Recent content in Welcome! on The Industrious Rabbit
I’m back, and I have a retro computing related thing for youall! I’ve been doing a lot of art lately and almost no programming. I’ve even been taking art classes to really level up! But I also wanted to keep my bunny toes a bit in the retro world, so I’ve been learning how to use the most recent version of the quintissential Amiga art program, DeluxePaint V (or 5 or Five or…
I’m getting close to having all of the game code in place for an alpha release for VCF East. I finished up a lot of smaller tasks that would unlock bigger things down the road: dynamic palette loading, as all the palettes so far were hard-coded fading the bottom info screen in and out along with the main game screen loading compressed music MODs I decided this week to start working on the…
So much code and art this week! The pencil art from last week is now in sticker form and I’ll have them at VCF East: I built the first full level of the game in Inkscape. My level generation code takes an exported PNG and turns it into the correct binary map data:
This week was a hodge-podge of work: Finishing up next level loading Allowing for variable length levels During warmup, only show each pose once Get the game working on the Amiga 500 (well, 68000-based Amigas) The last one was interesting, as it required hunting down every place in the code where I had odd memory accesses and squashing them.
I’ve started work on being able to exit the level you’re on when you reach the end, and load up the next level: Thankfully I already have a good testing approach for these non-interactive state machines, and so it was reusing the same approaches for warming up and colliding with an object. I also abstracted out more of the game’s physics engine for reuse, which I had started when…
This week I finished up the warmup graphics. Lots of animation work and a good bit of unit testing and you now see randomized poses at the start of the game, and fewer of them if you just recovered from a crash: Next up is being able to transition to a second level after you make it through the first. This is likely going to require restructuring a lot of code, since the current assumptions are…
This week was all about improving asset loading and drawing some warmup graphics. Before this week, the background graphics – the foreground columns and the background art – were imported directly into the output binary with INCBIN , just for simplicity in those early days when I was still flailing about with Amiga development. I decided to load those in dynamically as XPK compressed…
A bunch of travel slowed down progress, including a very awesome trip to MAGFest 2025. I’m posting pictures on Pixelfed , and those’ll eventually end up on my main site in a more permanent gallery. This past block of effort has been in getting the head konk animation working: This required a lot of testing to handle all the possible collisions that could happen, but it’s working…
Not much in the way of visuals to show this week. My focus has been to flesh out more of the unit test suite, allowing me to fix a few bugs in the process as well as perform some nice optimizations on some oft-called code. I also discovered a good, extensible approach to building switch statements in assember without using a big list of CMP / BEQ statements, which requires writing lots of code and…
Look at that smooth fade in: The palette manager I talked about on 2024-12-22 is finally plugged in at the right place to allow the game to fade in the palette from black (or, really, any color) when the level starts up.
I decided to work on the palette manager, and now I can fade between arbitrary palettes of colors: The fading algorithm is a slightly tweaked implementation of Bresenham’s line algorithm . I know I built paletete fading code back in the AMOS days, very likely using a ratio approach like this:
All three collision types are now working! (well, mostly working): I need to do something about that last one, when you are going to go over an edge. I may just have to extend the physics engine a bit more to make that look good. Thankfully, I have a new tool in my retro development toolkit to make that a lot easier to implement.
I have two of the three collision types working! Well at least the basics of them working: I also got the tiles background working, though for performance reasons I made the backgrounds 512px wide so it’s easier to do bitwise math for calculations.
This week was about getting a basic level “editor” working, using a combination of a Ruby script with RMagick and an image from LibreSprite: The level generation works, and I restructured a ton of code to make dynamic level loading work. However, the more complex levels revealed an issue in collision detection that I need to debug.
We have a main menu! It’s very simple, but it also forced me to restructure huge chunks of code in order to allow swapping out the menu and the game code. This included asset loading code, and this restructuring caused me to find a bug that took a few hours to track down. Symptoms:
Another week of slow progress, but this is mainly due to some really heavy refactoring work. I wanted to use ptplayer for music, and that required having my code in a ready-to-link format. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right, and so I restructured all of the code using all of the techniques I use when working with higher level languages:
Not as much progress this week, but some good code cleanups and performance enhancements: Spreading out redraw work across multiple frames Getting background rendering mostly working Precalculating double buffer calculations Next will be getting the double buffering to happen independently between the front and back planes, which will allow for smooth backgrounds and foregrounds. Then I’ll…
Lots of progress this week! Full joystick handling, including getting the jetpack working and decent jumping physics Drawing lots more stuff on screen: Textured 4 bitplane floors 1 bitplane ceilngs The jetpack meter Collisions with the floor, ceiling, and walls work I also fixed up some really stupid bugs and got the game working on my MiSTer and A1200:
Going to write up a blog post every week with the progress of my finite-at-first runner for the Amiga. My goals: write something large in Assembler learn as many of the Amiga subsystems as I can make an entertaining, easy-to-pick-up game with as many modern sensibilities as possible I have no timeline to get a WIP out for testing because I’ve never worked in Assembler nor this deeply with…
It’s time…time for a video on the Commodore Amiga Blitter! Topaz walks through the memory copy capabilities of this feature in the context of a small demo written to exercise the blitter, copper, and sprites.