Jonathan Thomas

We had a magazine in the UK called INPUT in the mid 1980s that aimed to teach people how to program such things on the 8-bit micros. Your video instantly took me back to those days. 😀

I guess I should probably stop messing around with demo effects on the high score screen and get back to writing the damn game. 😄

#CaveyTaxi
#AtariSTE

Thanks to Atari-Forum user ThorN for this "STOT Players Favourite new ST Game" award for Faster! 🥳

(STOT is the ST Offline Tournament - a high scores competition hosted on Atari-Forum and played using Atari ST games).

Download Faster for Atari STE from retroracing.itch.io/faster-atari....

Cavey Taxi for Atari STE: high scores now being loaded from floppy and displayed on high score screen. Tons of raster time left, so I feel the urge to get a lot more colours on screen and more demo effects going on here. 😄

(Yes I'm aware of the glitch!)

#CaveyTaxi
#AtariSTE

As suggested by Angus over on X - raster bars underlying the wavy logo. Who needs one of them "copper" things anyway? 😄

(excuse the artifacts - it's next on my list...)

#CaveyTaxi
#AtariSTE

That's an excellent idea... lots of new stuff to see on the STE from the last 5 years. Including my own two previous works :)

I'm supposed to be working on the core gameplay of Cavey Taxi for the Atari STE, but instead I've gotten caught up in creating this logo distorter for the high scores screen. 😄

Back to the game itself when I've got these demoscene urges off my chest!

#AtariSTE
#CaveyTaxi

Cavey Taxi for Atari STE - game is now booting from floppy and I'm working on mundane stuff like title screens and high score tables.

I tend to implement things *very* roughly before going back to refine them - this video illustrates this idea very well. 😄

#AtariSTE
#CaveyTaxi

Coming soon to an Atari STE near you, with another one of those tasty hi-colour title screens that does a great job of showing off the STE's 4096 colour palette. 😄

#CaveyTaxi
#AtariSTE

Sometimes I get a bit bored of working on the game itself, and find myself going off on a bit of a tangent to add some demoscene-style magic into the mix. 😄

"Cavey Taxi" for Atari STE: activated scoring system and added notifications to indicate how many passengers are remaining to be picked up.

At this rate of progress, I'll be looking for help with YM music and digital sound effects soon - please let me know if you'd like to help!

#AtariSTE

Excellent games on N64 - much more playable than the overrated (but very pretty) F1 World Grand Prix series.

The PC and Dreamcast versions were rather underwhelming though.

2 minutes of gameplay from my upcoming Atari STE minigame "Cavey Taxi", running on real Atari STE hardware (with a badly calibrated modern monitor 😞).

Look how effortlessly this powerhouse of a retro system handles that 2-layer parallax scroll and particle system!

#AtariSTE

Good to hear from you Scott. I contemplated the idea of an energy/shield bar, but I couldn't be bothered to go to the effort of working out the pinball-like physics of bouncing the ship off the rocks. So I'm afraid you'll have to settle for playing a game with difficulty turned up to 11. 😈

Ha ha! I messed up pretty badly there - it's a good illustration of how you have to pay non-stop attention to the craft at all times. I'm just glad I made the collision detection pixel perfect so I couldn't go blaming the game!

Not quite sure what you mean there - could you explain a bit further? 😀

This is the latest build of the WIP Atari STE game I am now provisonally calling "Cavey Taxi".

Pick up passengers in a tight cave complex and drop them off elsewhere, fighting gravity, time and fuel consumption. With pretty parallax scrolling and particle systems.

What's not to like? 😀

Continued work on this upcoming minigame for the Atari STE. The gameplay is shaping up to be a bit Crazy Taxi-esque - pick up passengers and drop them off elsewhere in the cave without running out of time or fuel.

Still lots of work to do but coming along nicely!

#AtariSTE

Ah well... at least the Blitter isn't as bad as everybody used to say. 😀

Score/status display starting to take shape (yes, the masking around the timer isn't yet finished...).

Working with hardware scrolling can be pretty mind bending at times. 🤯

#AtariSTE

Mockup of status display, including countdown timer, fuel remaining, score and high score. Hoping to implement this in the game in the coming days.

#AtariSTE

I have no idea at the moment - it's evolving rather organically. 😀

Fixed colour palette and added pixel-perfect collision detection with foreground. Ship spawns back to a safe point when it crashes.

All STE features except DMA sound on show here - Hardware scroll, Blitter and Enhanced palette! DMA sound to come soon to complete things. 😀

#AtariSTE

First signs of gameplay in this new Atari STE project - joystick left and right rotate the ship and up activates the thrusters. Gravity pulls the ship downwards.

The particle system is looking really nice - there aren't nearly enough ST/Amiga era games with particle systems. 😀

#AtariSTE

Big thanks to
@zeropagehomebrew.com
for this exquisite award certificate and trophy for FASTER on the Atari STE!

(Amiga OCS/ECS version of FASTER is still in the works - please bear with me...😃)

Jonathan Thomas

The STE version is already available if you want to grab a copy.

retroracing.itch.io

Ha! I know what you mean, it's sometimes a bit too fast for my ageing reflexes. My "justification" for this is that racing games in the 80's were hard and fast, but our younger reflexes could cope with that. 😆

I think it's going to be okay - I've come a long way since those earlier efforts and coming to understand how to get performance out of the Amiga. Still got a couple of tricks up my sleeve but hoping it should be as fast as the STE version for the most part.

Here's a very informal comparison between the existing #AtariSTE version of FASTER and the (WIP) #Amiga OCS/ECS version, because I know you guys love this kind of thing. 😄

Atari left, Amiga right.

This short gameplay segment (I can only show about 30 seconds in Bluesky) is taken from quite a yellow time of day in the 24 hour cycle. That may account for it - there's no deliberate yellowness injected into the Amiga version.