With thanks to Nick Thorpe for helping complete the column while I was in hospital after surgery.
SLOANYSOFT INTERVIEW - Davey Sloan
What gave you the idea to start Sloanysoft with your son?
It all started when Nate showed me some of the games he’d coded at primary school using Scratch. It reminded me of playing about with Spectrum games as a kid, changing a few things in BASIC listings and harbouring an ambition to make games of my own. It was during lockdown, and I had a bit of time on my hands that it dawned on me that with all the modern resources available and the help of the friendly Speccy community that we could have a crack at making something here. Our first game, Manic Mulholland, only took a few weeks and was really just intended to be a little surprise for my friend Peter, but we’ve been so overwhelmed by how nice people have been about our silly little games that it spurred us on to make more games and release them for folk to play through sloanysoft.itch.io.
What tools do you use to create the games?
Jonathan Cauldwell's Multi-Platform Arcade Game Designer (MPAGD) and ZX Paintbrush for the loading screens and we have been very fortunate to have the talented Mike Richmond and DJ h0ffman providing AY music which I believe was made with Vortex Tracker.
What has been your favourite game to work on so far?
It’s difficult to say, I loved making Forward to the Past as it was a very personal story, the RetroHitch game involved input and ideas from some lovely people in his Discord and Janky Joe was great fun as I got to include homages to a few of my favourite games, introducing Nate to some of the classics.
How do you divide up the development tasks between you, and who has the most ideas that make it in?
It’s all very organic, we’re always bouncing silly ideas off each other, usually on walks in the nearby park. Nate comes up with lots of fantastical ideas and designs, then I spend a lot of time trying to fit them into the restrictions of a 41-year-old budget microcomputer. As Nate has such a logical mind, he often helps me with the bug fixing.
Are you currently working on anything new?
It’s been on the back burner for a bit, but we have started working on a follow-up to Forward to the Past with some mechanics from my favourite game of all time, Bubble Bobble. This interview may spur us on to make some progress with that.
Would you encourage other parents to try coding with their kids?
100%! It was an absolute lifesaver during the pandemic, it gave us both a focus and kept us sane. The main thing is to have fun with it, nobody is going to get rich making homebrew for old computers. It’s all about learning new things spending quality time and engaging with a fantastic community. Even if you have zero experience coding, there are so many helpful resources out there to guide you through. Sure there may already be somewhere in the region of 40,000 games in the Spectrum archives, but there's always room for more!
NEWS BYTES
AMIGA: Krogharr: The Beerserker video at https://youtu.be/cROJdLq0ZUO
C64: SNK vs Capcom YouTube link and download at https://bit.ly/SvC64
GAME BOY: Aaling The Ghost progress at https://bit.ly/AalingGBC
MEGA DRIVE: ZPF demo ROM at https://bit.ly/3S5wquD
MSX: Snake And Rhino In The Sketchbook bit.ly/SnRMSX
ORIC: The Smiths Are Dead text adventure, also on C64 bit.ly/SmithsText
SATURN: Metal Gear Solid demo video at youtu.be/aLZcn6WFMjA
VARIOUS: Stinger by Fabrizio Caruso bit.ly/CrossLibStinger
ZX SPECTRUM: Haoken by Hicks (128K machines) bit.ly/Haoken
CHAMPION CODER - JOHN GIRVIN
Name: John Girvin
From: Northern Ireland
Website: nivrig.com
Format: Amiga, Mobile
Previous Games: Turbo Tomato, Dodgy Rocks, Solitaire, Atoms
Working on: Rogue Declan Zero, Isometric Amiga adventure, Mysterious licensed IP
John won the recent AmiGameJam: Swords & Sorcery with Rogue Declan Zero, under the Nivrig Games label.
When did you start writing Amiga games?
It would have been some time in 1992, though I got an Amiga in the middle of 1991 and probably started figuring out how to code on it not long after. I'd made a lot of simple(ish) games on the 8-bit systems I had before that (VIC-20 and Amstrad CPC), which are now unfortunately all lost to time. Over the next few years I managed to finish two simple Amiga games (Atoms and Daleks), not finish two more ambitious ones, and start making Turbo Tomato... which eventually came out in 2021. I took a long break in there from about 1997 to 2020 though where I mostly made Amiga WHDLoad installers and, later, a couple of small mobile and PC games.
What tools or development environment do you use?
Turbo Tomato was started in Devpac 3 on the Amiga with the usual tools for the time of DPaint, PPaint and some Blitz Basic 2 for tooling. It was finished much later in Visual Studio Code with the Amiga Assembly extension, VASM and FS-UAE. That's a great modern environment that launches straight into an emulator and really helps with the development iteration speed. Rogue Declan Zero was a bit of a departure as it is written 99% in C with just a few small assembly parts to glue things together. For that, I used CLion with CMake and the Bebbo gcc cross compiler suite. Again, this allows a fast loop from editing to testing the code in an emulator. I use a customised FS-UAE that gives me debug output as the game is running without slowing down the Amiga side of things. I also use Grafx2 and Aseprite for graphics, and a lot of custom Python scripts to convert assets from modern formats to Amiga runtime binary formats.
What inspired Rogue Declan Zero?
It was guided by circumstance! The initial idea was, vaguely, to do a game that supported the new retro twin stick controller being developed by Abstraction Games. I met Ralph and Erik at Amiga Ireland in January 2023 where they were demonstrating the controller, we got talking over a beer, and I (cheekily, perhaps) offered to do a compatible game if they built me a controller! One duly arrived not long afterwards and I started development. I was aware of the AmiGameJam of course, and decided to combine the twin stick genre with a Swords & Sorcery theme so I could enter. Procedural generation is something that had always fascinated me, and at that time the jam deadline was only a few months away (before it got extended) so I thought, to save time, procedural levels would save me from having to do a lot of manual level building. The roguelite elements came along naturally later.
It's an action game, so games like Robotron (and Llamatron) and Berzerk are touchstones, as well as the mazes and exploring of Shamus. Declan is a reference to Shamus, in fact.
The "zero" suffix came about as I thought I only had a few months to make a small and likely half-finished game, but in the end the AmiGameJam was extended and RDZ was released quite well polished and better than I had expected.
Rumours that I made a twin stick shooter roguelike to simultaneously annoy both H0ffman and BadgerPunch, who respectively have a twin stick shooter (Cecconoid) and a roguelike (RogueCraft) in the works, are unfounded.
Were you pleased with its performance in the AmiGameJam?
Ask me again after the results have been announced! [See FOOTNOTE below] Seriously though, the community reaction to RDZ has been tremendous and surprising for a game, I felt, was more worthy of a back-in-the-day budget style release. I've had a lot of positive feedback from people enjoying it, which is amazing! Perhaps it's tapped into an audience because it's an usual genre for the Amiga; there aren't that many twin-stick shooters on the platform that I can think of. As for the jam, based on the feedback, I'd foolishly dare to hope it places well in the end, but we'll see. This was the first game jam I'd ever taken part in so it's just fun to be in the mix.
[FOOTNOTE: RDZ won the Jam - https://itch.io/jam/amigamejam/entries - and the post-jam version is available at https://nivrig.itch.io/rogue-declan-zero for $4.99]
What were your favourite games in the jam?
The big dog has to be Badger Punch's RogueCraft, it just looks fantastic and will be a top tier release when it comes out. I also enjoyed The Last Dungeon from PixelPlop - I was initially worried it was going to be very like RDZ during development! Shooters aren't really my thing - I never had the reflexes for them - but special mention has to go to Caravandalf for its speed and clever content streaming it does. And Earok's Jack In The Pit is such a fun new idea.
What extra features are you planning for the full release?
I'm working on a big update now that I'd hope to have ready in a month or two. There will be some mild rebalancing, a hard difficulty, a new in-game music track, some features aimed at high-score competition play, a lot of bug fixes, some more bug fixes, and at least one and possibly three new game modes. I'm considering releasing it on other platforms as well and possibly a limited physical release, but there's no hard and fast plans there yet.
How long has development taken, and how long till release?
I started work on Rogue Declan Zero at the end of January 2023, so it's about six months of evening's worth of development.
Do you have any other projects in the pipeline?
I have a whole list of games to make! Before starting Rogue Declan Zero, I had, for a while, been working on a sci-fi 2D top down RPG/arcade adventure mix set on a lost starship. It was coming together but I'd lost my way with it a little and it needs some redesign in a few areas. However, the next project along will likely be an isometric adventure along the lines of Head over Heels (which I love), again on Amiga but probably not a stock machine, and an official licensed take on an existing IP. I hate to be mysterious but I can't say more than that at this stage. Stay tuned?
DATABURST - REVIEWS
Assembloids
Format: Atari Lynx (tested), Watara Supervision
Credits: Poly.play (publisher), PriorArt (developer)
Price: Digital download free, Physical cart €29, Limited Edition with poster €35
Website:
Limited Edition - polyplay.xyz/assembloids-limited-edition-lynx_1
Standard Edition - https://www.polyplay.xyz/Assembloids-Standard-Edition-Supervision_1
[Score] 83%
Check out a video unboxing of the Limited Edition and gameplay (including the original C64 version) at my YouTube channel - https://youtu.be/XBXVoCtwSv8
Frasier Fantasy
Format: Game Boy Color
Credits: Edward La Barbera
Price: Digital download (free)
[Score] 78%