000s (+ fast ram) should be able to run it perfectly, i just like the quirkiness / insanity of doing it this way. I may change my mind if i run into a performance wall. ;)

*Tbh I think there’s a sort of weird mystique to EHB64 - I’ve loved the idea of it since I was a kid, haha. The fact that you can (hopefully) make VGA colour looking graphics but on an absolute potato of a machine is v captivating to me.

It runs nicely on AGA too, it currently uses a slightly smoother (I wouldn’t say better, just fractionally different) palette when ran on AGA machines. Not 100% sure if it will in the final version, but i consider it a feature now rather than a bug. the reason for the different colours seems funny too. EHB halves the RGB values, so if you choose odd numbers it can't get a perfect half, and it gets much closer to the "technically correct" shade when it has 16m colours to choose from than 4096. (I'm 95% sure this is what's happening at least)

Scorpion Engine is an easy to use Windows-based visual programming application for making Amiga games), its UI is built in Unity. Programming is made of “code blocks” but you never have to type code, you select things from menus and rearrange them..
Screenshot 2021-01-17 012841.png
Then when you press “Run”, it compiles it (I think it’s actually Blitz Basic based under the hood) and launches your new Amiga .exe in WinUAE/FSUAE with your choice of Amiga hardware profile. I much prefer this way of working to, say Red Pill where you do the actual development on the Amiga, that would slow me down immensely. Another big boon is it uses TileEd (a free map editor) to edit the maps.. Which is a very nice tool for making layered maps, and they're transferrable to other engines later.

I’ve used a lot of supposedly easy development platforms/editors and this is by far the easiest whilst still being flexible enough to do a ton of different styles of game, and have them feel 100% unique, unlike stuff like SEUCK or even 3D Construction Kit, eew.
Screenshot 2021-01-17 011510.png
It comes with example projects of Zelda clone, Phoenix Wright (visual novel) Alex Kidd, Mario, snake, minigames etc.. Earok has been incredibly helpful when issues crop up too. I am not a programmer at all, it actually makes me quite panicky, but I can use this! 🙂

I've made a short video.. https://youtu.be/gmKAqi7vEvc

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fxgogo
Twickenham , U.K.

Posted Sun Jan 17, 2021 4:10 pm

Makes some sense. I never really played with EHB mode. You have me intrigued. That scorpion engine looks interesting to. Never heard of it before, but looks very well developed.

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Mixel

Posted Wed Jan 20, 2021 12:30 pm

1BAB551C-1816-4457-AA8F-C139B312E25D.jpeg
[wip] Some of the cast.. a lot of them missing, and some won’t appear at all. Started as an experiment; drawing them all in the same size so I had a reference for when they do turn up later, but then it became the beginnings of the usable versions of everyone instead. 🙂

They’re all in the same palette.. so if I wanted everyone to appear in a scene for some deranged reason I guess I could, haha.

Also here’s a bug..
A567743A-1BBB-4A18-905B-AAB418DD0F19.gif

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Jan 20, 2021 1:39 pm

so if I wanted everyone to appear in a scene for some deranged reason I guess I could, haha.
I'm envisioning a potentially epic end-game credits opportunity. <3

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Mixel

Posted Sun Jan 24, 2021 5:17 am

Ha good idea!

Oh man I shouldn’t think about the end of the game yet haha.

This week’s achievements have mostly been bug and slime movement behaviour and a few sprites. But there’s been a lot of level and mechanic planning too.
9B157D8D-98CF-4875-882F-B9D5622F5688.jpeg


Return of frogboss. This guy looked a bit different in CMO’s precursor Zombie Holiday but he’s back and more annoying. (And cuter, and thankfully about 10x better animated)

He had some nice music in ZH in his last appearance that I think will be the first piece I directly move over to CMO. Trackers are weird though so I’m giving myself a long time to figure that out. 😅

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Mixel

Posted Tue Jan 26, 2021 1:33 pm

CommanderKeen wrote:
Tue Jan 26, 2021 12:27 am
It looks amazing! The first screen, the entry to the game with a blue barge gives me strong Curse of the Monkey Islands vibes, and that my friend is a compliment. Your game looks beautiful! You sure know how to make pleasant looking levels that are clear and very esthetic. I first looked at the screens and only then read a description and it came as a surprise that it is not an adventure game. Suffice to say that I am excited and I keep my fingers crossed for you. This looks fantastic!
Thankyou so much. :D I absolutely take that as a compliment, no worries!

There is an element of forward planning with the backdrops, between the Visual Novel (that's definitely happening, though on the back-burner for now) and a future extreme *wish* to do a point and click adventure game, I've been drawing intentionally multi-purpose assets on and off for a while.. I think as I'm a one-man team it makes a lot of sense to pool assets like this so im not reinventing the wheel constantly, but it does mean there ends up being a lot of odd incidental detail in the hand drawn scenes that wouldn't be there if I wasn't writing scripts for every little thing in my head for when you "look at" them, haha.

I've not actually shared any direct feed from my A1200 yet but I definitely prefer how it looks there, something about the SCART connection smoothing out the signal i think. :) looking forward to showing more and thanks for the encouragement!

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Mixel

Posted Tue Feb 02, 2021 7:50 pm

E1CAA3B7-ECF8-4381-A517-1F5D398393EF.jpeg
Probable game over screen but I might make her creepier and I might animate it? Though I quite like a static screen with music.. nice to have an excuse to use a sizeable chunk of the palette all at once (27cols)

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Silverstreak
YouTube

Posted Wed Feb 03, 2021 2:00 am

This really does look outstanding; for any platform frankly. The combination of your graphical style and Earok’s engine are a perfect fit.

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Mixel

Posted Wed Feb 03, 2021 5:36 am

Silverstreak wrote:
Wed Feb 03, 2021 2:00 am
This really does look outstanding; for any platform frankly. The combination of your graphical style and Earok’s engine are a perfect fit.
Thankyou! :) I really needed an engine that’s this easy to use so that I can just churn out assets and not worry about implementation. It’s really funny to me that the first engine I’ve found that ticks all my boxes exports Amiga games, if Scorpion had been a windows game engine I’d be making a game for windows now instead most likely, I’ve tried so many “easy” tools in a similar vein. (MMF, Gamemaker, PGF (rip) Construct, Pixel Game Maker, etc) but I’ve never got this far because I lose momentum and get discouraged whenever I have to do the programming parts.

I’m really happy with people’s response to what I’m showing. I’m most looking forward to three things I’m not showing yet. :D

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 03, 2021 10:14 am

Is Scorpion available to download? Or are you a beta tester for Earok?





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