Resolutions 2024

11 January 2024

320x256

Maybe 320x224 as well.

But seriously. No New Year Resolutions because that's daft, but I do have some "plans" for the year ahead.

Let's all meet here again in 2025 and see what happened.

AMIGA IRELAND

I'll be attending Amiga Ireland in Athlone in January. It's always a good weekend, very chill. I'm looking forward to it even more than usual as, with one thing and another, it's probably the only retro event I'll get to the whole year. We're doing a Rogue Declan high score competition with prizes, and I'll have the Scourge Of The Underkind custom A500 case with me that I won in AmiGameJam for ... Rogue Declan.

ROGUE DECLAN PHYSICAL EDITIONS

I've been working on these over December, to be published by PolyPlay in early February (TBC). The floppy version is mostly just some final super-polishing, but I'm hoping the CD version will have remastered CDDA ingame audio! I have it working, it's a question of if can it be mastered now. The CD versions should work on most CD-equipped Amigas, including CDTV (a war story in it's own right), but the CD audio will be CD32 only. These editions will only be available from PolyPlay.

UNTITLED AMIGA ISOMETRIC GAME

As yet unnamed, this is the big focus for 2024. It's a port, and a big game, so I'm currently unsure what the system requirements will end up at, or if it will even fit into 2024. An isometric arcade adventure like Head over Heels or Get Dexter was always on my List, and this is a big bite of one to chew on. I have some basic engine bits working and the next step is getting scrolling in. The hidden complexities in scrolling an isometric environment on a 2D system will surprise you.

LAP THE LOUGH 18

What? A non-computering thing? Sometimes, I forget myself. I've entered this annual cycling event - a lap of 80-100 miles around Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland - 11 of the last 15 times it's been on (it skipped COVID Year), but missed last year's due to a crash in the summer doing bad things to my good leg. While I hate to be so very Old Man about it, I am carrying various injuries and ongoing pains into 2025 and I won't really know if I'm capable of doing another Lap until the summer. I'd like to get to a nice round 15 laps altogether at least though. Shut up, knees.

ROGUE DECLAN MEGADRIVE/GENESIS PORT

A stretch, this, I intend to work on it on and off. A spare-spare time project. I think the game would work well on MegaDrive, I do want to "branch out" a little, and I'd be daft not to squeeze the IP some more since it's gone down quite well on Amiga. It will need some work to fit it into the MegaDrive's measly 64Kb work RAM, but I've already done some experiments there and I think it's doable. It'll need upgraded graphics and redone music, but the team are on board for it already.

SOMETHING SOMETHING SPECTRUM NEXT SOMETHING

Back in the mists of 20mumble I backed the Spectrum Next Kickstarter 2, and the machine finally arrived a few weeks ago at the end of Space Year 2023. It's nice, I've had a little play around with it and poked at some development options but no concrete plans yet. The hardware looks capable, if a little fiddly, but I don't understand why they went with the 64Kb banked memory. That irks me somewhat. Irk Irk. I may not have much time for it anyway.