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HOME / INTERVIEWS / Samo Jordan
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INTERVIEW WITH SAMO JORDANAmigapd would like to thank Samo for for taking time to answer some questions about his wonderful horizontal shoot em up game StarBirds for the Amiga.
You can find out more about Samo and his programing projects at his website. This interview was completed July 2012. |
Starbirds - Samo Jordan - image taken from Samo's website.
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How did you become interested in programming?
SJ: I got my first computer in 1990, as far as I remember. It was an AMIGA 2000 and I first simply used it to play games. I think I got into programming because I always liked to challenge my mind and furthermore programming gave me the opportunity to actually create something, to give shape to my ideas.
On your website you mention you made many programmes in Basic before moving onto assembler programming - what were these programmes and were any released to the public?
SJ: In fact there weren't that many, just a few larger ones, but they were mostly insignificant and I did not release anything. I did not write those programs to achieve a particular purpose, my idea was simply to set up a challenge and
try to achieve the goals.
try to achieve the goals.
How did R-Type, Apidya, Wings of Death inspire Starbirds?
SJ: I was a big fan of old-style shooters and I was also quite good at playing them. I think I was mostly inspired by Wings of Death and its successor, Lethal Xcess, when it came to design Starbirds. For example the weapon system in Starbirds is quite similar to the weapon systems found in the older two shooters. I also wanted to have a high object density in the game, since I liked that particularly in Lethal Xcess, which had an awesome number of objects on the screen, at the expense of running only at 17Hz.
On what amiga systems does Starbirds work for, is it Amiga 500 or Amiga 1200 or both?
SJ: Starbirds should work on every AMIGA, including UAE, it was designed to be as compatible as possible to all different AMIGA models. I do not know whether this goal was fully achieved, but at least it worked flawlessly on my A4000T. I remember that the game ceased to work for systems equipped with certain versions of the BlizzardPPC accelerator board, because their flash ROM automatically loaded the 68040.library, even before the startup-sequence was executed. This probably broke the majority of old games. As far as I remember I wrote a small hack to cure that problem for Starbirds.
The game took 3 years to complete, how did you keep motivated to finish the
project and what was the main reason for the long development time?
SJ: The project mainly took so long, because I had no clue about structured/efficient programming. If I had to write the game now, it would only take a fraction of the time. We had some difficulties motivating ourselves, but managed to overcome those. I think we first wanted to make more levels than four, but then reduced the number, since it would take us way too long to complete the project.
Starbirds - Programmed by Samo Jordan
How did you meet Dario Hardmeier and how did you convince him to join the
Starbirds project?
SJ: As far as I remember I met Dario through his brother. I do not remember how the project actually came about.
I know for sure that we both liked these shooter games, and I vividly remember us two playing Starbirds together, after we were finished with it. That feeling was simply awesome, since we were both very good players and the action factor in Starbirds with two players is very high, especially for the harder difficulty levels.
I know for sure that we both liked these shooter games, and I vividly remember us two playing Starbirds together, after we were finished with it. That feeling was simply awesome, since we were both very good players and the action factor in Starbirds with two players is very high, especially for the harder difficulty levels.
What aspect of Starbirds are you most pleased with?
SJ: Starbirds is on the one hand very compatible among different AMIGA models, but at the same time pushes the AMIGA to its limits. Starbirds has a very high object density, even though it is a horizontal scroller, meaning that one has to deal with the fact that the number of sprites in horizontal direction is limited to eight. I managed to push it up to ten using copper tricks. Another nice thing about Starbirds is that every play is different. This is in contrast to some shooter games, where one can learn the tricky situations by heart and then one always plays these situations in the same way, which makes the game increasingly boring. A simple way to avoid that is simply to let the enemies aim towards your spacecraft so that one has to dodge the shots constantly, which is never done in the precisely same way. This is exactly what happens in Starbirds.
How did you plan the attack waves for the game - were these drawn on paper first
or based on any particular games?
SJ: The attack waves formed in my mind and I directly hacked them into the source code. Many trajectories consist of linear parts, circular parts and oscillations, which I simply glued together. As mentioned above, I worked quite inefficiently. There was exactly one helper tool, which I wrote beforehand, namely a tool to create the background graphics, which Dario then used to glue all his elementary pieces together.
Are you still involved in game programming and if so what are your current
projects?
SJ: Starbirds was my only game ever created. In 1999 I was involved in another game project, which was to port the well-known racing game Wipeout2097 to Amiga/WarpUp/Warp3D. Nowadays I do not write programs in my spare time anymore, but I still do programming at work, where I do simulations in the area of theoretical physics, as part of my PhD project
Download Starbirds
Thank you
AmigaPd would like to thank Samo Jordan for answering the questions and making his game available for the Amiga community.
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We hope you enjoyed reading the interview - remember AmigaPd is charityware - please visit our just giving page to support our chosen charity Mencap.
