Create background, levels.

Of couse you could also - or you had to - create big sprites out of smaller sprites, because the sprite size was limited to 32x32 for example. 

which designpattern where used? and why?

Visual: Tilebased 
Gamemechanic: Tilebase /- 
 

Rolling Ronny was looking decent, too. Commodore Format had featured a well-received demo in the Autumn on Power Pack 13, and it gave a fairly typical taste for the game. You’re cast as the hero of the title, a delivery boy in the fictitious town of Fieldington who secretly works for Scotland Yard on the side. When the town’s crown jewels are stolen and scattered across town by the careless robbers, Ron’s the obvious one to call. It’s at this point you’re plummeted into the first level. At first glance, it’s straightforward left-to-right stuff. Sure, you’re wandering the levels in search of the treasure but you also need to earn enough money for your bus fare to get to the next stage. This is where the errand boy stuff comes in: as you dodge cars and the mutated animals of Fieldington (in a surreal plot twist, the local magic circle turned everything fluffy a bit demented), you’ll meet some of the town’s inhabitants. By doing them a favour – for example delivering a package – you’ll get coins. Pocket enough, and you can level up. Here’s the whole game:

GESPAC SA was a Swiss company who designed the G-64/96 Bus in 1979. This interface bus concept provides a simple way to interface microprocessor modules with memory and peripheral modules on a parallel bus. The G-64/96 Bus uses a simple, yet modern and powerful interface scheme which allows a higher level of functionality from the single height Eurocard form factor. The low overhead of the G-64/96 Bus interface greatly eases the design of custom boards by the User. This is why, even many years after its invention, the G-64/96 Bus is still widely used in the industry. 
 

Here the visuals and mechanics are tilebased. 

Basic was one of the first coding possibilities in the 8bit and also the ‘OS’. the interface to the computer. The shells were ‘basic’.

LOAD “”",8,1

With the second generation of homecomputers. The linenumberless basic came up like GFA-Basic etc. This was a new step and brought basic on the level of Pascal and co. 

Amicom of Spreadpoint has been interviewed by Com and Orlando of Brainstorm at the Escpape and Spreadpoint copy party on Oktober 7th. 

When did you join Spreadpoint ? 
-A month ago. 

Your task in Spreadpoint ? 
-Coder, but in Spreadpoint everybody can do what he wants to. 

For how long have you been programming on the Amiga ? 
-For 2 years. 
What computers did you work on before? 
-Spectrum, Sinclair QL. I did some graphic programming with BASIC. 

What did you program on the Amiga? 
-A 3D-Demo (Summer of 88 for TLB), various intros and copiers for cracked games, Powerutility (sold it), a level editor for a shoot'em up, AMICOM-Kickstart (Antivirus, Copier etc.) 

What are you doing at the time ? 
-I'm working on Demo, called ATOM-demo. 
What's this about ? 
-Colored, shaded, permeating(!) 3D-Objects. 

Your future projects ? 
-3D vectorgrafics, 3D editor (ev. sell it), copier with multitasking capility, various utilities. 

What hardware do you have ? 
-An Amiga 1000  (1.5Mb, Harddisk 20 Mega SCSI), And an Amiga 2000 (A2620 Unix card, 68020 processor, 68881 math. coprocessor, 68851 Memory Management Unit, harddisk 80 MB SCSI, Modem 2400 Baud) 
Tell us something about your Master Seka. 
-It's based on the Seka V3.0 by Kefrens/Promax. It has been reassembled  and revised by my collegue Buddha. 
The main advantages are: 
Better editor commands, a finally working optimize function, auto runback, the workspace can be changed without exitting the Seka. 

Is there anything you want to advise to Amiga coders ? 
-Unfortunetly, there are more and more good programs, recently, which run only on one special Amiga. So I advise to try out the programs on different Amigas and to avoid unproper coding (absolute addresses, selfmodifing code, DBF-waiting-loops running to fast on the 68020.) 
And I hate programs, which you only can exit by a reset! 

Thank you for your answers. 

     Translated by The Acc{sed/BRS

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.

Visible in the Explosions

 

War Heli is a state of the art shoot em up game with big sprites on a computer with no hardware-scrolling! 

Visible in the SRF Docu “Cap der guten Hoffnung”