Wolfchild for the ST, a disaster

[Stefan jL]

Hmm... Atarimania credit 4mat (Matthew Simmonds) for the music... where does that info come from? 4mat himself?
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st ... 10865.html

[Retrogamer_ST]

In fact, most scrolling platform/action games on the ST is a sort of disapointment because the lack of nessessary hardware to run such games smooth. The best games on the ST is never scrolling platform games, it's games like Carrier Command, Dungeon Master, Vroom, F16 Falcon, Damocles etc.

[nativ]

there were a few, Magic Boy and Rainbow Islands come to mind immediately

[Retrogamer_ST]

All non scrolling or vertical scrolling platformers worked okey on ST while most horizontal scrolling platformers suffered a lot from the lack of hardware scrolling. Sometimes they tried to solve it with a hybrid of a "burst of rapid horizontal scrolling" and "screen change", like on ZX Spectrum when you enter the next screen in Jet Set Willy or similar game. This can be seen on games like Blues Brothers and Nicky Boom for exemple.

On the other hand, many of the best games for ZX Spectrum was the non scrolling ones, like Jet Set Willy, Cybernoid, Exolon, Dynamite Dan and many more.

[Zamuel_a]

There are some good horizontal scrolling games on the ST. Turrican and Beyond the ice palace for example, but it takes some memory and many games were designed to run on 0.5Mb machines so they could sell them to as many people as possible.

[Retrogamer_ST]

And that's why most software houses ignored STE too. Sell as many copies as possible.

STE fixed what ST should have had from the beginning, hardware scroll and hardware sprites. 2D scrolling platformers and scrolling action games were incredible popular when ST was released. Even old Atari 800 featured those vital custom chips for 2D scrolling sprite based games.

It was possible to do plenty of amazing things on Atari ST, but it demanded quite much of the programmer and some extra memory. Very few people was able to produce smooth scrolling horizontal platform and action games on Atari ST.

[Zamuel_a]

Porting Wolfchild to STE could be a nice project for someone

[Retrogamer_ST]

That would fix it nice me think.

When the scrolling can't cope + lack of any hardware sprites, the control is always terrible. It feels like controlling something in some sort of treacle environment where the physics is blown out of the window because the processor is working overtime in choppy game levels.

Then, when you control something that isn't scroll, it's the opposite. Dizzy for exemple has excellent control.

[Stefan jL]

Grazey has updated the SNDH archive and mention that Martin Iveson has confirmed that the Wolfchild music is by him
http://dbug.kicks-ass.net/sndh/?p=65

[dlfrsilver]

not sure, but it looks like that ST version is original?

?? I don't think there is enough info on that page to determine that?

you should read all his articles:

he did "Scroll Programming" for Wolfchiled and if you read article about Switchblade, you will find:

"Switchblade was the first game I began writing for the Atari ST.

...In fact, the only downside of developing Switchblade in my spare time was that my coding skills had improved so much in my day job, that in the evenings working on Switchblade I was going back to working on the code of a novice programmer and had to force myself to keep moving forwards to complete the game rather than constantly going back to rewriting the code to make it technically better."

we are talking about Simon Phipps: http://www.simonphipps.com/design.htm

regarding Rick Dangerous he wrote:

"The screen was 32 characters (256 pixels) wide on all formats, including the Amiga and ST versions, since we were so tight on time we could not afford to have different width maps for the different formats."

se he is coder and designer and graphicisian (how you call a man that draw graphics?)


non of this does not say exactly if Wolfchiled is made for ST but there is more (in Wolfchild article):

"To take advantage of the MegaCD's extra space I created an new introductory sequence for the game, and then spent many more hours revisiting the graphics, boosting the original 8 colour sprites and backgrounds to 16 colours."

so graphics for original Wolfchild did not use Amigas 32 colors? (it could be because additional bitplane would steal CPU cycles in chipram)


btw I did not notice that NGF have picture from Switchblade as avatar

Wolfchild was made on the Amiga as leader machine. It was released first for it, and it came 1 or 2 months later on Atari ST.

[lostdragon]

A dissapointment more than a disaster, but given the commercial state of the ST games market at that time, hardly surprising.
An STE version wouldn't of made commercial sense, ST conversion probably warranted in terms of if it's done enough folks will buy it, but don't tie people up for too long, we need it converted to the Sega formats, ASAP.

[lostdragon]

Reading an old interview with Simon (passed onto Atarimania and Core Design Website), he talks of all his development work being done on a Mega ST running OCP's Art Studio...

How the original design sketches for the main sprite in Wolfchild had a much more metallic look at had spiky armour, but that had to change as he was limited to 16 colours on the ST...

And the game itself came about after criticism for Switchblade 1 and 2's lack of enemies on screen, Core wanting to prove it was possible to have a lot of enemies on screen at 1 time in a game of this type.