'...a lot of the new #Amiga stuff is fun, some great games, but not on the "wow, if only we could have had this back in the day" level we see on the 8-bit computers or 16-bit consoles...'
@nivrig I guess a lot of that wow factor depends on how ‘professional’ the game looks, and the mastery of pixel graphics contributes a lot to that. Bitbeamcannon’s games, even though not out yet, look really good. I’m not sure why don’t we see more of that, while the Amiga scene has many great artists.
@nivrig
Metro Siege and Daemon Claw in development from BitBeamCannon look good and more polished that most Amiga games from the old days. And run very smoothly and have parallax backgrounds and lots of colours and such.
@Carnivius MS has been years in development because each level is like coding half a new game. Maybe this is the effort required to push the Amiga and not many will do it? And the effort to push an 8-bit platform is less?
@reidrac Yeah I think expectations are off that's part of it. The Amiga is a mid-80s platform, and 16-colour at its core, but it lived on into the 90s so it gets compared to much later systems.
@reidrac I've long held that 16-bit is the absolute limit for solo devs, and it's hard. Metro Siege, a really good looking Amiga game, has had a team working on it for years and including some of the best pixel art I've seen.
If you take a team of five ninjas and make the best Amiga game ever made, it still looks... fine... by modern standards. It's neat. But it's just not going to impress anybody but old people like us who know the machine inside and out.
So... don't bother. You can't "win" the tech race on a retro console! Instead make something that looks objectively "fine" and "nice". And on a 16-bit machine, a solo dev can do that!
@nivrig@reidrac That's also why I think 16bit is nicer than 8bit. To make something acceptable to modern eyes, even with the retro aesthetic - well on an 8-bit machine it's a TON of work. You have to be really good to make something that doesn't make peoples eye bleed 🙂
Whereas on a 16-bit system it's a lot simpler to get "hey yeah they looks pretty neat." Even I can do it! That way you can focus more on making the game fun, and less on just the mechanics of dev.
@nivrig@reidrac Maybe the real difference is - are you trying to make a fun playable good game that looks acceptable to modern eyes even with the retro feel? Or are you trying to make an interactive demo that pushes the machine, and if it plays well that's a bonus?
@TomF@nivrig I make games that I think are fun and are in a good technical level for the system. I don't like technical gimmicks that lead to a "not that fun" game but "how it pushes the system".
@reidrac@TomF I agree. But The comment wasn’t “Amiga games aren’t WOW compared to modern retro-style PC games”, it’s that other retro platforms (including other 16 bit systems) have games that are WOW for that platform where Amiga has … fewer.
@nivrig@reidrac That's true. Curious isn't it? My biggest beef with the Amiga (and ST) was the bitplane stuff - it just makes everything 4x more difficult. But I'm sure it's more than just that.
@reidrac@nivrig I don't know where the original quote came from, but I understand it. I was an Amiga user in its heyday and often felt the machine wasn't being used to its full potential even then. What's been done with the C64 shows how far things can be pushed with modern knowledge and hindsight, and most of the time I don't feel that's quite happened on the Amiga. As a programmer too, I can see things I could do to help with this if I ever found the time. (Of course talk is cheap 😉)
@nivrig It's a good question, and probably a good answer won't fit in this chat window ;) Though I think the main thing for me personally would be to push more for things that fully utilize AGA, as I really did think that got the short end of the stick in the 90s (not least of which because Commodore went bankrupt).
Also, I have an eye on a few arcade games that I'm pretty confident could have truly decent ports on Amiga that haven't been touched as yet.
@nivrig@retrotechtive gato roboto springs to mind, though I acknowledge had it been released for the Amiga back when, it would have been trounced for it's art style
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