Good advice on starting in the industry. I did a game development degree 20 years ago. When I finished the industry was no longer what it was when you started and what I was initially drawn to. I realised I was going to be a small cog in a big machine doing some of the most complicated work there is for peanuts. I noped out and never looked back!
I still enjoy game dev on the side though. I've been working on a 2 directional scrolling engine for the Amiga over the last few days. Almost cracked it now.
I never worked in the games industry. I realised during my course that the games industry I'd been wanting to work in for years no longer existed anymore, so I just took the degree to open the door to any development job.
My Amiga dev setup is maybe a bit unorthodox. At this point I'm more interested in getting something out than sweating the minutiae so I'm coding in Blitz Basic (though I plan to go lower level and get into Assembly on the Amiga later down the line). Even so, I'm sort of taking the approach you have with UrbX and I'm no longer coding on the Amiga in the first instance. I've started to replicate the subset of Blitz Basic commands I need in Typescript within a browser context. The benefit of that is I have a much faster development loop. Converting the graphics to IFF and the right number of bitplanes was quite long winded and so I can avoid all of that by working in the browser and making my game within the known constraints of the Amiga but with the tool chain I use for my day job. Hopefully it will lead to a better game, and if not, at least I will be able to make it quicker.
I see, yes. Makes sense. So I will go straight to assembler, via my Lua build. Just need to figure out the assembler build part. It seems the way to do that is to build to a folder shared with winUAE. Something like that :) I'll write about it when I get it going, anyway :)
Good advice on starting in the industry. I did a game development degree 20 years ago. When I finished the industry was no longer what it was when you started and what I was initially drawn to. I realised I was going to be a small cog in a big machine doing some of the most complicated work there is for peanuts. I noped out and never looked back!
I still enjoy game dev on the side though. I've been working on a 2 directional scrolling engine for the Amiga over the last few days. Almost cracked it now.
Yeah, interesting story. Kinda what I was alluding to.
I need to set up for Amiga dev over Christmas. Tell me how you are doing it..!
I never worked in the games industry. I realised during my course that the games industry I'd been wanting to work in for years no longer existed anymore, so I just took the degree to open the door to any development job.
My Amiga dev setup is maybe a bit unorthodox. At this point I'm more interested in getting something out than sweating the minutiae so I'm coding in Blitz Basic (though I plan to go lower level and get into Assembly on the Amiga later down the line). Even so, I'm sort of taking the approach you have with UrbX and I'm no longer coding on the Amiga in the first instance. I've started to replicate the subset of Blitz Basic commands I need in Typescript within a browser context. The benefit of that is I have a much faster development loop. Converting the graphics to IFF and the right number of bitplanes was quite long winded and so I can avoid all of that by working in the browser and making my game within the known constraints of the Amiga but with the tool chain I use for my day job. Hopefully it will lead to a better game, and if not, at least I will be able to make it quicker.
Sorry if that was too long. 😁
I see, yes. Makes sense. So I will go straight to assembler, via my Lua build. Just need to figure out the assembler build part. It seems the way to do that is to build to a folder shared with winUAE. Something like that :) I'll write about it when I get it going, anyway :)
A really interesting update. Honest and pragmatic. I'll be checking out those links too.
A very Merry Christmas to you, Tony. Let's see what 2025 brings us. I see good things ahead.
Thank you, and the same to you! Good things indeed!
Happy Christmas Tony to you and your family 😊
Cheers, and to you, Graeme :)