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HOME / INTERVIEWS / Mathew Carr
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INTERVIEW WITH MATHEW CARRAmigapd would like to thank Matt for agreeing to answer some questions about his game Gravity Beam.
For more information on the game visit the Gravity Beam website. This interview was completed November 2012. Thanks to Lifeschool from Lemon Amiga forum and contributors to our facebook page for providing questions for the interview. |
Gravity Beam - Mathew Carr
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How did you become involved with programming?
Mathew Carr (MC): We had a few Sinclair machines in our house with games like Ghostbusters and Jumping Jack when I was very young. I more or less learned to read by reading the massive manuals that came with them. I was fascinated that there were BASIC games in the back where anybody could get at them and even change them however they wanted. It was hard to copy out programs on the older Sinclairs because they had an odd system where every letter on the keyboard represented a BASIC keyword.
Years later, we got an Amiga 500 and I started collecting tons of weird PD and shareware games from magazines. Every week, I used to go down to the local computer shop and get an Assassins PD disk copied up from the catalogue. I eventually got my own copy of AMOS but I was limited to text-only programs (or excruciatingly slow games that only use the graphical primitives) because I had no idea what I was doing. The local libraries weren't very good for programming books and I didn't know anybody else who was into computers. My AMOS magnum opus is probably a 100-line roulette program somewhere that gives you extra money if you type in your name as 'MATT THE AWESOME'. It was only after I got an Internet connection around 1997 that I could get into programming properly. Even having an unreliable dial-up connection that cut out whenever there was a slight breeze outside was miles better than being
without.
I got DarkBASIC and Blitz Basic for the PC, and I talked my way into a student copy of Flash 5 around the time of animations like Joe Cartoon and Xiaoxiao so I could learn some ActionScript as well. (If I'd have known how big Flash portals would become years later, I'd have stuck with it!) I tried to learn C a few times so I could do 'real programming', but I couldn't get my head around all the extra stuff needed to set up an environment where you could use graphics.
When I read that you could make your own Game Boy Advance games in C with unofficial development software, I knew then I definitely had to learn it. I guess that's when I first did 'real' programming, working my way up through all the tutorials, converting old Blitz game projects into C, writing a Dr. Mario clone for Windows, and a year later I finally got round to writing my GBA game which I rushed together to enter a coding competition (and lost to a superb handheld port of Another World that came right outta nowhere at the last minute).
Years later, we got an Amiga 500 and I started collecting tons of weird PD and shareware games from magazines. Every week, I used to go down to the local computer shop and get an Assassins PD disk copied up from the catalogue. I eventually got my own copy of AMOS but I was limited to text-only programs (or excruciatingly slow games that only use the graphical primitives) because I had no idea what I was doing. The local libraries weren't very good for programming books and I didn't know anybody else who was into computers. My AMOS magnum opus is probably a 100-line roulette program somewhere that gives you extra money if you type in your name as 'MATT THE AWESOME'. It was only after I got an Internet connection around 1997 that I could get into programming properly. Even having an unreliable dial-up connection that cut out whenever there was a slight breeze outside was miles better than being
without.
I got DarkBASIC and Blitz Basic for the PC, and I talked my way into a student copy of Flash 5 around the time of animations like Joe Cartoon and Xiaoxiao so I could learn some ActionScript as well. (If I'd have known how big Flash portals would become years later, I'd have stuck with it!) I tried to learn C a few times so I could do 'real programming', but I couldn't get my head around all the extra stuff needed to set up an environment where you could use graphics.
When I read that you could make your own Game Boy Advance games in C with unofficial development software, I knew then I definitely had to learn it. I guess that's when I first did 'real' programming, working my way up through all the tutorials, converting old Blitz game projects into C, writing a Dr. Mario clone for Windows, and a year later I finally got round to writing my GBA game which I rushed together to enter a coding competition (and lost to a superb handheld port of Another World that came right outta nowhere at the last minute).
What made you decide to make a game for the Amiga rather than a modern game system?
MC: I'd like to write games for every system I can get my hands on!
I've written games for the Game Boy Advance, DS, ZX Spectrum and C64. I've just finished building some basic rewritable cartridges that'll help me make games for the Sega consoles later on.
The A500 was the first computer I ever owned and I've been looking forward to figuring out how to program for it for years. I'd recently finished a small C64 game in 6502 assembly, so I figured it was about time that I got to grips with 68000 assembly and learned how to program the Amiga for real.
As for modern systems, that covers a lot. I can only write software for things I own, so if you'd like to buy me something like an OUYA, OpenPandora or Raspberry Pi, go right ahead! :P
For the big consoles, I remember that once upon a time you could run your own code on your own Sony Playstation 3 though. It's true! Ask your dad.
The Xbox 360 has its own crazy world where you need to pay money to run software you wrote on the hardware you own, which is something I have no interest in whatsoever. It took me some time to work out exactly whether or not
you need a regular 'Xbox LIVE Indie Games' subscription to do it. Microsoft doesn't make this very clear. Turns out you do!
In the smartphone world, I was a fair bit into producing a puzzle game for Android when it all went a bit pear-shaped. I'd gotten to the stage where all of the gameplay mechanics and interface code were blocked in and I was ready to start recruiting artists and musicians.
I bought myself relatively early phone, thinking that if I could get my game running well on a simple phone it would surely work on everybody else's more sophisticated phones. I sent the game off to a few dozen other Android owners I knew to see how compatible my engine was. The results I got back were... disheartening to say the least. The game didn't work for *any* of them; every single tester reported a wholly different set of bizarre and unpredictable errors.
With the game appearing fully functional on my own Android hardware and PC (through cross-compilation), I had no way to test for these errors short of asking everybody to lend me their phones for six months or buying one of every Android phone I could find. Bugger it.
I've written games for the Game Boy Advance, DS, ZX Spectrum and C64. I've just finished building some basic rewritable cartridges that'll help me make games for the Sega consoles later on.
The A500 was the first computer I ever owned and I've been looking forward to figuring out how to program for it for years. I'd recently finished a small C64 game in 6502 assembly, so I figured it was about time that I got to grips with 68000 assembly and learned how to program the Amiga for real.
As for modern systems, that covers a lot. I can only write software for things I own, so if you'd like to buy me something like an OUYA, OpenPandora or Raspberry Pi, go right ahead! :P
For the big consoles, I remember that once upon a time you could run your own code on your own Sony Playstation 3 though. It's true! Ask your dad.
The Xbox 360 has its own crazy world where you need to pay money to run software you wrote on the hardware you own, which is something I have no interest in whatsoever. It took me some time to work out exactly whether or not
you need a regular 'Xbox LIVE Indie Games' subscription to do it. Microsoft doesn't make this very clear. Turns out you do!
In the smartphone world, I was a fair bit into producing a puzzle game for Android when it all went a bit pear-shaped. I'd gotten to the stage where all of the gameplay mechanics and interface code were blocked in and I was ready to start recruiting artists and musicians.
I bought myself relatively early phone, thinking that if I could get my game running well on a simple phone it would surely work on everybody else's more sophisticated phones. I sent the game off to a few dozen other Android owners I knew to see how compatible my engine was. The results I got back were... disheartening to say the least. The game didn't work for *any* of them; every single tester reported a wholly different set of bizarre and unpredictable errors.
With the game appearing fully functional on my own Android hardware and PC (through cross-compilation), I had no way to test for these errors short of asking everybody to lend me their phones for six months or buying one of every Android phone I could find. Bugger it.
Image taken from Mathew Carr's Website
Is Gravity Beam the first game you have shared with the public?
MC: Nope. :)
The first 'full' game I made was probably Blast Arena Advance, an avoid-'em-up arcade game for the Game Boy Advance. After that, I ported Lemmings to the Nintendo DS, complete with all the level packs and a level editor.
There's a whole bunch of prototypes I created for university around that time that should really go on my website, along with some half-baked experimental games and Flash applets that didn't quite work for one reason or another.
Commercially, I was involved with Sony's Studio Liverpool before they shut down, and I've done some freelance work since then that you might have seen.
The first 'full' game I made was probably Blast Arena Advance, an avoid-'em-up arcade game for the Game Boy Advance. After that, I ported Lemmings to the Nintendo DS, complete with all the level packs and a level editor.
There's a whole bunch of prototypes I created for university around that time that should really go on my website, along with some half-baked experimental games and Flash applets that didn't quite work for one reason or another.
Commercially, I was involved with Sony's Studio Liverpool before they shut down, and I've done some freelance work since then that you might have seen.
How did you keep yourself motivated to get the project to an almost finished stage?
MC:
In March, I thought it was finished. There was a working game, three levels, the smallest MOD music I could find lying around and an icky looking dithery title screen. Not exactly a system seller, but it could comfortably go on an early 90's coverdisk, so up it went.
Then Retro Gamer magazine mention Gravity Beam off-hand in a box-out in their homebrew section and everything goes wild.
The purpose of Beam was to allow me to get to grips with the Amiga; I honestly didn't expect much interest in the result and definitely not a mention in a magazine. The messages I got from folks asking about Beam provided a major impetus to putting some proper guts into the game. Between April and now, almost every line of code in the game has been rewritten and optimised. It's now bigger and much smoother than before. There's also in-depth documentation on how the game works and how to add your own levels into it!
Then Retro Gamer magazine mention Gravity Beam off-hand in a box-out in their homebrew section and everything goes wild.
The purpose of Beam was to allow me to get to grips with the Amiga; I honestly didn't expect much interest in the result and definitely not a mention in a magazine. The messages I got from folks asking about Beam provided a major impetus to putting some proper guts into the game. Between April and now, almost every line of code in the game has been rewritten and optimised. It's now bigger and much smoother than before. There's also in-depth documentation on how the game works and how to add your own levels into it!
What has the feedback been like from the Amiga community and has this led to any changes to the game?
MC: When I posted the first version of the game to the English Amiga Board in April, the response was very positive. I received a lot of suggestions from players, many reasonable, some unpracticable without tearing the game apart, and some I didn't quite understand. Somebody suggested that one of the levels could have multiple random boxes, including a fake box that explodes when you try to pick it up... I'm not sure that players would have appreciated that
one. :)
I enjoy reading all the messages I receive about the game, and I try to reply when I can. Even a curt message saying that“such-and-such-a-level is broken and the game is a load of rubbish” is helpful! Although I tried to take care when placing the collision, there's no way to automate that kind of testing. Every time a piece of unfair level geometry is reported I'm very grateful.
one. :)
I enjoy reading all the messages I receive about the game, and I try to reply when I can. Even a curt message saying that“such-and-such-a-level is broken and the game is a load of rubbish” is helpful! Although I tried to take care when placing the collision, there's no way to automate that kind of testing. Every time a piece of unfair level geometry is reported I'm very grateful.
Gravity Beam - Mathew Carr
Youtube Video by mattkamineko
If you were to make a sequel to Gravity Beam, what extra features would you
include?
MC: A map. I like maps. Whenever I play a game that doesn't have a map, I feel like the game is deliberately wasting my time by being obtuse. Bob's Bad Day shows you a perfectly fine map before the level begins, for example, so I've got no excuse.
Maybe if I'd made Beam back in 1990, you'd get a glossy poster with all the level maps on or something in return for your Gravity Beam registration fee. :) If the Gravity Beam 2 Kickstarter reaches £1,000,000, the GB2 boxed set will include a real 1/72 scale Greenwing spacecraft model kit and a cloth map! (I kid, I kid!)
Like a lot of Amiga games, Beam doesn't have simultaneous sound and music. I'm just not an audio programmer. You can't do audio programming while listening to music! I could spend months writing a sound engine that correctly interfaced with the Amiga chipset, but I almost certainly wouldn't enjoy doing it and I'd expect the result wouldn't be quick enough to allow the game to run alongside it. Before I added the ProTracker music routine, the game only had a thrust sound effect that changed pitch based on your speed and it made the game feel really bland.
There's plenty of user-friendliness features that the next GB should have. Maybe a more obvious high-score table, flashier awarding of medals, tracking pilots by their username. I'd like a 'rewind' ability where folks could retry difficult sections of the level without having to restart completely.
At the moment there's no way to know the crate's remaining health, which is a tad unfair. It would be nice to be able to have some indication whether the create has plenty of health or just one good knock left in it, but there's not a lot of spare processing time left to draw a meter. That's the same reason why the player's ship is indestructible. (Making the ship indestructible also allows the player to be reckless as they like with the ship, particularly when approaching the crate.)
Having a built-in level editor on the Amiga side wouldn't hurt. Everybody loves a good level editor. At the moment, the game is hard-coded to the Mars scenario. For folks to be able to add their own planets with their own music and their own graphics, you'd have to re-code the interface and add in tons of loading-unloading code (and with that comes validation code, so that simply having a malformed planet file doesn't cause the game to explode on you).
More importantly, the current level editing system on PC could do with some automation features. Currently, the level author first designs the level layout with the graphical tiles, and they have to then lay out the collision polygons on top of that *manually* which takes quite some time unfortunately.
Maybe if I'd made Beam back in 1990, you'd get a glossy poster with all the level maps on or something in return for your Gravity Beam registration fee. :) If the Gravity Beam 2 Kickstarter reaches £1,000,000, the GB2 boxed set will include a real 1/72 scale Greenwing spacecraft model kit and a cloth map! (I kid, I kid!)
Like a lot of Amiga games, Beam doesn't have simultaneous sound and music. I'm just not an audio programmer. You can't do audio programming while listening to music! I could spend months writing a sound engine that correctly interfaced with the Amiga chipset, but I almost certainly wouldn't enjoy doing it and I'd expect the result wouldn't be quick enough to allow the game to run alongside it. Before I added the ProTracker music routine, the game only had a thrust sound effect that changed pitch based on your speed and it made the game feel really bland.
There's plenty of user-friendliness features that the next GB should have. Maybe a more obvious high-score table, flashier awarding of medals, tracking pilots by their username. I'd like a 'rewind' ability where folks could retry difficult sections of the level without having to restart completely.
At the moment there's no way to know the crate's remaining health, which is a tad unfair. It would be nice to be able to have some indication whether the create has plenty of health or just one good knock left in it, but there's not a lot of spare processing time left to draw a meter. That's the same reason why the player's ship is indestructible. (Making the ship indestructible also allows the player to be reckless as they like with the ship, particularly when approaching the crate.)
Having a built-in level editor on the Amiga side wouldn't hurt. Everybody loves a good level editor. At the moment, the game is hard-coded to the Mars scenario. For folks to be able to add their own planets with their own music and their own graphics, you'd have to re-code the interface and add in tons of loading-unloading code (and with that comes validation code, so that simply having a malformed planet file doesn't cause the game to explode on you).
More importantly, the current level editing system on PC could do with some automation features. Currently, the level author first designs the level layout with the graphical tiles, and they have to then lay out the collision polygons on top of that *manually* which takes quite some time unfortunately.
Were there any particular games which inspired you when creating Gravity Beam?
MC: “Gravity Force 2”. Fast-paced Thrust-like dogfighting action game for two players. (Amiga Power, Issue 39. Probably the best coverdisk in the universe ever.)
“Tractor Beam” by James Lean. Slow-paced, extraordinarily tense, highly technical, single-screen AMOS Lander-like game for one player. (The One, Issue 57)
Put 'em together, and what do you get? Gravity Beam!
I suppose you could think of Beam as a 20-year anniversary tribute to the original Tractor Beam.
The final product is pretty similar to other Thrust or Lander games, but I think it most resembles the special missions from Stardust where you have to use Thrust controls to move the Stardust ship through a cramped underwater-like maze.
There's another game which I thought I'd unintentionally copied some stuff from called R3: The Art of Rocketry, but I played it recently and it's nothing like GB. You do deliver crates from one place to another in R3, but it's closer to Air Taxi.
The spiritual sequel to Gravity Beam would of course have to be called 'Tractor Force'. It would be similar to Llamasoft's Hovver Bovver, but on a much larger scale. Maybe a twin-stick shooter where you have to plough a field while fending off attacks from giant robot dogs using a sci-fi repulsion ray codenamed 'Tractor Force'.
“Tractor Beam” by James Lean. Slow-paced, extraordinarily tense, highly technical, single-screen AMOS Lander-like game for one player. (The One, Issue 57)
Put 'em together, and what do you get? Gravity Beam!
I suppose you could think of Beam as a 20-year anniversary tribute to the original Tractor Beam.
The final product is pretty similar to other Thrust or Lander games, but I think it most resembles the special missions from Stardust where you have to use Thrust controls to move the Stardust ship through a cramped underwater-like maze.
There's another game which I thought I'd unintentionally copied some stuff from called R3: The Art of Rocketry, but I played it recently and it's nothing like GB. You do deliver crates from one place to another in R3, but it's closer to Air Taxi.
The spiritual sequel to Gravity Beam would of course have to be called 'Tractor Force'. It would be similar to Llamasoft's Hovver Bovver, but on a much larger scale. Maybe a twin-stick shooter where you have to plough a field while fending off attacks from giant robot dogs using a sci-fi repulsion ray codenamed 'Tractor Force'.
Screenshot from Mathew Carr's website
What aspect of the game creation caused you the most problems?
MC: It would be quicker to list the aspects which didn't cause me problems.
Out of all the systems I've coded games for, the Amiga is the most difficult. It's a brittle menace! Just setting up the screen requires you to learn to a secondary macro language to control the copper. Major kudos is due to the authors of the Amiga System Programmers Guide for including bona-fide compiling sample code! Something as simple as reading the state of the joysticks and mice means you have to interact with the dicey sounding CIA lines and twiddle bit values around. If you want to check the second button on a two-button joystick as well, you have to look in a completely different place altogether! I still haven't a clue how to interact with the keyboard.
I'd never programmed an Amiga game before, so the entire project was a learning experience. I tried to keep the game as simple as possible so that it would play at 60 frames per second and have the same fluid, loose camera motion as Wiz 'n' Liz, which I believe I accomplished, I'm proud to say. I was continuously discovering new techniques as I developed each part of the game; if I were to make an 'Oh No! More Gravity Beam'-like sequel, it would probably be
very different internally.
There were some times where I thought I'd hit a completely insoluble problem and wanted to give up on the game completely. Things like unpredictable crashes, graphical glitches with the scrolling, unpredictable lock-ups during the collision check, complete unresponsiveness when I tried to do disk access, or the game working on A1200s when booting from floppy but not when loading from the HDD or vice-versa. Almost all of them were due to oversights on my part, but there were some Amiga-specific secret things that I couldn't have figured out in a million years. In nearly every case, when I put my questions to them, the gurus of the English Amiga Board were right on the money instantly.
Out of all the systems I've coded games for, the Amiga is the most difficult. It's a brittle menace! Just setting up the screen requires you to learn to a secondary macro language to control the copper. Major kudos is due to the authors of the Amiga System Programmers Guide for including bona-fide compiling sample code! Something as simple as reading the state of the joysticks and mice means you have to interact with the dicey sounding CIA lines and twiddle bit values around. If you want to check the second button on a two-button joystick as well, you have to look in a completely different place altogether! I still haven't a clue how to interact with the keyboard.
I'd never programmed an Amiga game before, so the entire project was a learning experience. I tried to keep the game as simple as possible so that it would play at 60 frames per second and have the same fluid, loose camera motion as Wiz 'n' Liz, which I believe I accomplished, I'm proud to say. I was continuously discovering new techniques as I developed each part of the game; if I were to make an 'Oh No! More Gravity Beam'-like sequel, it would probably be
very different internally.
There were some times where I thought I'd hit a completely insoluble problem and wanted to give up on the game completely. Things like unpredictable crashes, graphical glitches with the scrolling, unpredictable lock-ups during the collision check, complete unresponsiveness when I tried to do disk access, or the game working on A1200s when booting from floppy but not when loading from the HDD or vice-versa. Almost all of them were due to oversights on my part, but there were some Amiga-specific secret things that I couldn't have figured out in a million years. In nearly every case, when I put my questions to them, the gurus of the English Amiga Board were right on the money instantly.
Has the game a 100% individual effort or did you have any help with coding, music etc?
MC: The Gravity Beam game and interface code was my own work, and I've got the bloodshot eyes and unkempt beard to prove it.
There are two short but invaluable routines used in the simulation that help Beam run as fast as it does: there's an integer square root routine by Nyh (http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=4984) and a pseudo-random number routine by Lee Davison. (http://mycorner.no-ip.org/68k/prng/index.html)
I didn't write the music routine, I used “Protracker V2.3A Playroutine VBlank V2” from an archive of players I found on Aminet. Even though it's a million years old, it somehow still assembled with the modern assembler and ran, so I wasn't going to mess with it.
My brother Jon wrote the ingame 'calm' music theme, which set the general theme of the other tracks, written by myself. I originally thought of having the calm/panic/results/menu music scores as patterns within a single song, so common instruments are only loaded once and saved on memory (Deus Ex on the PC does the same thing with its 'undiscovered' and 'combat' themes), but that would make it more difficult to replace the MODs with your own.
I drew all the graphics you see in the game, with the exception of the Mars background used on the title screen and level select. That's based on a public domain image by NASA from the NSSDC Viking Orbiter Raw Image Archive, redrawn. I also designed and laid out the levels. (Speaking of which, I'd never heard of the Curiosity Mars rover until some time in July before it was due to land. It was entirely a coincidence that I set the game on Mars!)
The original old title screen is an illustration which I put together in Photoshop and downsampled to fit the Amiga's palette. To make the new title screen, I went back a few revisions and redrew the ship and crate in an Amiga sprite style (which I always think looks like it could be from a Zeppelin title screen, even though it looks nothing like that in
reality).
There are two short but invaluable routines used in the simulation that help Beam run as fast as it does: there's an integer square root routine by Nyh (http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=4984) and a pseudo-random number routine by Lee Davison. (http://mycorner.no-ip.org/68k/prng/index.html)
I didn't write the music routine, I used “Protracker V2.3A Playroutine VBlank V2” from an archive of players I found on Aminet. Even though it's a million years old, it somehow still assembled with the modern assembler and ran, so I wasn't going to mess with it.
My brother Jon wrote the ingame 'calm' music theme, which set the general theme of the other tracks, written by myself. I originally thought of having the calm/panic/results/menu music scores as patterns within a single song, so common instruments are only loaded once and saved on memory (Deus Ex on the PC does the same thing with its 'undiscovered' and 'combat' themes), but that would make it more difficult to replace the MODs with your own.
I drew all the graphics you see in the game, with the exception of the Mars background used on the title screen and level select. That's based on a public domain image by NASA from the NSSDC Viking Orbiter Raw Image Archive, redrawn. I also designed and laid out the levels. (Speaking of which, I'd never heard of the Curiosity Mars rover until some time in July before it was due to land. It was entirely a coincidence that I set the game on Mars!)
The original old title screen is an illustration which I put together in Photoshop and downsampled to fit the Amiga's palette. To make the new title screen, I went back a few revisions and redrew the ship and crate in an Amiga sprite style (which I always think looks like it could be from a Zeppelin title screen, even though it looks nothing like that in
reality).
What hardware and software did you use to make Gravity Beam?
MC: The game code was written on a very creaky Windows XP computer made out of spare bits. To test the game, I copy the assembled game into a directory with all the game files, which is then mounted in WinUAE as a hard drive. To test the game for real, the code is copied to the Amiga on a CrossDOS disk or zapped over on a null-modem cable courtesy of Amiga Explorer. (I can't believe that AE worked first time. That's some kind of sorcery right there.)
I have an A500 and an A1200 which I use for testing, but very little of the game was prepared on the Amiga side. All I can think of was the final preparation of the GB disk; the formatting, the bootblock, the icon, stuff like that. I couldn't imagine how long it would have taken to program the game on the real machines as I don't have a freezer cartridge or Action Replay. If the game crashes or glitches on the real hardware all I learn is 'it doesn't work'. WinUAE lets me quickly start the game, break into execution and view the contents of the Amiga's memory to figure out what's up. It's absolutely essential. And thoroughly amazing in all respects.
Oh yeah, I've also got a CD32. I wonder... Gravity Beam could be just a couple of routines away from CD-quality music! I hadn't thought of that before...
The Gravity Beam game code was written in Motorola 68000 assembly code, cross assembled using vasmm68k_mot in Windows XP.
The levels were made in an editor called 'Tiled' which I definitely recommend. It's cross-platform, it's free and it -works-. . And purely by coincidence it has a line drawing mode which matched exactly with what I wanted to use for Gravity Beam's scenery collision.
The graphics were drawn by myself in Paint Shop Pro 4. There's also another editor called Usenti by Coranac which I sometimes use for dealing with tiled graphics or reorganising image palettes. It has a configurable number of bits-per-channel, so you can set it to match the Amiga's 4 bits-per-channel colour format, and it also has some convenient export options.
I have an A500 and an A1200 which I use for testing, but very little of the game was prepared on the Amiga side. All I can think of was the final preparation of the GB disk; the formatting, the bootblock, the icon, stuff like that. I couldn't imagine how long it would have taken to program the game on the real machines as I don't have a freezer cartridge or Action Replay. If the game crashes or glitches on the real hardware all I learn is 'it doesn't work'. WinUAE lets me quickly start the game, break into execution and view the contents of the Amiga's memory to figure out what's up. It's absolutely essential. And thoroughly amazing in all respects.
Oh yeah, I've also got a CD32. I wonder... Gravity Beam could be just a couple of routines away from CD-quality music! I hadn't thought of that before...
The Gravity Beam game code was written in Motorola 68000 assembly code, cross assembled using vasmm68k_mot in Windows XP.
The levels were made in an editor called 'Tiled' which I definitely recommend. It's cross-platform, it's free and it -works-. . And purely by coincidence it has a line drawing mode which matched exactly with what I wanted to use for Gravity Beam's scenery collision.
The graphics were drawn by myself in Paint Shop Pro 4. There's also another editor called Usenti by Coranac which I sometimes use for dealing with tiled graphics or reorganising image palettes. It has a configurable number of bits-per-channel, so you can set it to match the Amiga's 4 bits-per-channel colour format, and it also has some convenient export options.
Screenshot from Mathew Carr's website
Do you still play amiga games and have you tried recent releases such as Downfall or Sqrxz?
MC: I haven't been keeping track of new Amiga releases as much as I ought to, I'm afraid. I was never on BBS or newsgroups on the Amiga, so when I stopped getting Amiga magazines around 1995 I fell out of contact with all
things Amiga. By the time I got a reliable Internet connection, they were all packed away. The atmosphere around the daft PD Blitz Basic and AMOS games I used to like was alive and well around the PC version of Blitz Basic and DarkBASIC (which in many ways reminds me of AMOS), so I assumed most Amiga work had stopped. I'm pleased to see that that's not the case. :)
When I find an Amiga game that looks interesting, I like to do it justice by playing it on the real hardware but sometimes that's just not possible. I was very pleasantly surprised by the first person shooter Genetic Species for example, but to play that on a real Amiga at any decent rate it has to be a high-end workstation-style Amiga with a CD drive. Super expensive, and I probably wouldn't have the first idea how to set it up in the first place! I think you need a CD drive to play onEscapee as well.
Although they're old, I still play my Amigas when I can wrest another day's life out of one of them. Sadly, some of my older games are fading away and I don't know how long they'll last until the magic wears off completely.
I have played the new Amiga remake of Sqrxz, and it is very hard! I think I got about a third of the way into it before I had to stop before I chucked a joystick through a wall. A very accurate port indeed! :)
things Amiga. By the time I got a reliable Internet connection, they were all packed away. The atmosphere around the daft PD Blitz Basic and AMOS games I used to like was alive and well around the PC version of Blitz Basic and DarkBASIC (which in many ways reminds me of AMOS), so I assumed most Amiga work had stopped. I'm pleased to see that that's not the case. :)
When I find an Amiga game that looks interesting, I like to do it justice by playing it on the real hardware but sometimes that's just not possible. I was very pleasantly surprised by the first person shooter Genetic Species for example, but to play that on a real Amiga at any decent rate it has to be a high-end workstation-style Amiga with a CD drive. Super expensive, and I probably wouldn't have the first idea how to set it up in the first place! I think you need a CD drive to play onEscapee as well.
Although they're old, I still play my Amigas when I can wrest another day's life out of one of them. Sadly, some of my older games are fading away and I don't know how long they'll last until the magic wears off completely.
I have played the new Amiga remake of Sqrxz, and it is very hard! I think I got about a third of the way into it before I had to stop before I chucked a joystick through a wall. A very accurate port indeed! :)
Once Gravity Beam if finally completed could you be tempted to make another Amiga game and if so what type of game would you like to make?
MC: I could be tempted to make another Amiga game as long as there are Amigas left standing to play it on!
I think the home computer Amigas (the A500, A600 and A1200) always 'nearly had' their own truly great platformer, their own Super Mario World, but they never quite got it. I remember many of the Amigas' original platformers fondly, but they do suffer from their own complaints that make them fleetingly enjoyable but ultimately disappointing experiences. If somebody wanted to make an outstanding original platformer, they'd need to really take their time, learn from all the mistakes of other games (in terms of both game and software design) and figure out what exactly the system is capable of.
Also I always found it odd that the Amiga had very few, if any, Japanese style RPGs. There were European RPGs like Ishar, but playing those was like watching somebody paint a picture of somebody watching paint dry. JRPG games don't have much motion, especially the early ones. Why couldn't the Amiga have its own Final Fantasy or Shin Megami Tensei? The Amiga is more than capable of playing music while displaying a colourful, mostly static high-res picture of Satan for you to throw numbers at. Somebody get Traveller's Tales or KAIKO on the phone!
I think the home computer Amigas (the A500, A600 and A1200) always 'nearly had' their own truly great platformer, their own Super Mario World, but they never quite got it. I remember many of the Amigas' original platformers fondly, but they do suffer from their own complaints that make them fleetingly enjoyable but ultimately disappointing experiences. If somebody wanted to make an outstanding original platformer, they'd need to really take their time, learn from all the mistakes of other games (in terms of both game and software design) and figure out what exactly the system is capable of.
Also I always found it odd that the Amiga had very few, if any, Japanese style RPGs. There were European RPGs like Ishar, but playing those was like watching somebody paint a picture of somebody watching paint dry. JRPG games don't have much motion, especially the early ones. Why couldn't the Amiga have its own Final Fantasy or Shin Megami Tensei? The Amiga is more than capable of playing music while displaying a colourful, mostly static high-res picture of Satan for you to throw numbers at. Somebody get Traveller's Tales or KAIKO on the phone!
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Thank you
AmigaPd would like to thank Mathew Carr for taking the time to answer these questions.
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