Basic for creating games. 

OLIVER Being a pixel guy – the tools were remarkable. We did not have devkit like the Katakis tools or something specified for creating game graphics. I used the editor that came with the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit for sprites, which turned out extremely practical. The Ronny-sprite was created with an C64 editor called Mob-Profi, which provided overlayed hires and multicolour-sprites. The pictures in the intro and end sequence were pixeled in Koala Painter with a joystick, but everything else was more like hacking. I edited the charset with a font editor. The level backgrounds were tile-based maps, so a friend of mine coded one tool for combining 2×2 chars to tiles including the colour – and a second tool for assembling the levelmap like a puzzle game. As setup I had a C128 and Amiga 500 side by side. By the way – there was a TV and a monitor connected to the C128 at the same time, because of the the different video quality and I wanted to be sure that the graphics  looked right on both display types. With our modern mouse or stylus driven tools and those workflow-trimmed programs it is hard to believe that we got things done at all back in the day when we were even lacking fundamentals such as UNDO functionality. However, I have to say that you had full control over the technical specs of the graphics and as a graphic designer you started to think like a coder.

Otherwise, I hardly remember details of the project. At least for the first month, Mario and I were working alongside each other. The intro and the end sequence were finished first. Then it was very intense and determined by crunchtime, the process was sort of first-in-first-out. The progress in code was tied to incoming graphics. Markus composed the new tunes at home far away and we had some issues with the delivery. Nevertheless the whole soundtrack reached us in time and its implementation went smoothly. Still there was no free time at all. In the final weeks weeks it became a kind of competition – like, who needs the least sleep! I also remember that the editing of the levels was pretty chaotic. Three of us worked in shifts and it took much longer than planned.

Oh I almost forgot about the  communication with Virgin. That was the horror for me because I hardly spoke any English back then. David Bishop and I talked English and German mixed, which worked surprisingly well.

'Game Exec' mini OS

Tracker were software - used especially on the Amiga. The most of the music was created in this type of music software. And the people behind the swiss games of the 80ies/90ies even created a tracker and the possibility to use the same framework also in games. 

Fantasy computers are computer that are ‘inspired’ by real computers. Means their name sound like ZX81 > Tic80 but of course they are fast, programmable with lua and in the most of the cases have all integrated: spriteeditor, tile/background-editor, soundeffects editor and music editor. So they are really the dream of an 8bit-coder* with assembler, low memory, low graphics, no tools. 

Hardware
- C64 consolen basis, erinnert mehr an eine Console als an einen Computer (Sprite, Hardwarescrolling, Music).
- SID wirklich witzig

VisualDisplay
Unmöglich viele Modis: High res. Multicolor > Programmierung schwierig. Positiv: Kombinierbar
- Beschränkte 16 Farben > Schwierig etwa eigenes zu machen. 
- Strahlende Farben fehlen.

Music
- Music Coding
- SID wirklich interessante Stücke. 

Tools
- Damals Paintingprogramme? > Öfter bessere Computer genutzt wie Amiga/PC (Compiling)

Coding
- Schwierig reinzukommen, sogar schwieriger als Atari2600
- Entwicklung über Jahre
- Basic embedded .-(
- Woher kam das Wissen? Die Software? (Magazine?)
- Öfter bessere Computer genutzt wie Amiga/PC (Compiling)
Gamecoding
- Ohne Tricks (Sprite Multplexer 8 Sprites viele Spiele nicht denkbar) ähnlich wie beim Atari 2600. Tricks

Beschränkung
- Beschränkung bei Shootemups am Schwierigsten bei allen anderen Genres eher möglich mit 8 Sprite durchzukommen.

Community
- Identitätsstiftend aber warum? Einfach übers gemeinsame Spielen?
- Bis heute ungebrochen. Aber mehrheitlich Spieler? Demoszener? 

Heute

Gesamte Entwicklung auf einmal da, keine allmähliche Steigerung/Entwicklung über 10 Jahre
Selbst heute, einige Tutorials aber kein Gametemplate. Viel bis heute unterschiedliche Nutzung: Vorallem game und demoscene. 
> Anwendersoftware fast nicht dokumentiert. 
> Neue Games, demos > Anwendersoftware?

Variation: Computer
Selection and Updating: Designer 

First developing on Atari ST (Assembler) but never published something except a demo for a bbs 1993 (First founded by two brothers). First not released ‘product’. A listing game for Happy Computer. 
Than switched to Macintosh (1995 ). Games in C . And than published over the net (website) or in Maganzines Disc-Magazines as Shareware. Paid first with checkes (almost impossible to get the money for 15$ games), so switched to real money and than to KAGI.com a first worldwide payment service.

Inbetween the author worked produced Flash-Games for advertising and ported a lot of games for Java (Applets) 1996 . 

Afterwards switched to Objective-C on MacOSX with a new name: la1n.ch. 

The swiss gamedesign was influenced and even founded by the cracker scene coming from the C64 to Amiga and the other tree was the Atari ST. Around 25 own Games and Ports were created and published from 1985-1997. There was even an own publisher Linel. 

The game development process was splittet into different type of productions. Each part had its own tools like coding / assembler, images > paint tools and of course music with the trackers. 

Coder.
Amicom joined SPREADPOINT in 1989 together with Depeche. He was active as coder of very different things from MMU tools to demos. What he liked best was to explore and develop new programming tricks that could be used in demos and other places.

Data
Born 1968, grown up and living in Switzerland.
Todays occupation: finishing studies (natural science), running an internet company togehter with other ex-amiga freaks.

Work
Demos: Lissa, Platin3D, Small.
Intros: Giana Sisters (trained by Depeche), Amegas (trained by Depeche).
Utilities: Blitter-Copy, List Manager, MMU expert, AFS File Scrambler, SPlay soundtracker player.
Other stuff: Atom Demo (unfinished), Platon's Polyhedra (unfinished), revival of HQC demos, GigaMem (a virtual memory extension to AmigaDOS), some work in TypeSmith (a outline font editor).

Music
Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, Simple Minds, Billy Idol, Pink Floyd, Pet Shop Boys, OMD, ...

GameDevs are gamedeveloppers. The name tells also a lot about the idea behind. The most important thing was the technical difficulties. 

Consoles inspired by old consoles but 100% new. They are somehow like the dream of this days. All dev. thing in one tool (graphics, sound, tiles, coding, levelediting)

working with Photoshop and Tools like KaisPowerTools.

It is clear, the fantasy consoles embed trackers into their software to create music. They construct the fantasy of the tools of those time. There were no trackers direct embedded in 8bit computers. Trackers really became popular as standalone programs on Amiga. 

A lot of new possiblities to do things into the anolog world or in the new digital world:

Music
- Music: a new style
- Music-Tools: create your own songs, software-syntheziser like the trackers. 

 

Graphics
- New styles
- Design > DTP
- Rendering

 

DTP (Create and publish)
- Desktop Publishing (Design 2)

 

Multimedia:
- Interactives
- Games

 

Software 
- …

Demo coder, known for cool demos and trainers.
Depeche jonied Spreadponit in 1989. He mysteriously left SP in 1990 and broke up alomst all contact. He then went over to DefJam but not very much later stopped his Amiga activity. Depeche was so fond of language games that he once bought a Langenscheid's dictionary of slang-English!

Data 
Born 1972, grown up and living in Switzerland
Todays occupation: finishing studies (comp. sci)

Work
Demos: Wooow, Scrapheap, Empire, Power!, HI5 and more
Trainers: a whole lot...
Sound: some crazy mixes
Tools: a disk copier in a bootblock, TLB-Utilitydisk, more

Hobbies
old days: being creative, being cool, speaking cool, cool places, cool clothes, cool people, arcade games, pinball machines
today: unknown.

Music
DM, Art of Noise, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Yello, LL cool J, Derek B, De la soul, ...