Devlogs

NEONnoir News

Once again, I state the obvious and say it’s been quite some time since we last chatted. So much has happened, and I can’t wait to get you up to speed.

Nov 13, 2023 · 2 min

NEONengine Devlog 4 - Text Layout

It’s been a hot minute since our last NEONengine devlog. This time, we will dive deep into the world of text layout.

Jun 22, 2023 · 6 min

NEONengine Devlog 3 - Language Packs

Today’s devlog is going to be short and sweet. Last time we talked about text rendering and that all of the NEONnoir strings are in a language pack that provides two things: the strings and the length and position of every word in every string.

Jun 14, 2023 · 4 min

NEONengine Devlog 2 - Drawing Text

Before porting my text-rending code, I looked at what ACE could do for me out of the box. Out of the box, ACE comes with a tool to create a monochrome font (1BPP) to be used when rendering text. The neat thing about this is that you can change the color of the text at runtime. Unfortunately, it only supports monochrome fonts, while NEONnoir uses a multi-colored font.

Jun 9, 2023 · 4 min

Enter NEONengine

As you have probably surmised from the previous post, NEONengine is the C port of the framework that powered NEONnoir, and progress is already underway!

Jun 8, 2023 · 4 min

What's Next?

It’s been about eight months since the release of NEONnoir, and in that time, I’ve been making various bug fixes for the engine and the game’s content. I wanted to add features I cut due to time constraints and use NEONnoir as the test game while I start preproduction for the sequel. This has led me to ask myself, “How much more effort do I want to put into the Blitz Basic codebase?

Jun 8, 2023 · 1 min

NEONnoir Release

When I first started thinking about the Amiga Blitz Basic Jam , I knew I wanted to make a cyberpunk game. Having just finished the Dungeon Crawler Jam 2022, I was in the mood to make a dungeon crawler with point-and-click adventure elements in the vein of Horror Soft’s WaxWorks. This was my first time developing for the Amiga and the first time touching Blitz Basic 2, as I started to understand the limitations of the language and hardware – but more importantly, my own limitations, I decided to drop the dungeon crawling aspect and decided to focus on making the game a first person point-and-click like Myst.

Jan 4, 2023 · 13 min

Devlog 05: Dialogue Trees

Figuring out how to make NPCs have conversations.

Jul 2, 2022 · 8 min

Devlog 04: Writing text on the screen

Let’s figure out everything we need to do in order to display a text using a custom font and see if we can’t add some bells and whistles.

Jun 22, 2022 · 8 min

Devlog 03: File formats

Today we define the file format where we store all of the game’s data in a way to make it easy to read from Blitz Basic.

Jun 7, 2022 · 8 min

Devlog 02: Making a game for the Amiga?

I understand at a broad level the kind of game I want to make: a first person, point-and-click adventure game set in a near future dystopian world. What I need to figure out is what systems need to be built and how to build them.

Jun 6, 2022 · 4 min

Devlog 01: New beginnings

Starting a new devlog series for NEONnoir, a game I’m making for a retro game jam!

Jun 5, 2022 · 2 min