Amiga Games Released in 2024 Index | Hacker News Reader

Amiga Games Released in 2024 Index

lemonamiga.com

104 pointsdoener31 comments

Some real gems in there:

Dr. Dangerous: Secrets of the Temple of Xol'Tan https://hoogames2017.itch.io/dr-dangerous Beautiful and runs on naked Amiga 500.

Dungeonette https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=5069 Stock Amiga 1200.

Roguecraft https://thalamusdigital.itch.io/roguecraft Any Amiga with 2MB of ram.

> Crysis (Prototype)

I was not expecting that. Looks interesting in the itch page!

Also I really liked the Untangle one. I think I played something like that a billion years ago.

Looks like a port of Untangle from Simon Tatham’s Puzzles [0], itself inspired by Planarity [1]

[0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/unta...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarity

Source code: https://github.com/grzegorz-kraszewski/untangle

How is this possible?! I saw the screenshots and it looks great!

What am I missing?

Assuming you mean Crysis. That it's not 3D, but full motion video.

Yeah, agree. It’s a video but still impressive. One day someone will find a way to code the actual game.

Neat. Somebody ported the old mobile Doom RPG to Amiga

https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=5049

I was suddenly reminded of Magicore Anomala [0], which was announced in early 2023 but I haven't seen anything about since. It doesn't seem to be on the development list.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SB20aFHc08

I'm thrilled to see someone bring up Magicore! I don't do much publicity because it's been a quiet 2 years working on the game engine, without much flashy content to show for it. But we're ramping up to begin production of the final game assets, so I anticipate having a lot more to share this coming year.

Here is a small demo I threw together for AmiWest 2024, from last October: https://youtu.be/xIYrhKHEPEA

I also have a personal blog which is largely a development blog for Magicore (https://dansalva.to/blog). My next post will be about a recent feature where I use Amiga's hardware acceleration to draw rays of light that can be obstructed by passing objects. Proof of concept video here: https://youtu.be/rFWFTuWx82M

OK I’ll bite: should I be trying out these old game systems? I keep seeing retro game systems getting new releases and more and it’s very cool.

Are there emulators for all of these systems?

Are you asking if there's some kind of universal amiga emulator available on the internet?

I see what you did there.

> Are there emulators for all of these systems?

RetroArch is a great place to start. It supports a ton of different “emulator cores” and acts as a frontend for emulators for different systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RetroArch

Install it and give it a go.

Check out PiMiga especially if you have a Pi 400 turns it into a super cool retro setup..

https://youtu.be/PYR9MtSkjE0?si=18uOhM0Qww_NNaTW

Amigas are superbly emulated. But in general, yes... Not only soft emulators but highly accurate FPGA emulations.

Their emulation is very good but usually works but the games require various combinations of joystick, keyboard and mouse. Kind of harder to set up on handhelds than console systems.

I'm starting to get a feeling that making games for "outdated" systems is worthwhile. I don't think we tapped out the potential of most of these.

They will also keep working for way longer (in emulators) than current games that depend on steam APIs, DRM, online services, GPU driver versions etc.

Yes, old and new games for outdated systems will easily outlast modern games. I can still play a game from 1985 on an emulator today but how many contemporary games can I play in 2065 ?

I've recently developed a very simple game for the ZX Spectrum in a week and within 2 weeks it was downloaded almost 200 times on itch.io. Despite being an extremely low effort attempt I got some feedback and even a review on Youtube.

Now I can't help but wonder what sort of feedback I'll get if I put in a decent effort. I'm pretty sure it's going to be worth it, since at least for me it was already a very pleasant surprise to have people enjoying my simple game.

Is there really enough of a market to warrant all this development, particularly for the commercial releases? How much could they really make?

Market? What an extremely HN comment :-D

I see some games can be bought, but I doubt it's big biz. People do lots of things for shits and giggles and out of pure passion.

Well we are on HN. Odd to me for being downvoted for a question rooted in curiosity.

I’m just trying to understand the motivation. If it’s free then I can understand it’s a hobby. When it’s being charged for, and there are some “studios” pumping out commercial games, then to me it warrants trying to understand more about the game creators. Especially when they’re amiga games.

Not a studio, this is development like it's the 90s. Though development is easier now with modern tools, but just like the 1990s it's something one person can write.

I buy retro games. The creators typically make them as a hobby and a lot of the ones I play are basically text adventures with a simple parser and a few dozen locations with a unique pixel art image for each location. So it costs them nothing but time to make and my purchase helps buy them coffee. With very rare exceptions, these are usually not built with any kind of "studio" or large budget, so profitability is irrelevant. They often just release for free.

The Z Machine and Glulx parsers are not that simple. Ditto with PAWS and clones.

I just checked the games I've played and most of them used a pretty simple verb-noun parser (use keycard), but the latest ones are much more sophisticated as you've pointed out like verb-noun-noun (use keycard with switch) or something like that. Of course I think some use a slimmed down version of Inform7, which should be pretty powerful.

Inform 7 it's the language. The parser comes from the library under Inform6 too and is not that limited, it can accept compund phrases too.

You can just use Inform6 which is OOP oriented and it's very easy to define in game-objects, rooms, attributes such as objects being containers/openable/enterable and such. Setting up basic puzzles it's pretty straightforward.

I made a simple retro game out of pure passion and released it for free at itch.io, however I see many good games that sell for low prices. There's definitely a niche market. Alternatively users can also donate or become your patrons. From what I see, if the game is decent and the price is lowish, then it sells quite well. Obviously won't pay your bills, but it's something...

A few hundred, maybe a thousand sales.

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