Amiga Isometric Devlog #6

31 August 2024

It's been a month or so. Time for another Amiga iso-game devlog.

Last time I felt like the game had reached a milestone and it was time to add some actual content, so that's what I've done.

What has been added is easiest explained in a list!

First rooms from the original game.
Non-square rooms that use invisible colliders to block off areas of the floor.
Player death and restart (room reset) loop. I always like getting this in early.
Jumps tuned to be like the original game, including coyote time.
Entities: two sizes of lift, pushable crates, gates, collapsing floors, deadly floors.
World state change signals.

=> [IMG: None Shall Pass]

The gate objects block the player's path, and can be both static (like a safety barrier) and dynamic, responding to events in the world. The dynamic gates are driven by a set of boolean world state variables. For example, when the player enters or leaves an area collider, or collects an item, a state variable can be set, and game entities can check these to respond accordingly. In the demo video linked below you can see a dynamic gate that "locks" a door behind the player when they enter one of the rooms. This will later unlock when the player collects a particular item (as soon as I implement that particular item in a few rooms' time).

=> [IMG: Fire Bastard]

A special call out also for the Fire Bastard (working name) entity, a box that shoots out four rotating jets of deadly flame. I couldn't replicate the original directly as the Amiga isn't strong on particle systems, but the engine is able to shoot enough indvidual fireballs and handle iso-sorting and collisions at an acceptable rate to replicate the gameplay. And that's what counts! I fully expect there will be more compromises like this to squeeze the game into a 16-bit platform.

All the new rooms and features (including the Fire Bastard) can be seen in this run-through of the first few rooms.

=> [VID: Amiga isometric game WIP 6] | [VID: Amiga isometric game WIP 6 - YouTubeß]

It's looking even more like a game now. The camera needs a little tweak to add a dead zone and maybe not scroll so much all the time. I think also some initial non-programmer graphics might be useful before more rooms are added, to set a palette at least. And I will need to take a look at the original map to see which rooms might be included or not - there's a lot, and I think I might aim to include around 25-30% of them in the Amiga version so I'll have to be picky. There's much variety packed in to the original rooms though so it will be tough to choose a subset.

A video paints a thousand words, so this is quite a short devlog for quite a lot of things being added! September is looking to be busy with other things but we'll swing back to iso-land soon enough afterwards.

Amiga Isometric Devlog #6

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