New Bubble Story

[alain.treesong]

Hi Amiga Enthousiasts

This thread is dedicated to "New Bubble Story", an Amiga (500 and beyond) game designed under the label 'Agima' that I hope will be finished in 2021.

Yesterday (04 july 20) Mike Parent (the main graphist of the game) spoke a little bit about the game at the end of an interview (the main interview was about the projects of BitBeamCannon).
You can see this interesting interview here : [ Show youtube player ]

In fact New Bubble Story is a refactoring (with completly new levels) of a game I wrote 25 years ago : Super Bubble Remix.
This game was also a remake of a 1987 commercial game called Bubble Ghost by Ere Informatique.

When I considered Super Bubble Remix in the middle of 2010s, after I wanted to dev on A500 again, because of the "Rink a dink redux" demo (https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=61182),
I've seen at least these flaws :
- Super Bubble Remix needs an A1200 config (actually a 020+ and 2Mb of chip memory) even if it is an OCS game (because of Amos)
- The difficulty is too high from level 4 (the game has 40 levels)
- The bonus system is not good and some of the 40 levels are not interesting.

So the idea was to completly rewrite the engine in order to make it work on a standard A500 (with 512Kb chip and 512Kb fast) and do new levels with better gameplay that will replace the
old levels. To sum up a new game for the A500.

So I've rewritten the engine during the last years.
But I wanted also to improve the graphics and in particular to redraw the old main character (a little ghost) to clearly mark the difference with the previous versions.
An important step arrived at the beginning of this year when Mike Parent, the designer of future great games like Daemon Claw and of course Metro Siege (https://bitbeamcannon.com/metro-siege/)
accepted to work on the game.
Mike has brilliantly redesigned the ghost, improved a lot the graphics of the first gfx environnment and drawed a full new environnement to add variety to the game's visual
(so New Bubble Story will have two nice graphics "worlds").

In April, the great demoscener musician mAZE joins the project and has already composed 4 excellent musics. Thanks a lot mate !
I think the audio part of 90s version, Super Bubble Remix, was pretty good. Ixien a friend has done a good job but I hope it will even better and much more diverse in New Bubble Story.
The samples that you can hear in the little video (link at the end of this looonng text) is done by Ixien (taken from Super Bubble Remix). Perhaps he will do other things on the project.

So here we are.
The current version of New Bubble Story works on an A500 with the main engine in 50fps (of course in Amos ;-) ), has 14 of the 32 levels that will be finally available,
4 musics (the goal is have even more than that), a drawn splash screen, two gfx environnements and a lot of other things.
The first 16 levels will be designed done in the first environnement (in the castle), and the last 16 will be designed with the second environnement.
The bonus system is far better and the counter of the blow (see the video or the screenshots) is now in the level area.
I also use the copper to increase the number of colors or to implement level gameplay ideas.

I hope the game will be finished in 2021 and will be distributed in a nice box.

Here is some screenshots and a video of the two first levels.

A screenshot that shows a comparison between the first level of Super Bubble Remix and the first one of New Bubble Story.
We can see that the 2 levels are different and enjoy Mike's work on the ghost and the shadows of the stones.


An example of the second environnement (in Tiled). This level will be not probably a real level but a test of the second environnement.


A little video of the 2 first levels (running in winuae with an A500 config) :
[ Show youtube player ]


I will publish future infos on the game in this thread.
Bye.

Aghnar / Agima

[manossg]

Really cool and full of nostalgia buzz!

[Predseda]

Great Amos games appear lately on Amiga. I am really happy that there are talented coders who know how to use AMOS properly. Looking forward!

[lesta_smsc]

The game looks great and is actually quite smooth! Great work!

[Havie]

This looks really good and very impressive for an Amos game. Looking forward to play...

[nikosidis]

Looking great. Smart to hire Mike.

[amigafred]

Very nice. Thanks for it

[xboxown]

Any idea where I can a link to download the game? Will you provide a level editor with the game?

[alain.treesong]

First of all thank you all for the nice comments in the previous messages.

For the moment I haven't yet released a demo that can be run on a real Amiga (or an emulator). I think I'll make one but not for a few months.

I'm taking advantage of this for a very light "work in progress".
So, as I said, the game will have 2x16 levels (two different graphical environments) and I'm currently programming the last level of the first 16.

A small picture of one of the first 16 levels:


Cheers,
Aghnar

[Gzegzolka]

Very cool

[Tigerskunk]

Wow, this looks so much better now..
Good job, to all involved!

[xboxown]

Originally Posted by alain.treesong

First of all thank you all for the nice comments in the previous messages.

For the moment I haven't yet released a demo that can be run on a real Amiga (or an emulator). I think I'll make one but not for a few months.

I'm taking advantage of this for a very light "work in progress".
So, as I said, the game will have 2x16 levels (two different graphical environments) and I'm currently programming the last level of the first 16.

A small picture of one of the first 16 levels:
Attachment 68367

Cheers,
Aghnar

This looks great! Could you release two ADF? One ADF the game and the other ADF is an editor?

[alain.treesong]

@xboxown
Sorry I haven't answered about the editor.
Actually the design of a level is not completely done with an Amiga but using the famous tool called Tiled (https://www.mapeditor.org/) on PC as you can see in a screenshot of my first message.
Then the level is converted from xml to be in a format acceptable to the Amiga (using a little code I wrote in Java). Moreover a lot of levels have specific features which means that there is a specific programmed layer for each of them.
An editor coded for Amiga can be done of course but this will be quite a lot of work and it is not planned right now.
Anyway thank you for your interest :-)

[xboxown]

Originally Posted by alain.treesong

@xboxown
Sorry I haven't answered about the editor.
Actually the design of a level is not completely done with an Amiga but using the famous tool called Tiled (https://www.mapeditor.org/) on PC as you can see in a screenshot of my first message.
Then the level is converted from xml to be in a format acceptable to the Amiga (using a little code I wrote in Java). Moreover a lot of levels have specific features which means that there is a specific programmed layer for each of them.
An editor coded for Amiga can be done of course but this will be quite a lot of work and it is not planned right now.
Anyway thank you for your interest :-)

I am looking forward for the game release I have an Amiga 500 by the way! I hope I get to enjoy it on my A500. If it is not possible because the game is AGA, that is fine, I have a Vampire 4 upstairs. Can you make the game HD installable in case I need to run it on my V4 upstairs?

[dschallock]

This looks great! Keep going, This will be a pleasure to play, Can't wait!
Question: Will this game open a PAL or NTSC screenmode?

[alain.treesong]

@xboxown
The target platform is the A500 OCS and will work on the most of the Amigas (you can read the first message of this thread that gives some details).

@dschallock
Thanks and this is a good question.
The game has a screen area of 266 pixel height (including the panel with scores) so it is a bit above the "full screen page" in PAL (320x256).
So this is not designed for NTSC but I will try perhaps to find a solution for NTSC.I will see that at the end of the design.

[dschallock]

Originally Posted by alain.treesong

@xboxown
The target platform is the A500 OCS and will work on the most of the Amigas (you can read the first message of this thread that gives some details).

@dschallock
Thanks and this is a good question.
The game has a screen area of 266 pixel height (including the panel with scores) so it is a bit above the "full screen page" in PAL (320x256).
So this is not designed for NTSC but I will try perhaps to find a solution for NTSC.I will see that at the end of the design.

Thank you for considering the NTSC audience. Really looks like a fantastic game idea and the execution is looking really nice too. Music sounds great too!

[alain.treesong]

Originally Posted by dschallock

Thank you for considering the NTSC audience. Really looks like a fantastic game idea and the execution is looking really nice too. Music sounds great too!

Okay, after all those nice remarks, I'm gonna have to take that into account :-).
So my idea is to allow NTSC users to slightly scroll up and down on the playing area with e.g. some key. This will make it possible to see the whole level. In fact most of them will certainly be playable directly in NTSC but some will have some important hidden parts that the scroll will allow to discover. I can't promise anything yet as I haven't tried anything yet but that's what I'll try to implement.
See you soon

[dschallock]

Originally Posted by alain.treesong

Okay, after all those nice remarks, I'm gonna have to take that into account :-).
So my idea is to allow NTSC users to slightly scroll up and down on the playing area with e.g. some key. This will make it possible to see the whole level. In fact most of them will certainly be playable directly in NTSC but some will have some important hidden parts that the scroll will allow to discover. I can't promise anything yet as I haven't tried anything yet but that's what I'll try to implement.
See you soon

I think that is a great solution, thanks for considering it!!

[xboxown]

Also thanks for considering an editor for this game in the future!!