Amiga Demo, Part 2

April 18, 2019

The second part of this blog series about the development of our demo. This will cover the initial phase and timeline. Focus on tool chain, process and collaboration.

#Introduction Coming back to a platform which I used just a for a short time beginning of the 1990’s was interesting.

#Modern Development on old machines I started by figuring out how modern Amiga development is done. Turned out that most of the system programming today is done using C code with a cross compiler (see: http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc/). While the compiler is not the best on the planet it still provides a good starting point and the tool chain is fairly easy to get up and running. I had some classic hello-world Amiga C mixed with Assembler running after an evening of fiddling around.

#Gathering the team I know very well that the outcome equals the sum of excellence of parts involved. Getting good people involed is key to achieve what you want. Very few of us can do it all - better have a pro than an amateur.

First I just posted on our closed facebook group that I had the intention of doing a demo, but nobody took me seriously as I didn’t have anything substantial to show (assumption from my side). I continued to work on some small stuff. And during a trip to Sweden I met up with Krikkit to discuss if he was interested. Turned out he was.

We discussed back and forth and came to the conculsion that we should not rely on heavy graphics to drive our demo but rather code. As we were just two coders for the project but no one else. We looked back at other projects we had done (and satisfied with) and decided to model our project after the Sketch intro.

Time before and around christmas was spent developing content which could be used. When we had a few effects running I decided to reach out again. Now contacting people directly. I guess the combination of not just having an idea (but substance) and perhaps timing made all the difference. Both Evade and Flod responded positively. We explained what we had in mind and Flood very quickly sent some ideas for the graphics.

#Collaboration The internet is full of great tools to cut time in the feedback loop and to help you keeping track of assets and source code. We used #Slack for day to day communication. Mail was used sparsely when #Slack quite didn’t cut it - like elaborate feedback and similar. Dropbox was used (through shared folders) to share assets. Github (in a private repo) to host the source code. Youtube used to share effect drafts and previews. Besides the collaboration tools we used PowerPoint as a tool to describe our storyline (i.e. part order). power point

#Process Our process is (and has always been) code driven. Generally our demos start out with one of the coders have a few effects and a general idea about the design concept. In the case of ‘Dark Goat Rises’ me and Krikkit decided we couldn’t rely on recruiting many more graphicans and muscians to the team. There are just too many variables these days that interfere. Thus we decided on a clean design which we could manage more or less on our own without relying on complex graphical elements. Basing our design on the ideas in Sketch. We still consider Sketch a very nice intro because of the clean design and fairly advanced code - even if it doesn’t smack you in the face.


Profile picture

Written by Fredrik Kling. I live and work in Switzerland. Follow me Twitter