Devlog 01: New beginnings

Hello World!

In this new devlog series, I’m going to catalog the process of making my new game for the Amiga Blitz Basic Game Jam. As part of the jam, we have 3 months to create a fully fledged video game that is, well, written in Blitz Basic and runs on Amiga hardware. One of the top prizes is having your game receive a boxed release!

The community over at the Discord is extremely knowledgeable and welcoming, even to people who’ve never used programmed in Blitz Basic before.

For my entry, I’m taking inspiration from the first (and only) Amiga game I’ve played, Rise of the Dragon. It’s a point-and-click adventure game that owes quite a bit to Blade Runner and other cyberpunk media.

My entry will be NEONnoir, and as the name hopefully implies, it follows the story of a private investigator in a near-future dystopia who gets caught up in things bigger then themselves. Is the story cliched? Absolutely! But while the jam is one of the longer ones being three months long, it’s a very short amount of time to create a polished game from scratch, in a language I never used, on hardware I don’t (yet) have, with dev tools that have not aged well at all.

To make my life easy, I’m writing tools in C++ that run on Windows that will help be create the game’s content, which will hopefully allow me to iterate quickly and hopefully finish in time.

In the following devlogs, I’ll be discussing more about the project and tools. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

See you next game!