Zampo loves unconditionally all food, but loves chocolate more than everything! So, he just has to start his quest from a chocolate factory ;)

(Given that the zone is still work-in-progress, the graphics shown in the video are subject to change.)

The FACTORY zone is the only one that is missing before the game is complete and the good news is that it is almost done:
* map: 80%
* music: 99%
* tiles: 100%
* code: 100%

Another insider look:


In the early stages, the design of the game included as a main feature the necessity of uncovering the mazes by visiting all of their corners. This was conceptually and visually cool, but terrible from a gameplay point of view, as it made the game hard and destroyed completely the strategic aspect of the game (at the beginning of a level, being able to see the whole maze, with its bonuses and maluses, allows the player to choose the best strategy to complete the level while amassing as many points and extra lives as possible).
Therefore, the idea got replaced with a much milder one, according to which the unvisited areas of the mazes were simply darker. That was nice to the eye, but it did not really add much.
So, also the second idea got canned and the two bitplanes that had been reserved for it were used to double to the number of background colors and for the transparecy-based effects that provide feedback when a gem/bonus/malus gets picked up.

Somebody in a forum and others privately expressed their appreciation of the game music. I thought that the technical details might be interesting to everybody, so...

Right from the start, I wanted:
* the game to run on stock machines;
* the game to run at 50 fps;
* music and sound effects to play at the same time, without music instruments being cancelled by sound effects;
* the music to change dynamically depending on the game situation;
* the game to fit on a single floppy disk;
* to have everything load at boot and thus avoid loading while playing.

The unusual route I took was the easiest on the hardware: pre-recording the music as various sound samples to play on 2 of the 4 Paula channels, thus leaving 2 channels free for the sound effects.
This allowed the music to be made of virtually infinite channels. Therefore, I went for 8 channels: 2 for drums (I could have used more to be honest, but, really, it would have hardly made much difference), 1 for bass, 1 for strings and 4 for the melody synth (given that the instrument echoes, it needed space). Of course, more notes and more instruments could have been added, but that would have made the music too intrusive, whereas I wanted it to be just a background accompaniment.

Here is the "normal" music (i.e. the music that plays when no bonuses or maluses are active):

The downside of this choice is that the samples take a lot of space - especially considering that I went for a rather high quality: 28604 Hz. As a consequence, the music is mono (this halves the amount of data) and shortish (each tune lasts only a few seconds). The fact that music is mono is hardly a problem: since it is just a background accompaniment, the subtleties of stereo are not that important. The fact that the 5 tunes that the music is comprised of are short is counterbalanced by their frequent switching from one to another due to what happens while playing.
In the end, the music ended up taking 1304526 bytes (i.e. almost 1.25 MB), for a total duration of 45.6 seconds. Such size was the limit to leave enough CHIP RAM for the rest and to have the data fit on the floppy disk.
By the way, to actually get the game to fit on a floppy disk, I had to compressed the tunes. Luckily, I had some methods and tools ready, as I had originally developed them for SkillGrid (that game also uses pre-recorded music, although it is stereo and decompressed in real time): I just had to choose those that would produce the best results and write the unpacker routine that would decompress the data at startup (unfortunately, I did not have it for the method that produced the highest compression ratio). Compressed, the music amounts to 622067 bytes (about 52.3% compression ratio).

Side note: I used the same compression method also for the other tunes (which are combined toghether into a regular tracker module) and the sound effects.

@MamePPCA1

Quote:
If you watched a video of Pac Man (which this game is a second degree relative of) or Tetris without knowing those games, you wouldn't think much of them, would you? ;)
Good luck again with your machines.


@328gts

Heartfelt thanks to you for your continued support!

@MamePPCA1

Thank you! I see in your signature that you also have an Amiga CD32: if it can read burned CDs, you can try the game without waiting for your A1200 to be back (good luck with that, by the way) ;)

The game is out: https://retream.itch.io/gemdalus
Enjoy!

Some gameplay snippets:


And also a look at one of the thousand old versions of the menu screen:

@zerec

Thanks a lot :)

@328gts

Thanks for letting the Amiga folks know.


@Lio

Thanks for the nice words.


@all

Short gameplay preview:

@cloverskull

Thanks!


@all

More experimenting with PTDS. This is a proof of concept. It is just the core of a graphics engine for various vague game ideas (that are not going to materialize). It was useful to evaluate the visual quality and the speed (around 20 fps on a stock Amiga 1200, constantly much above 50 fps on an Amiga 1200 with Blizzard 1230 IV, 68030 @ 50 MHz and 60 ns RAM).



https://www.retream.com/PTDS

Notes:
* the video quality is affected by the fact that: the scandoubler did not support SHRES (so a real-time software trick was used to somehow produce the colors, although it is only a visual illusion and causes a sort of rasterline effect); the monitor did not support progressive PAL; the video was shot with an ancient phone at just 24.917 Hz; YouTube's compression degraded the video quality further;
* graphics are just placeholders;
* the city skyline has been derived from the picture at https://www.pinterest.com/pin/some-oth ... line--327988785356024774/

Since the last post, a huge amount of changes and additions has been made. The most important one is the creation of a new zone (i.e. level): TOWERS.



CHANGELOG


https://retream.itch.io/quod-init-exit-iio

P.S. Only one zone remains to be made and then the game will be finally complete!

@manga303

It's for developers, so only future games/demos will benefit from it - if any will use it at all, that is.

@NinjaCyborg

No, because it uses SHRES to simulate LORES dots.

@NinjaCyborg

Technically yes, but the LORES resolution and the lack of clarity wouldn't be suitable for web pages.

Just released.

PTDQ is a video system for AGA Amigas that provides a chunky-to-planar method which is faster than the traditional ones. It is the higher-quality brother of PTDS (formerly PED81C), another system based on the same core principle.



Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=witR2EE9No8

[The video quality of the real machine output is heavily affected by the fact that the scandoubler did not support SHRES (so a real-time software trick was used to somehow produce the colors, although it is only a visual illusion and causes a sort of rasterline effect), the monitor did not support progressive PAL and the video was captured with an ancient phone at just 24.917 Hz. YouTube's compression degraded the video quality.]

Full details are provided in documentation included in the archive that can be downloaded from https://retream.itch.io/ptdq.

@328gts

:)


@all

Just released a new version, as mentioned in my previous post.

https://retream.itch.io/skillgrid

Changelog since the last one posted in this thread...

v1.9 (1.2.2025)
1. Replaced the Amiga CD³² NVRAM access routines with new and working ones, and enabled the hiscore loading/saving from/to NVRAM (before it was enabled on demand by the user at boot, but the reading failed, so the hiscore loading/saving self-disabled).
2. Improved the startup code (among other things, now it allocates dynamically a CHIM RAM buffer that before was reserved in a BSS section, allowing the game to boot on a stock Amiga CD³² again - which did not happen anymore since one of the previous updates).
3. Reduced the number of stars pre-rendered on the background.
4. Fixed, improved and updated the manual.

v1.8 (12.1.2025)
1. Fixed the version string.

v1.7 (31.7.2024)
1. Fixed a sprite glitch introduced by yesterday's update.

v1.6 (30.7.2024)
1. Made the startup code more robust and faster.

v1.5 (11.5.2024)
1. Touched up a volume effect in the MUSIC MODE music.
2. Removed some useless instructions from the cleanup code.

No problem!

@trixie

Just fixed/improved the manual.

I just got a confirmation from another person that the NVRAM code works fine on his machine equipped with a TF328. Given the care poured into this, the amount of tests performed and the positive response from different machines, I consider the code fully working.
Therefore, I have released the code in a package that contains also a command line tool to read/write arbitrary chunks of the NVRAM. It can be downloaded freely from https://retream.itch.io/amiga-tools.
I'll soon release an updated version of SkillGrid that makes use of it.

@saimoQuote:
This remained frozen for a few years. Eventually, I managed to get the code to work on a real Amiga CD³². Now, before releasing an updated version of SkillGrid which makes use of it, I'd like to have it tested on more machines, so if anyone around here has an Amiga CD³² with a writable drive (required to save a backup for recovery from disaster), I'd be glad if they could make a test and let me know the result. All that's needed is to download this package, put it on the drive and run a script - here is a video that shows what happens.