Gemdalus-new AGA game coming soon! It's RELEASED NOW !!!

If you were a fan of Oil's Well on your C64 you're going to love playing Gemdalus on your 68k Amiga coming soon from RETREAM

Here's a screen pic from Level 1 and a cool initial game play preview from Amiga Bill's Twitch channelstarting at 1:05

I dont know this game but Saimo is doing an excellent job at releasing quality/imaginative games and tools so I have no doubt about his next project !

@Lio

You will know it soon and yes Saimo always delivers top quality for OS4.x and 3.x users

@328gts

Thanks for letting the Amiga folks know.


@Lio

Thanks for the nice words.


@all

Short gameplay preview:

Awesome Game Saimo!!

Happy to buy a Copy!!!

Keep up the very good work Bro.

Greetz

@zerec

Thanks a lot :)

Some gameplay snippets:


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

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

If I can return my Amiga 1200 from AmigaKit,I can then buy this game,that it looks very good for the Amiga line of computers.They have it and maybe can pay it sooner than later OK?

Good work saimo!!! Amiga rules!!! Long live the Amiga and happy May month for us!!! Amiga is forever!!! And this game seems to ROCK...AWESOME!!!Awesome game

Can I play it with Vampire 1200 installed on the Amiga 1200 when can get my Amiga 1200 again at home

Thank you for uyour attention sure men.

@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) ;)

@saimo

Yes thank you too Saimo!!! The problem I encounter now is that the CD32 PSU were burnt some months ago...maybe I will have to look on some Amiga retailers and buy a new PSU for my CD32.

Nice to read you really,I was trying to find some new one for my amazing CD32 Amiga console.A new PSU.

Thanks!!!

@saimo

Yes...maybe I will buy this game if my Amiga 1200 can be back home.

Thank you for your work and dedication for the Amiga CD32 and Amiga 1200 that is a cool computer to acomplish and enjoy a still new Vampire 1200 accelerator and I love em all.

Amiga is alive...If someone can wait it for us.

With love from Spain...Javi

Hope to get my Amiga 1200 soon,when I can e-mail Matthew or Chris for this task.

Thanks really

@saimo

I saw the video of the game before and it was good but not as I expected to be honest,less interesting.There could be more interesting and cool games for the Amiga than this but anyway this seems as a good game anyway.

Of course I have to talk to return my Amiga 1200 first or maybe buy a new PSU for my CD32.In fact is a task I had been thinking with AmigaKit for months ago.

And of course my Amiga 1200 must rules as an Amiga that always rules on the shelf and delivers good games to play.

But I want to buy this game if I can.Because it is an interesting game for the Amiga lines of computers.

Thank you to Saimo and to all of you,fanatics of the great computer,the best that is the Amiga off the line of course.

@saimo

Simone thanks yet again for an original top quality game for our AMIGA'S both 68k and PPC !!!

@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!

@ saimo

Thanks for all the top quality games and apps you've produced over the years for us Amiga users both 68k & PPC it's truly appreciated

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.

@saimo

Thanks Simone the music and sound effects are great!

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.