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July 25, 2024 46 mins

I am joined by Alex Brown, programmer of an upcoming brand new beat-em-up 2-player game for the Commodore Amiga – Metro Siege. With the target platform the Amiga A500, originally released way back in 1987! Alex takes us through the journey of pushing the limits of the Amiga A500, the experience of programming with the Amiga custom chips and how this wonderful passion project will become a final release.

Topics include:

  • How Alex became a programmer
  • Alex’s favourite game influences
  • Why create a new game for the Amiga?
  • Pushing the limits of the Amiga A500
  • Taking the Amiga online with cross system online multiplayer
  • The art of releasing a beta or technical preview and gathering feedback
  • Keeping the gameplay smooth with 2 players, enemies and lush surroundings
  • Parallax scrolling, moving trains and what’s needed to achieve the results
  • Using modular character animation on the Amiga
  • Given extra life to a retro computing platform
  • The reason for the expansion memory of 512kb memory requirement
  • The programming resources available for the Amiga
  • The tricks of the trade for programming the Amiga
  • The software and tools for creating Amiga games
  • Emulation versus real hardware for testing
  • The size of the team and the understanding of the capabilities of the Amiga
  • The biggest challenge of getting the game to work
  • Why AGA has not been targeted… yet?
  • Ensuring there is an end goal to any “passion project”

If you watch the video version of the podcast, I have captured Metro Siege running from my own Amiga A500 (which mine does have Pistorm installed, but I have been assured it will still run great without one). You can find out more by visiting the Metro Siege website.


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