During the development of the Amiga port of Cecconoid, I was constantly posting updates to a discord server so that Gareth (original dev) and Andy (Thalamus) could see the progress. With the game now shipping to players, I thought it would be fun to look back at what’s there. The channel is literally full of small video clips of development stages, tests and some epic failures. This won’t be a deep dive by any stretch, this project was the most challenging and complex I’ve ever undertaken. Instead it’s more of a video compilation timeline.
19th December 2021
Where it all started. I was given a Tiled map of the game. Created a tool to convert the map and graphics into something useable on the Amiga. Added basic controls to move around for testing.
Andy at Thalamus reworks the map to fit on the Amiga display. I add a player ship with basic movement and some screen flipping.
11th June 2022
Not sure what I was doing between January and June, probably Revision stuff, but back on the case. Worked out a method of scrolling between the screens.
14th June 2022
Solid progress. Adding the first draft of the particle engine and player bullets, with a bit of collision detection. White means the bullet hit the terrain, red means it hit a destructible object.
15th June 2022
Added the particle data to the graphics converter and linked them to destructible objects. This is also proof that Cecconoid uses four colours. Black, White, Red and Transparent. 😉
16th June 2022
Not sure how I’m getting this much progress so quickly but.. ray casting lasers hitting the terrain!
20th June 2022
With this much up and running, I progress through each room, adding any new enemy type I come across. Eventually you are just adding enemies to the map rather than coding new logic. Biggest change here are the doors and triggers implementation. You can also see the collision detection against the player and the laser, one of the more complicated collision detection methods used in the game.
23rd June 2022
Add the option power-up and try to add some particle sparkle.. did not go to plan! Later decided not to bother with that sparkle.
3rd July 2022
Implemented the barriers and the collision detection. The pushing of the player was much harder to implement than I thought it would be!.
8th July 2022
Enemies can now shoot at you! Pew pew!!
14th July 2024
Viewers of the stream might RememberI was unable to code a basic bloody starfield. Well it got fixed.
3rd August 2022
Implemented the homing missiles, although with some.. bugs. Demonstrated it on stream where the chat managed to debug it for me. Bonus bit of Kim Justice on stream captured in the moment.
22nd August 2022
I hated these! Was incredibly difficult to get them to act like the original enemies. So much so I deferred work on them till everything else was finished!
22nd August 2022
Wow, got a lot done today, must be a Sunday? Adding enemy patrol mechanics. These could be added to the Tiled map using polylines which then get auto-converted with the map data and enemy placements.
24th August 2022
First run at implementing the swarm. Each one is a separate enemy and would eventually require collision detections with the player and bullets but also need to chase the player. Some optimisation was required.
3rd September 2022
Adding the incredibly nasty chonky laser enemies. Laser are drawn with simple horizontal and vertical blits. Somehow it managed to simulate ZX Spectrum colour clash, kind of.
8th September 2022
The most challenging room to develop in the whole game. First run at the circle of death but I don’t think I got the angles right here, even if this does look really cool. I am currently very concerned about the implementation of collision detection on this beast.
10th September 2022
We arrive at my proudest moment. The collision detection on this took some thinking. Collision on each bar wouldn’t work, way too heavy. Instead it’s all based on the angle of rotation and the player’s distance to the centre point of the circle. The outer edge distance pushes you out and vice versa, with a gap in the circle to let the player through.
16th August 2022
Twin stick controls are not a common thing on the Amiga, so I implemented an option to shoot with a mouse cursor. Gotta try and make it accessible where possible. Angles were eventually locked to 45 degrees so you didn’t have an advantage over other control methods.
20th September 2022
Time for some sound. Extracted all the sound effect wav files from the Unity project and put them in my audio converter tool. Then implemented the 4 channel sound effects mix engine from Dutch Retro Guy. The engine only uses one hardware channel on the Amiga, leaving 3 more for music. You can check out the details here -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTFGIGdj-fc
3rd October 2022
Emoon was busy working away on a super optimised particle engine based on my prototype. Here it is finally implemented, able to push 1000 particles per frame on a base A500. I even got it to sparkle!
7th October 2022
Those annoying enemies I mentioned earlier? still a problem! So I move onto other tasks, like the title screen. If you check the final game, those explosions are timed to the beat.
18th October 2022
First draft of one of the many hidden rooms in the Amiga port I added. The TBL logo data was taken directly from the Eon demo. Later it gets filled and double rendered. It also holds another secret in the final game.
27th October 2022
Implementing trace lasers. These were very tricky indeed! Currently a little skinny compared to the original, but I’ll go back and make it better later.
31st October 2022
Who is up for a long-winded side quest? The beginnings of the many ZX Spectrum easter eggs hidden in the game.
5th November 2022
If you believe, you can achieve! Maybe the first ever Amiga game with achievements? I dunno. These were drawn using manual copper sprites. Saved on all that mucking about with drawing and clearing.
8th November 2022
Adding screen shake. Far more complicated than you would think, believe me!
14th November 2022
Having a lot of fun doing development streams on Twitch, so I add all the chatters to a secret room. Pro-tip, if you want the achievement here, you better read all the names.
18th November 2022
Work on the ZX Spectrum easter eggs starts to get a little out of hand.
20th November 2022
Easter eggs are now really out of hand. The start of the hidden lemmings style sub game. Miner Willy had to depart the project due to a contract dispute.
27th November 2022
Something I hate about early 8-bit games is the lack of a proper ending. I like to make sure you are well compensated for your hard work.
29th November 2022
With the main Cecconoid game at 90% complete, with that delightful “90%” remaining, I start work on Eugatron. There is a lot of cross-over between the two games but there are some unique enemies and other challenges to come.
5th December 2022
Last of the Eugatron unique enemies put in place. These lads are proper gnarly.
6th December 2022
With everything in place for both games, it’s time to start adding polish and presentation. Here is the hi-score table. The zooming starfield is based on the code from the legendary Paranoimia cracktro, albeit pretty well optimised to push a lot more stars.
8th December 2022
Now we have two game modes, we need to be able to select which one to play.
9th December 2022
More presentation stuff, this time the intro screens. The original Triple Eh! intro has the logo coming in from the top of the screen, but I flipped it for sprite reasons. The Thalamus logo reveal uses a weird hack to the particle engine to create that dissolving effect.
17th December 2022
Implementation of the mixing engine for the music side of things, essentially pushing 6 channels out of three hardware channels. The red flashing shows that the mixer is currently rendering the next required sample.
29th December 2022
Main menu music in the bag, time to work on the Cecconoid in-game theme. Just the first couple minutes, but the plan for this was to make it run like a DJ set to last the play time. I managed about 6 minutes before I ran out of memory.
4th January 2023
Time to hit Eugatron with a soundtrack. Tried a couple of different styles out but ultimately moody and heavy Drum n’ Bass fit the bill. Adding the slowly rising high pitch noise to the intro was intended to create some tension for the early stages. Think it worked.
7th January 2023
Remember those skinny tracking lasers from earlier? They got fatter.
10th February 2023
Bit of a gap in the videos because I was mostly sending builds of the game to Gareth for some play testing. However, still not “content” with the number of easter eggs, see what I did there, I spend a week creating a super small version of Cecconoid in MPAGD for the ZX Spectrum. Question is, can you find it?
20th February 2023
Bit more spit and polish with the player warp effect. It’s essentially the same code as the Paranoimia starfield, except it draws lines instead of dots.
24th February 2023
I love it when games have sound menus in them, so I always add one. This is the first draft of it. The starfield got dropped and the waveforms showing the music mixing buffers got solid.
28th February 2023
While showing the game to my wife, she asks why my name isn’t in the opening titles. OK, better fix that then. The text effect might seem a little familiar to my TTE family.
3rd March 2023
When a game is pretty much complete I like to send it out to a few of my Twitch friends for testing. If anything is going to go wrong, it’ll be when it’s live and in the hands of someone else. Charlie Far here doing the lord’s work. Shortly after this I added an exception handler to capture these. Once the bugs were fixed Charlie went on to score a whopping score of 4,953,355 in Eugatron. So impressive he is now an achievement in Eugatron.
20th April 2023
Just one final bit of content needed to be added, the tape room. Can you find them all?
So that’s pretty much it. The following months were further refinement, bug testing, fixing, more bug testing and fixing until everything was solid. In total it took around 1 1/2 years to produce the game end to end. Once I was happy that it was complete, we began the work on the production of the physical release with Thalamus, who have done an outstanding job with everything.
A big thank you to all who helped along the way with testing, technical advise and support. I wont name you here, you’re already in the manual. 🙂
I hope you’ve enjoyed this peek into the work stages of Cecconoid. See you on the next one.
Code and Waveforms 