Paolo Cattani

The first game I developed for the all-mighty Amiga was “I Tesori” (Treasures), featuring Pippero and Tucchero in their quest for fortune and glory in the Burubullis’ dungeons. The game was a classic platform one, but the gameplay had some interesting features that made it somewhat different from other titles of the same genre. Unfortunately, it was coded using a very bad development system (Microsoft AmigaBASIC), so the final result was quite bad (especially performance-wise); and even if I planned, later in those years, a remake written in C in order to do justice to the original idea, such a remake never was completed.

Well, never… until now! Taking advantage of this period of Covid pandemic, having some time to spare just to experiment with the Godot engine, I developed a modern version of that old game. It’s still a 2d platform and the orginal gameplay is still there, but I added some new features that, really, were intended to be there in the original game but weren’t because of limitations of the development system.

The new browser game, “I Beobi e il Segreto dei Burubulli”, is freely available here: http://www.paolocattani.com/beobisegreto/; it’s free to play, but if you think it deserves a little donation (link in the game) I will donate myself half of the collected money to organizations that are currently working to fight the Covid pandemic!

I’ve never been a big fan of “game engines”. I’ve always found them either too bloated and complex to be mastered in a reasonable time (thus, preferring rewriting things myself), or too simplistic and limited to be suitable for big projects.

However, some time ago I stumbled on the Godot Engine. And I think that this one can be the one that can make me change my mind.

First of all, the dev system is really compact, the ide/editor itself is a little executable that doesn’t require any installation; you put it wherever you like and you get rid of it by simply throwing it in the bin. In less than 100Mbytes you get a visual 3D/2D environment where you can build your virtual worlds with lots of prebuilt objects representing the most common tools a game developer needs: 3d stuff, physics, GUI controls/widgets, networking, and so on. Neat!

Second, the learning curve is really good, if you have a bit of experience in game development: things are deployed in a very clever way, you don’t need to immediately understand everything to be quickly productive, simple things are simple and complex things are possible. You reuse components already available for the most common stuff, and you can extend them using the internal scripting language, GDscript, to add the required additional functionalities your game may need. It’s even possible to improve/add core functionalities to the engine by adding your own C++ libraries and objects in a very clean way, thanks to the “modules” interface, a really really good point: what about porting the AVC library, in order to use the Godot Engine as the basis of my next racing sims?

I still need to dig in more into this project, but, as a first impression, I should say that it’s really interesting.

The Amiga retrogaming web magazine “Amigatronics” has published an interview with me about some of my old videogames (especially the Amiga F1 game “VirtualGP”):

https://amigatronics.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/amigatronics-virtual-interview-with-paolo-cattani-the-alien-bonus/

I was honored to speak at the Festival of Engineering of Lodi about the fine art (and science) of videogame programming.

It was very interesting, especially for my colleagues engineers… many people don’t know what’s behind the development of a videogame, the advanced mathematics required to build a 3d engine or the complex physics behind a modern simulation of a racecar or an aircraft. An engineer is, nowadays, an essential part of a videogame development team!

Some time ago I had the idea to recover my old Amiga’s hard disks. I still own ALL my old Amigas, and both the A4000 and the “towerized” A1200 are still here, along with their HDs full of my hard work of the “ol’good days”. But how could it be possible to import all files on my Linux HD?

Both the A4000 and the A1200 are AGA machines and are equipped with IDE drives, so it would be possible to make them at least available to modern systems using those IDE-to-USB adapter. Unfortunately, the ones I tried were unable to correctly recognize the drives, as they are very old (circa 1992) and (probably) not compatible with the controller. The only solution would be to find a motherboard “old enough” to be compatible with them and mount them there.

Luckily, I have a Pegasos II system lying around (such a mobo was donated to me by Genesi so that I could port my F1 game “VGP2” to MorphOS); the PegII would be the ideal solution, as it is “old enough” to read those old HDs, “new enough” to support modern media (USB sticks), and – most important of all – MorphOS should immediately be able to read the Amiga file system.

Problem was: PegII didn’t turn on! Again, luckily, the problem was simply the power supply; by just replacing it with a brand new one, the old mobo turned on, kicking and alive, fully recognizing the old Amiga HDs! Throw in a USB stick, copy everything over there, WAIT a lot (PegII is just USB 1.0!), and…

…well, now I can boot my virtualized A4000 (with FS-UAE) again on my Linux workstation!