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Amiga PD CharitywareAmiga PD is a charityware site - if you download any disk images you are encouraged to donate to our chosen charity - Mencap - at our justgiving page.
Suggested donations are £1 per disk image download as this was the cost of obtaining a disk back in the 1990s. Thank you. |
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Interview - Mattis FolkestadMatt Folkestad has kindly given his time to answer some questions on his Amiga game Madhouse a graphic adventure inspired by the Monkey Island adventure games which were popular on the Amiga.
AmigaPd would like to thank Lifeschool from the Lemon Amiga forum for again providing the research for the questions used in this interview. We hope you enjoy reading the answers. How did you first become involved in writing computer games?I bought a used Commodore 64 in my early teens and started experimenting with writing simple Basic programs. I loved that little box. I mostly made some text adventures with elaborate ASCII graphics, and remember designing 3-colour sprites on graph paper. I also painted a bit in Koala Painter, and was envious of the Amiga 500s that had appeared in our neightbourhood in northern Norway. When I was 15-16 I bought my first Amiga 500 and I loved everything about it. I enjoyed drawing and animating in DeluxePaint, making music in OctaMed and after a while making simple games and programs in Amos. I felt the computer was a great way of expressing myself and experimenting with technology. And of course, I loved playing all kinds of games on the Amiga.
How did you go about creating the graphics? Did you use a custom editor or DPaint?Everything was painted and animated with the original Commodore mouse in DeluxePaint IV. I'm surprised I never developed carpal tunnel syndrome!
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Madhouse - Walk throughThe above YouTube video was made by www.recordedamigagames.org - it is a complete walkthrough so avoid watching all the way through if you don't want the puzzles spoilt.
Download - Madhouse
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How did you find Amos Pro compared to other programming languages?
I read a little about assembly programming, and was immediately turned off. Basic was understandable, and Amos Pro was a complete package and fairly easy to work with, coming from C64 Basic. I never studied programming, I was always a "try-until-it-works" kind of bloke. I loved that I could import songs from OctaMed and artwork from DPaint easily. Today, I think Flash is most comparable to Amos Pro. Very visual-oriented and pretty easy for beginners, and well suited for games. .
Was Madhouse the first game you ever coded?
Before Madhouse I made some smaller stuff that was never released. This was before the internet, so projects not up to scratch usually stayed at home. I made a math title for kids called Icarus and lots and lots of small games and demos that I forced my friends to play and look at. A lot of games were started and never finished, including an underwater fighting game. Pretty understandable, in retrospect.
What inspired you to make Madhouse - Indian Spirit?
I loved the LucasArt games, Monkey 1 and 2 being my favourites. I loved the comedy, the design, the story element and the wacky no-rules, inventive narrative. Madhouse was very much inspired by all the games LucasArts had made up until then. I really wanted to make something that other people would enjoy, and I believed the adventure genre was both techically and visually within reach. LucasArts stopped supporting the Amiga around that time, and I was really sad to see the new games only appearing on the ugly PC's.
Madhouse requires a 2MB Amiga and a hard drive installation, and can't be played from floppy. What was the reason behind this?
I started working on Madhouse on my Amiga 1200 which had 2 megs of RAM, and quickly realized I had to use all of it to use large BOBs and backgrounds. I figured most of the Amiga people had upgraded to 2 megs when I wrote it. I'm pretty sure you can play it from floppy, if you enjoy painful loading times. You had to assign the two disks to the HD path manually, so I guess at least if you have an extra floppy drive you could just use those. Luckily, it works rather well on the current Amiga emulators.
Did you develop the Madhouse concept using story-boards, or a narrative structure first, or did you just make the screens and develop the story later?
I'm pretty sure I had the whole thing in my head the whole time. I might have written down some key points with the puzzles and story, but I never made any storyboards. I learned about those years later when studying for my Bachelor of Animation. I went -"Ahhh, that was a pretty good idea!"
In Madhouse we play a janitor in a mental institution. Was this based on personal experience or was it just a fun thing to do?
It was just a wacky setup. I was in my last year of High School (17-18 years) when I made it, and had no working experience short of cleaning my underwear from time to time. A mental institution meant I could create some really weird characters. My favourite is Short-Sight Anna, which just lies in her bed with the biggest pair of glasses known to man.
Unlike almost every other adventure on the Amiga, Madhouse uses no text parser, action buttons, pull-down menus or even right mouse clicks, and simply relies on a single joystick and fire button. Was this intentional as part of the game design or just something you discovered by accident?
The reason for the unusual joystick control was simply that I wasn't able to program a click-and-walk routine. My amibitions were bigger than my programming competence. But I also remember arguing to myself that I wanted to make a fun story-driven game, not a use-fish-tank-with-african-shaving-cream-kinda game where the puzzles took a million tries to get right. I loved the LucasArts adventures, but hated the hard puzzles. I cheated a lot!
The introduction to the game looks and feels very professional. Did you take inspiration from any other classic Amiga titles?
Thanks! I think Day Of The Tentacle might have been released around that time and I loved the cartoony design. Actually, the first few screens have a slightly different style than the later ones. I started playing with exaggarated perspective more, and a more clear and simple design for the different rooms.
Shortly after we solve the second puzzle in the game, we find a very humorous shareware donation advert. What reaction did you get from doing this?
After sending the game to different Public Domain libraries in the UK, nothing happened. Then, about three months later a letter came in the mail from some bloke in the UK who loved the game. The envelope was opened and the £5 was missing. That was it. The "please pay the shareware fee" rap didn't have the resounding impact on the world as I thought!
The music is quite memorable too, especially the end theme. Who coded the music?
I did the music in OctaMed, sampling my pink Ibanez guitar with my Megamix Master sampler. I started making and recording music long before I started dabbling with computers.
How long did it take you to complete the project, start to finish?
I'm pretty sure it took almost a year. I started summer 1994 and the game was finished sometime in 1995, if I remember correctly. It was a huge project, probably the largest I've ever undertaken!
Did you encounter any problems or experience an funny incidents during programming?
I remember having friends over to play the game while I was making it. Having them laugh at the silly puns was very encouraging. I had a lot of problems regarding game logic and the code grew very, very, very long. It would probably make any seasoned programmer throw up a little. It was hard at the end keeping track of everything. Oh, and I remember some bugs in Amos Pro where some pixels were cut out from the sprites. You can see it sometimes when Greg talks, his feet have this weird glitch. I never figured out what was wrong.
I see from your Machineboy web site that you're still involved in producing and releasing shareware titles: such as Flap Flap for the Iphone ($0.99). Is the shareware scene still a productive and viable experience for you?
I work as a developer for NRK (The Norwegian BBC) and still make games and fun apps. My encounter with Amos Pro certainly rubbed off. In my spare time I still make music, and as you mentioned I've released the game Flap Flap for iPhone. I've also made a virtual Jew's Harp for iPhone and have concrete plans for new games. The shareware scene was probably never viable as a proper income channel for Amiga titles, but I see the App Store and similar virtual stores as a great opportunity for indies to create and sell great, inventive titles.
What's next? Anything lined up you can share with us?
Right now I'm finishing off an EP with my own music. Soft rock stuff with lots of harmonies. Look out for "Marabakke" on your favourite mp3 store this autumn, or check my website www.machineboy.com for news.
Thank you for taking time to answer the questions.
Thanks, it really means a lot that people appreciate my work! I found a long play video of Madhouse on youtube earlier this year, and it really made me smile!
If you like graphic adventures check out our Top Ten Point and Click Games page. Perhaps you might want to vote for Mad House.
If you like graphic adventures check out our Top Ten Point and Click Games page. Perhaps you might want to vote for Mad House.
