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[Schrompf]

Back in the days when I had a different surname and an array of Amigas, some friends and me released a TopDown spaceship shooter called

Crossfire II

It has a story mode in which you do short missions, defending transporters, pummeling cruisers, secretly place sensors or drive a tank at a planet's surface. The missions are connected by a text-intense story which most people will skip, I fear. After 2h to 3h you're done with it, and it has zero replayability. But there's a Horde mode and a Deatchmatch style local multiplayer with a bunch of weird weapons.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1377680/CROSSFIRE_II_Retro_Amiga_Shooter/

I started developing Crossfire2 with my twin brother back in 1997, we learned C along. We finally released it in Dec 2002 with a publisher who was also the owner of the last Print Magazine about Amiga. That guy, in theory, still has the rights to this game, but due to the amount in dispute of roughly 4€ I'm pretty sure we'll reach an agreement.

The code is horrible. Bunch of bools wrapped into eachother, function declarations literally copied around, lots of global vars. Back in the days Amiga had no MMU / memory protection, so I had to fix quite some OutOfBounds / OffByOne errors while porting it to PC. Put every array into a transparent array class, allocated all memory so that it ends at a page boundary and readwrite-blocked the page behind it so that it crashes immediatly at the first byte after the end. And crash it did, lots and often.

Now it's all clean. I also updated it to the audience's taste of today: an "easier" story mode, immediate Retry opportunity without repeating story text pages or the weapon shop, achievements, cloundsynced save games, transparent keyboard / gamepad controls. I couldn't update the graphics - it's still 320x240 pre-rendered at 16bit - because I don't have the models anymore. I also do not have the compiler for the homemade script language, so all missions are left unchanged. The anim format is still 320x180 at 20fps, my homemade format achieved ~1:10 compression ratio but at least it ran steadily even with 30MHz and 4MB RAM.

Trailer: http://www.splitterwelten.info/privat/crossfire2_trailer.mp4

   








If you're interested and you wanna help me out, wishlist it or talk about it. Thanks in advance!

[Schrompf]

If you got Twitter and you want to help me, please fav this post: https://twitter.com/DerSchrompf/status/1293642094825930758?s=20

Maybe I can convince the Twitter algorithm this way that this post is worth being shown

[Schrompf]

Another scene from a later mission: It doesn't look good for our battleship.

[Sp1ke]

Looks reallllllly good.
Best luck witch proliferation of your game

[Schrompf]

Thanks :-) It's already nicely wrapped up, but I still encounter an occasional bug which I finally track to some unwritten bool or a leftover array entry. I wish for a small arm-sized time machine just to slap my younger self across the face.

On the other side, seeing how much I've grown as a coder in the past 20 years is wiiiild.

[Schrompf]

I'm nearly out of everything, and then this ship blocks my path home!



Crossfire II was released for Amiga in December 2002. Back then it required 4MB of RAM and a Motorola 68030 with at least 30MHz. The Steam version is coming at August 31th and will need a bit more. Like 256MB of RAM, and a few hundred MHz. Turns out a simple DirectX context and the GPU driver behind it comes with a certain cost.

[retrophilion]

Anything Amiga is an instant love for me.  Well done!

[hijong park]

As a fan of asteroids this is an instant buy to me !!!

[Schrompf]

Thanks, people!

[Schrompf]

The trailer is on youtube now:

[JobLeonard]

Nice work! Following the thread/twitter/steam/etc

[hijong park]

I have bought and played it. I haven't played the original amiga version, but here's feedbacks :

- It was a bit disappointing that there's no increased resolution support and I'm forced to play with distorted pixels and black borders. It's literally a port with no additional feature.



- Survival mode's playfield is screwed up and unplayable !

- I use Quanba Arcade joystick but unfortunately controllers are not remappable...




I'll play it a bit more but right now I was a bit disappointed. Hope it gets improved later.

[Schrompf]

Thanks for the feedback!

- It was a bit disappointing that there's no increased resolution support and I'm forced to play with distorted pixels and black borders. It's literally a port with no additional feature.

There's a whole bunch of new features, such as quicker retry, 60fps instead of 20fps, cloud sync, achievements and so on. And remappable controls for both keyboard and controllers. See Options -> Player Options -> First Player -> Controls.

Survival mode's playfield is screwed up and unplayable

Thanks for the hint. There's like 30 of these, and I've tested a bunch of them, so just retry if you want. I'll hunt this one down and fix it.

I use Quanba Arcade joystick but unfortunately controllers are not remappable...

It is. See above.

I'll play it a bit more but right now I was a bit disappointed. Hope it gets improved later.

And understandably so. But I can't redo the graphics, I don't have the assets anymore. Heck I don't even have the custom script compiler anymore, so I can't rebalance the story, either. But I'll add a warning on the shop site, just in case someone expects an HD version or something.

[Schrompf]

We aimed for next Monday, Aug 31th. But by accident my partner already released it a few hours ago :-/ I'm at work and then gotta tend to my family, I have not time up until late evening today, for fricks sake.

[hijong park]

I went to option and tried to redefine controls but the game doesn't redefine the controls when I pressed the controller's buttons. This happens even when the player1's control input is "controller1".

Survival mode need to be fixed quickly, I bought this game mostly because of that mode.

[Schrompf]

I went to option and tried to redefine controls but the game doesn't redefine the controls when I pressed the controller's buttons. This happens even when the player1's control input is "controller1".

Hm ok, gotta recheck that.

Survival mode need to be fixed quickly, I bought this game mostly because of that mode.

Have you tried just starting another round? I think you just found one buggy survival level, the others are probably fine.

[hijong park]

Have you tried just starting another round? I think you just found one buggy survival level, the others are probably fine.

I have retry survival mode over 10 times and every games were the same. I think all playfields are screwed.

[Schrompf]

Ok, thanks for trying. I'm on it

[Schrompf]

Fixed.

[hijong park]

The playgield is now fixed, thanks.

The survival mode is awesome, it's like star control but without any tedious RPG elememets which I was looking for years.

But is there a way to increase health in survival mode ? I was waiting for an item to increase health but that kinds of item never appeared.