Please login to submit a screenshot

Most people agree that the Amiga version of Midnight Resistance is actually more fun to play than the arcade coin-op - a case of the Amiga version bettering the coin-op! (Well done!) At the time, did you notice any bugs/problems with the coin-op that you changed/improved?

Bloody nice of most people to say, thanks, I can't really remember but we did play the arcade version, didn't it have a rotating novelty joystick controller or something that was awkward and painful after a bit, anyways, I think the control method that we used with the standard stick possibly got in the way less, but I could just be imagining that.

Was the Amiga the lead version?

I think they were pretty parallel but independent, a lot of the graphics were shared but what we did with them was best for platform, the ST's small page scroll wouldn't have washed for me on the Amiga, we had more screen area, smooth scrolling and I found no problem doing two player simultaneous.

Any idea how long the game took to write?

Probably about 5.5 months, which seemed typical at the time and place.

Did you have to also create the ST version completely yourself or was somebody else responsible/helping on that?

No the ST was taken care of by (the now sadly late great) Joffa Smith.

Presumably there was some big chunk of actual game logic code that was identical on both the Amiga and Atari ST and it called separate routines to do the actual screen rendering and sound for each platform? Or heaven forbid, did you both do your own version of the code?

Sounds crazy, but you know I think we each wrote it from the ground up. I think the game handled quite differently to cater for the page scroll on ST, it was all much more fluid on Amiga, thanks to the hardware, so maybe the differences and speed of development meant it was more straightforward to just do it, I spent quite some time in Joffa's office but this was mainly to see some daylight. He had an office on an outside wall of the Albert dock, and we'd sit around chewing the fat with Frank talking about computers and cars.

Did you have access to the source code or get supplied with anything from the coin-op people?

No source code, but we had the suitcase for a short while at least, I think we probably videoed a play through, and read the roms to get the basis for the graphical data.

I don't think the suitcase would have stayed with us long but we had it for long enough to get what we needed, once the game was mapped out we had enough to make the game.

Were all the inter and end-of-level guardians fun to write or a nightmare, or a bit of both? (eg. The planes flying over, the huge battleship, the massive spinning cogs etc).

I think it was probably one of the most fun titles to develop, most frustration in development comes from having to rethink around flaws in design or capability of the hardware. When the design is complete and working at the start of development, it's in the bag, anything you do beyond that will just be icing on the cake.

Did you get so good at the game you could fly through the game very easily? (I could never beat the planes dropping bombs without losing several lives!)

I reckon so, but when you need to get to a point in game to find and fix bugs, I would typically still rely on cheats, maybe that was more to do with time than anything else though.

With regards to the enemies in Midnight Resistance, were they all placed (and triggered) based on the map?

Triggered by map point and some by event.

Were the enemies all treated like objects with their own chunk of code, a move procedure, a draw procedure, a blow up procedure etc? And once created they all just do their own thing?

The code was quite low level and procedural, but the same concepts apply.

What was the most complex enemy?

I guess it would have been the more multi modal guardians.

Are you a perfectionist, as it seemed like a lot of effort and care went into making a really accurate conversion?

Just following the lead from what we saw, it was just great to have hardware that could do some justice to the coin-op, there was a lot of time and effort, I was always burning the midnight oil, if you think it was accurate then I guess we did ok.

Did you always create the actual game first and all the extra stuff (high score tables, intros, outros etc) later? Or if you got stuck on a problem you'd switch to doing another bit for a break?

Focus was on the game, I suppose at times, you could say that it is often productive to go and do something different then return.