Hello World! It’s been a hot minute since our last NEONengine devlog. This time, we will dive deep into the world of text layout. Before we begin, let’s go over every requirement we have: Must be able to print text left-, center-, and right-justified. Given a maximum column width, it must be able to wrap text. Given only an x-coordinate, it must be able to center the text vertically It must be able to draw a panel using a nine-patch....
Hello, world! 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. The language pack has three sections: The header The strings chunk The words chunk I borrowed the notion of chunks from the ILBM/IFF file format because it not only made everything pretty neat, it made it easy to look at the file in a hex editor and quickly figure out what was what where....
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. An example of NEONnoir's dialogue system A screenshot of NEONnoir’s dialogue system shows that the green text is two shades of green, creating a CRT-like effect....
What is 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! The Blitz Basic source has proved more and more challenging to work with as the project grows bigger as I add enhancements. The next game in the series is unshackled of an impending release date, so I want to add all the features I had to cut before....
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?...
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....
Figuring out how to make NPCs have conversation
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.
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.
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.