The Powder Diaries – appendix – Archeological Digs

Not enough developed to be a full chapter, here i introduce a better insight on the 1991 demo.

The 1991 demo was called “M1 Prototype” on the title screen. Due to the disk error i mentioned on chapted 2, Maltese decided to redo the title screen at its own liking. The demo is using a homebrew trackloader and is known to not work on machines with os older than 2.0.

I found the disk at home when i went to Italy last may and made a DMS of it;  later last week i installed WinUAE in my laptop and tried to make it run, with little hopes being that disk already picky on my old A500 and never worked on my 1200.

Meddling a bit with settings i made it work finally!

The Prototype Demo loading screen

And the splash screen once loaded

So in this demo we have the first half of the later scrapped Sea Level and a first version of the City level. There are some playability differences with the final version such as the fact that is possible to collect energy pods to restore the ship energy (very little) and that the credit system is using thousands of units, like 500 credits for a change.

Sea has a pretty nice palette and shows the skills of  Marco Maltese at its finest as much as in Clouds; the enemy placement and strategy is interesting too.

A screenshot from Sea

Even the already known City level is different from the final one: first of all the sea flyby part is longer, then there is traffic roaming the city – as private vehicles and trucks – and some police roadblocks; plus the end of level boss is not a robot like in the final version – rather is another big helicopter. Also there were some kinda funny behaviour, liks some kamikaze Rail-A falling down the rails.

Download and Use

The demo is available as zipped DMS (DiskMasher) file; to use it in Amiga you need to unpack it using the DMS tool to create a physical disk; to use it in WinUAE or other emulators or even Minimig i guess you just transfer the .dms in the card and that’s it – don’t know about further settings.

For WinUAE i found out the settings in the following picture work for me:

I used A600 basic, with the slider compatibility set to Best Compatibility.

The demo can be downloaded from Aminet at this link.

Still in Aminet, is also the 1997 demo previewed in Amiga Format;  it contains the final version of  City and City Boss. This other one can be installed on Hard disk and can instead be downloaded at this link.

The Powder Diaries – 8 – Verkosoft to the rescue!

Verkosoft to the rescue!

It is the fall of 1997 and, for most of us, Amiga and powder are things of the past. Still Nicola and Thomas liked to tweak with the Eneditor in order to make the levels a bit tougher  – actually A LOT tougher, and sometimes taking enemies out of the original context – but i did not touch its work files since long time.

Then, all of the sudden, Filippo calls us. Thanks to the city demo We found a publisher, they say; at this point revenue and fame were no more a priority: as long as the game finally could be published everything was good.

And since we wanted to make it come out fast, we had to cut a LOT. No more space level and boss, no more factory boss, no more ruins boss, no more intro pictures – beside the Game Over and the End Game ones.
Since I did sever contact with Maltese sone times earlier , had to provide some of the missing assets like more decorations in the final level and the end graphic. Actually, I had to prepare the package box graphic and had to re-create the logo in vector graphics using freehand. The 3d image in the game package was done by me using lightwave 5 on my 1200 and rendered at 150 dpi, with extra touches in photoshop for the laser ray and little extras; I am mainly a 2d person while Maltese was the one with most experience on 3d, but this one imo came out decent enough. Some extra touch with Photoshop enhanced things better.

At the time of the final rush, however, was  providing my services as contractor to an advertising and web agency in Fano, so my exposure time was reduced. For the game testing and enemy placement remember Nicola Filippo and Thomas took the lead: due to that, they started to tweak the game difficulty to match their own skills and in some cases to misplace or change enemies destination -such as, in example, the big Fuel tank in Factory that was supposed to have an engine in front and instead became a fat ship to destroy; that also increased the difficulty level to pretty hard.

The final package of Powder, as shown in Hall of Light: more “real looking” than my pristine hi-res Jpeg 😛

The package wrap was put together in Freehand and the only text we had from the company was the payoff in the back of the box. There was also space for any copyrights and disclaimers that i left available for the publishers – that however did not noticed, thats why those two lines with the filler text “all copyrights goes here” in italian language appears in the bottom of the wrap.

The irony was that, during the nineties, i was looking at the game boxes of export Megadrive games with a deep envy for the plastic box and the colorful detailed artwork, while at the end, with time and budget contraints we ended up with a pretty crappy anonymous cardboard box too.

Published, at last!

And so in 1998 Powder came out under the Verkosoft brand, Epic Marketing in the UK.

The cuts, the difficulty problems and the age at the end shown its effect, so much that Amiga Format killed it with a 23%; other magazines were more forgiving, however is sure that when Powder came out the Amiga scene was no longer the good shooter starving market that we embraced in 1990, rather the inflaction-ridden mediocre shooter wasteland of 1998.

The Unforgiving review of Powder on Amiga Format

Other magazines were not that hard with it, like the Italian The Games Machine, that gave it an indulgent 79%, but AF review indeed marked the kiss of death for our beloved project.

The review of Powder in the italian version of The Games Machine:
thanks to Mauro Corbetta of RetroEdicola for the scan.

 

The Aftermath

In summer 2005, just a couple of months prior of my departure for the States, all former members of five stars met again in a restaurant in Fano,for what we called the “Powder Dinner” – at the end the earnings in the already meager end-of-nineties agonizing Amiga market were so tight that we were barely able to pay a dinner for it. Also was my last time I seen Maltese in person, with its first czech blond wife.

There we are: the Five Stars VG studio in 2005!
From the top left: Simone Bernacchia , Nicola Valentini, Filippo Carletti;
bottom: Thomas Paoloni, Marco Maltese – sorry for the bad quality of the scan.

I met the programmers again this year, in occasion of my trip to Italy; Maltese – now living in Sicily, was not present but was nice to see each other after long time! So they also had occasion to meet my wife and had a pleasant time; the main reason however was to get a leftover copy of Powder from Carletti to deliver at the president of SCCAN here in southern california, that was looking for it after i told him about my experience in doing graphics and music for the game.

Some Satisfactions, at last!

In 2009 Amiworx published a donationware CD called “Amiga Meets Piano” where, among the other popular Amiga game tracks the main theme of Powder -to my great surprise -is also featured, albeit incomplete, but this means somebody considered it good enough to be performed, and for me that is a big compliment!

In 2012 the Amiga Longplays channel featured a Powder longplay; found mostly favourable comments, especially about the soundtrack;

also on LemonAmiga the rating of 4.2 is pretty decent; plus the user the user frikilokooo Wrote:

In my opinion one of the three funniest Amiga shmups,its best feature is the addiction and its gameplay is different of the others shmups,highly recommended.The game is very underrated maybe because it came too late to the market.The graphics are unbalanced,some graphics are very good and others graphics are average,maybe by the fact that one of the two graphicians of the game is much better than the other one.The game has the best ingame music of any Amiga shmup(the best outgame music is for ProjectX though).Only a couple of glitches:no autofire,no two players mode and very unbalanced weapon system that ends using homing missiles at the end because the other weapons are worse,becoming very monotonous always the same weapon.

In 2011 I started to meditate on write down my memories on this experience, but lacked the time to do so: it was supposed to be just an episode on my blog (still in ilcannocchiale.it at the time); then a discussion about Amiga vs c64 and games design and working appeared on the forum nonsoloamiga.com, had occasion ot talk about my experience with Powder and the interest generated gave me the spark to start to write about Powder in a more expanded way.

I already started to put my songs in the AMP site and as videos on Vimeo, and the Diaries are giving me the occasion to work harder in showcasing most of my work that in my opinion need some exposure.

I would have also liked to recover the sources and try to make some kind of  “director’s cut” or maybe some other game based on the same engine; however, when i tested the work disks in my 1200 most of the floppies were giving me read error; i gave them to a friend of mine that has a catweasel-like device in the hope to recover something.

I asked Maltese about some material to show here, but he said he lost it all, since he moved several times during the last fifteen years; plus stated in a chat that he is not that affectionated to those past events and forgot most of the things happened then; however, if he or the other members of the team decides to add more particulars they can get in touch with me.

Gathering the Memories

Honestly,  most of the material i had it with me the whole time, since i tried to show it on some demo CD that i made when looking for work in Italy and abroad after got laid off by my employer in 2003, but so far never received any feedback on it;

At the end the real triggers that pushed me to publish the powder diaries were two: The nonsoloamiga discussion helped me gather in my mind most of the technical data, but the real one is likely more ego-related; having all my tests, work files, animations, unused musics rotting on the floppys in boxes on the basement at home and in some demo CD-ROMs and folders in my laptop here on the states; i treasured this material for years even in cases holding it to show on interviews due to the fact that was a project in progress; then, when the game finally was out, all the material due to technology advancement became outdated, but i always hoped that if i shown all my stuff and attempts probably the consideration of people towards me could have shifted to a different level: at the time, at least until i started to win contests, had the perception that people thought was wasting my time: even a here withheld Five Stars team member thought the same of my animations, then awards proved i was right.

So as this day, i considered Powder history however worthy to be told also as part of my youth dream and work for hopes on a better future, despite its little to no influence in the Amiga market.

At the end, were those diaries just an ego trip? Very likely, but am glad to have done my work on it and don’t regret any minute spent!

Want to get the advantage of the last rows of text to thank all the people I worked with and those who in some ways supported me either logistically or morally or that, with their mere existence, gave me ideas and reasons to go on.

Music – Powder Final Credits (1997) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

 

The Powder Diaries – 7 – The long dark tea time of the soul

All’alba Vinceroooooooh

After my partial defeat with the Delusion! the videoclip, was particularly bitter on the shortsightness of the music business – something many others had to deal with in future as we know, but that did not discourage me to continue my career: at the time i already started another project – that was able to continue to work thanks to the purchase of a side 2 megabytes RAM expansion.

The animation “N.O.L.W. – The Night Of the Living Wrecks” was presented at Pixel Art Expo in Rome and placed second; with the money i was able to buy a second hand Amiga 1200 that replaced my 500; then came, in Easter Weekend, as usual, the Bit.Movie. I remember was there in the awarding ceremony and they already assigned the third and second prize; assigning the first they started talking about “how the author re-interpreted a cult movie and give it a new meaning “, pretty convinced it was a slow boring animation I seen in the same contest to win so, when instead they announced my name was pretty surprised.

N.O.L.W. – La notte dei rottami viventi – the night of the living wrecks from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

 

The prize also gave me way to expand further my machine, so I bought a hard disk (half gig, at the time pretty big), a Viper 030/42 mhz + FPU (later found out was a EC030 so no MMU drivers for me) and 16 megabytes, later brought to 32 and also a Microvitec monitor – meant that the times to draw animation on TV were over for me.

The long dark tea time of the soul

At some point money for studies ran out and I found myself working as ad spreader – those people who put junk mail in your mailboxes: was one of them, and did that job for little more than one year while looking for a job in my field.

That also lead me to take a country funded course in office automation so that I would have been able to work in a office. Thanks to shapeshifter, was able to do my homework on my Amiga on Word and Excel and, when had the time, was studying on my own how to do DTP and graphic design, trying to recover my high school know-how and a more traditional track; the fact that was working on Amiga rather than on P C or Mac (despite Mac emulation) was not helpful either: DTP people were almost exclusively a Mac shop and also pretty proud of it: for them my emulated mac was some kind of travesty.

Was working together occasionally with Maltese in doing soundtracks for commercials and some of its – if i can call it this way – failed experiments too; was also teaching myself HTML using some booklets bought in a local bookstore; at the time things were much simpler than now and having a Netscape install and a text editor was enough.

Music – Deimos (v3.2) – 1994 from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

One of the themes for a never-finished project of Maltese – since there were no memory constraints those musics were more rich in audio samples and effects

As musician also worked with the main organizer of Pixel Art Expo in doing the soundtrack for its animation – made on imagine PC and VLab Motion – for Imagina, called DevilBalls; even if at the end was not qualified to participate i still consider it an interesting experience, with him sending me the tape of the animation and me creating the music and adapting it to the flow; normally in traditional animation the music comes first and animation adapts to its flows but CGI made the roles get reversed in this case.

Music – DevilBalls (1997) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Together with the same guy and an italian-british AMOS programmer i also worked on the static and animations for a soccer manager game;  the animations were supposed to be sprite driven (for more situations to show) and inspired by the then new isometric Fifa Soccer on the Megadrive to save memory, but ultimately we decided for small pre-rendered animations in a stadio-like megascreen; i also made a music for it that at the end was not used.

Above: one of the work files, and below the final display how it looked for the soccer manager game.

Serious troubles and lockups between my accelerator and the surf squirrel i bought as second hand forced me for a pretty intensive (and money rewarding) gig to buy – for the huge (for me) amount of Five Millions of Italian lire of the time – a Power Mac Performa 6400; this however opened the door to a more steady flow of work for websites and multimedia work (mainly presentations, video animations and web sites) using Macromedia Director and the – then new Futuresplash Animator, in future known as Flash; for 3d i was still using Amiga though due to the fact that my performa was not powerful enough to work with Lightwave at a reasonable speed; so at the end had a mixed work environment, exchanging data in a rather painful slow way via serial connection and Term program.

I also had occasion to set up an exhibitions with other people living in the close city of Ostra, where we showed our works in paintings and in a slide show with pictures and animations made using Scala. It was called in italian language “Onde di luce e immagini photogeniche” – a pun using Lightwave, Imagine and Photogenics names; beside that i also held a small personal exhibition in Senigallia called “Scarabocchi Binari” – in english Binary Doodles, so now you know where the name of this blog came from.

The Fading of the Five Stars

For events not connected to Powder, however, me and Maltese had a bad discussion about a gig we were doing together and for a long while we hardly talked to each other.

Job roles, family changes (Tomas got married and had kids in example) and conflicting schedules brought Five stars to a de-facto split, not to mention Quazar disappearance.

For a better city Soundtrack and more bling – literally

Around 1995 had Thomas and Nicola complaining since a while that they were so tired of the City soundtrack that I provided them in 1990 that needed to turn off the volume when doing testing, I did try to create alternate tracks to no avail for a while, when i was not busy with other stuff: at least three different tracks were made before choosing the final one;

The alternate tracks can be found in the Powder Musics Album of my Vimeo profile once will have time to upload them.

the one with the guitar riff won – it also shows that Powder has a rock soul maybe?

Music – Powder City Level Soundtrack Definitive (1996) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

One of the songs rejected was instead used for the City boss.

Music – Powder City Boss soundtrack – 1996 from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Nicola and Filippo thought that the city level was too flat and unappealing so asked me to add some animations, including the pulse of the crane lights and the glass glare in the buildings;  i also reworked some of the posters to have a more polished look. One of the rejected one was my tribute to the OAV Genmu Senki Leda, which I tried to portray in a hypothetical sequel promotional ad.

 

The Rejected Genmu Senki Leda II Poster in the original workfile – using the same City 16 color palette and my now well-known justaxposition technique

Habemus Logo!

Even for the logo there has been progress: after the first phase, where i was looking for a more Psygnosis-style shape, a clearer font came out that seemed satisfying and also look good if filled. Several tests were done with different filling material, with a crater field as main candidate – also to recall the dust itself; filling on Amiga never been a problem thanks to Deluxe Paint Stencil feature.

The final font face, with the initial crater filling

Also another characteristic i wanted to add was an electric spark going through the logo: not a new idea, i did that in the past for a test Quazar logo, but now skills gave me more accuracy; i tried two blue tones,one on the navy blue the other on cobalt blue, that resulted more convincing For the inner pattern at the end we decided for a clod of dust, obtained with a furious and merciless application of the smear filter to the crater landscape and a change of palette. The logo and the initial screen graphics is at 32 colors.

The logo almost final, just with the electric spark in navy blue shades rather than cobalt blue 

The Final level, how you never heard it…

The actual incarnation of the final level has been mostly cobbled up in the latest month prior publishing, and is also using a music that was meant for the now lost Clouds mega-saucer Boss Fight, but it was meant differently, even this with an approach phase and then with the Boss fight following; at least the boss is the same, with a human size figure growing to a giant robot, Megaborg style  (that strangely has a deja-vu feeling…), but was not meant to come out from the destroyed ship, rather to wait for us and then transform, with a crescendo and then the fight.

Music – Powder – Final Theme – 1991 (Unreleased) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

The Approach theme

powder final boss 0004 from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

The final Boss fight theme

…and how you heard it

I had to finish the graphic for the final level at the end: we were unable to get in touch with Maltese and so had to cobble up the background graphics and the map. For the music at the end was decided to use the music meant for the discarded Clouds boss – made by me with samples of an electric guitar played by a friend of my brother as experiment and then loved by Maltese at the time.

Music – Powder – Clouds stage boss (1993) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Pity that the replay routine messes it up a bit compared on how was supposed to play, but still makes the level pretty intense!

The Powder Diaries – Service Announcement

Last month have been in my home country for three weeks, where i also dug more into my disks to retrieve more powder data and files. Pity that, due to the lack of broadband, was unable to update my blog, but now that am back am slowly filling the gap and should be able to publish the final parts of my diaries soon.

The Powder Diaries – 6 – Commodore is dead – Long Live Commodore!

I’ll fix it tonight, Raila

One day we were having one of our meetings about what to do for powder; this time looked like was Tomas itself the one behind with the schedule. So Filippo and Nicola teased him about when he was going to finish some part of the game and he was invariably answering “I’ll fix it tonight”: that become a bit of a gag for a while, also added to unrelated stuff. Tomas has been more on the playful side rather than Filppo, that usually has a more serious – almost germanic – look  even if got its own share of sarcasm; however, talking about Tomas cannot avoid to remember how he used to call the dog of Maltese Raila (was called Karen, by the way and was a mix cocker) – Rail-A is one of the first enemies of City – the orange rail vehicle with the turret on; instead, Rail- B is the grey one and Rail-C is the vehicle that takes off. The wagons for Rail-A are called Rail-D.

REAL arcade sound effects – literally

In begin of 1993 Thomas started to meddle with sound routines inspired by the seven voice routines used in Turrican and Apydia; since most of Amiga games at the time were using mostly the same sample bank for sounds, i wanted something a bit different so one day i went to the local arcade in Marotta with my stereo and started recording arcade sounds; was lucky to be there in a moment there was no people so i recorder the sound effects of the demos of three-four arcade machines including the then pretty new Konami Shooter Xexex. Don’t ask me how a hardcore shooter like Xexex came in a small town arcade, dunno.

Xexex

The stage start sound of  Xexex became then the transformation sound of the M1. For the voice announcing weapon names, was provided by Sara, the sister of Thomas.

Commodore is Dead: Long Live Commodore!

Spring 1994;  Parking lot of the then called Joyland (now Auchan) in Fano. A Saturday Morning.

I remember i did just bought the latest Commodore Gazette and Amiga Magazine computer mags and was sitting in my car reading it, enjoying especially the articles and tutorials about Lightwave 3D. Then i seen the article about Commodore asset liquidation.

Was like being struck by a lightning: all of the sudden all plans for my future seemed to shatter and my know-how apparently doomed to fall in obsolescence shortly;  not only: was since long time planning to invest on a more powerful Amiga or in an AGA machine and, knowing th eeffect of the supply  and demand law, might have brought prices of the remaining available machines to raise.

Had been hard to digest.

At the moment i also hoped for Powder to be finished soon so that at least we would have seen some return.

And, to add insult to injury, the Amiga Club in pesaro was one of those targeted by a sting from the local IRS police force due to changes in the italian software piracy law; since me and the other Powder devs were not active members they did not come at our door knocking and seizing all our Amigas, but for a while i had a strong stomach ache.

The Multimedia carreer takes off

In the meanwhile, i was trying to pursue my other childhood dream: do animated shorts. The presence of the Bit.Movie and of a prize in money was a good motivator, but nothing beats the being able to do the work you dreamed of when you were a kid! In the last two years, as already told, me and Maltese participated to the 2d and 3d real-time contests with our animations; plus i did the soundtrack for several Maltese 3d animations, like Virtual Battle:

Virtual Battle – 1993 from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

i also had occasion to do music for the opening of a local TV show and for a couple of local commercials made by Maltese with mixed techniques – one of them was also presented in Pixel Art Expo in 1995.

After my Powder animation, i got some confidence and so tried to do a full short too; to save memory I worked with an eight color palette; the story I told was called “Mobile Suit Danko” (Danko was my nickname as Graphic Artist for Quazar, while my musician nick was J.M.D. that means Jovanotti MUST Die) – with a reinterpretation of Gundam Zaku as more cartoonized figures; a friend with Hard Disk helped me assemble it from the eight disk of anim files i prepared at home, and sent it to Bit.movie the same year as virtual battle: placed eighth beside problems with the MOD player both in my animation and Maltese one (that at the end sounded better).

Mobile Suit Danko from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Beside that, the existence of the lighttable tool on Dpaint allowed me to experiment and started to use cel-animation;  my first work to use that was a video clip cover of a popular Vasco Rossi song at the time – called Delusa – in its Disco remix; inspired by the lyrics (talking about the girls of a then popular TV show full of girls) and the work of an artist called Cavezzali, that used to portrait naive women as geeses  (well that is the italian equivalent to the Blonde stereotype), i made my own version of the videoclip, assembled synced and recorded on U-matic tape and sent it to the contest; expecting at least to place in the first three positions (and the contest involved prizes in money, so i was hoping to get at least an AGA machine with that cash).

Delusion! the videoclip from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Problem was, to use the song i needed a waiver from the recording company. So i got in touch with them to get one but the manager, Mr.MoneyMaker, said that was not going to do any exception and should request for a permit with the standard fare, that was like $5,000. Considered that the first prize of the contest was just not even $1,000 i decided to re-record the animation with a soundtrack made by me using protracker. It placed tenth if i remember.

However better times were in sight.

At the Bit.movie i also had occasion to befriend some of the volunteers that were providing access to the Amigas in showcase –  some also involved in the Rimini Amiga Club – and also professionals that were using Amiga for broadcast and computer graphics work; that later included contacts with other programmer including some MatrixSoft coders that made several sports games at the time.

The Bosses that weren’t

The idea of having a separate sublevel for each boss seemed to me a good one; that meant more room for creativity and for boss graphics.

Pity that at the end, those boss levels were scrapped for time constraints: in my opinion they would have added more appeal and athmosphere to the final game.

The graphic palette between the main level and the boss level was the same, same for the player ships, keeping continuity; just the boss level was usually no more than ten screens long and with one screen only of graphic blocks.

The factory boss sublevel was supposed to have the ship enter in a giant elevator; a huge door close behind, a counter showing the elevator going down (unrealistic, I know, but pretty coreographic) then the ship go further in a huge underground hangar, crossed occasionally by electric lightning until the ship
is surrounded from a huge assembly crane.

A composite of the Factory boss

The music I create for that was quite dark and syncopate: by chance i ended using the same samples as for the Factory theme.

Music – Powder – Factory Boss Music -1992 (unreleased) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

The ruins boss was supposed to start with a tunnel in the temple while mines are sitting on the top; at some point the mines explodes and the ceiling is falling down: so the ship needs to avoid debris.After a while the ship reach a junkyard, where the real boss resides. The boss is a mole-like robot tower structure.

Blocks to compose the Ruins Boss level

An animation test of the tower-like mole coming out

And this was the music: to remember that the boss music as intended is made of an introductory part – while reaching the final fight – and the the boss loop; there were two exception: one is city level and the other one was clouds.

Music: Powder – Ruins Boss level (1993) [unreleased] from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Finally, the boss sub-level in space involved a long tunnel where several armored ships need to be destroyed and a spheric core protected by two lasers and an energy shield.

The music for the space boss came out almost techno-style, fit the environment and put in the mood; am pretty satisfied of this one.

Music – Powder – space Boss level (1993) [unreleased] from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Foreground Sprites

Even if they were implemented as early as 1991, the most of the foreground sprites (those elements that go in parallax in front of the ships) were mostly designed now. We were using it, possibly sparingly not to clutter too much the field of view and were sometimes made of one or two 32 X any-height three colors sprite. The most notable example of those are in the city, especially the huge dish, but also several trees in ruins;  also many of enemy bullets were sprites with their own three colors palette. Together with the lower score panel the display of those brings the contrmporary colors on screen to around 50.

 

Some of the sprites work files for City, Ruins and unused for Factory and Space – the katakana in the last picture was a joke in italian (done while being bored) about how Nicola would have said that sprite “Got Balls”

 

The Powder Diaries – 5 – Road to somewhere

Looking for an Identity

Maltese proposed the name and logo of our team; since nobody had better ideas the name stuck. i later put the logo in the city level as billboard, cannot remember if is still there though. The name was Five Stars VG Studio; the logo was composed of five stars on the top, a big VG in the middle and below the remaining STUDIO text.

The Five Stars VG studio logo in a billboard on the city level

We also already started tests for the logo: beside the already shown Prototype logo, i started to design some alternate Powder logotypes. Keep in mind that at the time Psygnosis logotypes were quite trendy so i tried to create some following that style:

a first test for a Powder logotype in two colors 

 

Another test for a Powder logotype: the second screenshot has guidelines for the coders in italian language in case they decided to animate it.

 However those two early test were rejected, so back to the drawing board.

WolfSoft

So at the end of 1992 as explained in part 4 me and Maltese proposed Powder to with Mr.CornFlakes but he said was not interested in the game. In a latter time I tried to work with him in a recreation of the graphics for a clne of the World Rally arcade game by Gaelco; however, i underestimated the complexity of the map layout – that probably needed to be laid out in more than one layer.

I think have no surviving graphic files to show also because the work diskette malfunctioned at some point.

However, since at that time we were already in 1994, most of the computer gaming interest was starting shifting on PC; i remember Mr.CornFlakes showing me a preview of a 3D game based on a similar-robotech environment, also using timelapse animation of models for the introduction: indeed having a media like an Hard disk or even a CD-ROM was making a difference…

Consoles and Japanese Influence

The father of Maltese was used to go in eastern asia for business; once he came back with a good bunch of japanese computer mags; one was called Technopolis and was computer oriented; then there were a couple of PC-Engine related magazines.

Covers of the japanese computer mag Technopolis, courtesy of this page

Despite the language problems – at the time my japanese language knowledge was far lesser – those magazines gave us a deeper insight on japanese console games trendy at the time than my monthly purchase of local and british game magazines – especially CU Amiga and C+VG – could. So that showed me the most trendy shoot’em up in the console, like Rayxanber III, insight of Rayxanber II and other games.

There is also another friend of mine that is a diehard game collector and focused mainly on Amiga, megadrive and Super Nintendo, either the export machines or the official ones; therefore, not only via pictures in magazines but also live i was able to see lot of games in console, sometimes still in the japanese box with japanese handbooks and writings. The boxes and the writings, especially the japanese Megadrive game boxes, had for me – coming from art studies – their personality: the plastic case, the full color handbooks were giving me the feeling of a complete and solid product.

Plus the undeniable culture shock that manga culture provided on the western: albeit undercover during the eighties, it exploded as subculture in the early nineties and found me with my arms opened both as aspiring comic and animation designer, as video game graphic designer and as video game musician: the different (sometimes cheesy or plain weird for a western small town guy standards) tastes in graphic and music were opening me a new world, albeit not completely unknown for me: i knew a bit to use katakana since the eighties and extended that to learning more japanese language later on; now i can still use kanas and read some kanjis but am afraid is fading away (not good)…

An overview of the tools

The Map Editor is pretty simple. It is needed to load the MED source then write in the source code the path for the block files and the screens length of the map then use A to run the tool. There are two main screens: the first is the proper map screen and the secondis the seleciton screen. In the bottom there are twelve empty blocks. The user clock on several blocks of the map and then in the empty slot to “load” the block, then switches in the map screen and starts to “draw” clicking in one of the blocks in the palette below to draw that block. Through a button is possible to save the map and if i remember clearly pressing Escape to be quit back to the DOS.

The Enemy Editor – or eneditor – was also the main engine of the game. Modifying some flags was possible to compile either the editor version or the final version of the game, and using the parameters we were pointing the files to be loaded.

But, before of that, we needed to prepare the enemies with another tool, found by Tomas and Filippo, likely coming from the demoscene: seems to me to remember it was called RawEdit; however, we had to align all sprites animationone next to the other in a single picture to be then highlighted and saved in .bmap; i used to call those files MasterClipper.

An example of Masterclipper file for Ruins.

To insert an enemy in the eneditor was needed to scroll to the desired point then go to the selection screen. There was possible to choose one of the loaded enemies, define animations, behavior and other parameters. There was the possibility to create also nullObjects, mean empty sprites that were used to refer an enemy or an event. Through a number of selectors was possible to add counters for transformation either in raster cycles or in number of hits, plus there was the way to define parent-child relationships between enemy elements so that, in example of a boss we could have a nullObject that, in 300 raster lines transform in the boss – that have three linked objects shooting homing missiles and that transforms in explosions after 100 hits providing 20 credits. [need to find pictures for it] – other special events involved the passage of Sprites (for parallax effect) ,stopping the scroll and ending the level.

The intro, the screens and the ending that never were – almost

Is well known that Amiga did create the trend for fancy game intros thanks to psygnosis; might be less known that japanese games had text intros first and that the Neo Geo created the trend for cutboard lightweight intros.

Since powder was trying to retain an arcade or at least a console feel, I thought the cutboard style of intro was ideal. There are at least two attempts for me to create an intro for powder: the first one was supposed to have several vignettes in the foreground with cutscenes like the bay door opening, the ship igniting boosters and so on;

however, since was my own initiative was scrapped at the end, also because Maltese realized that i misinterpreted the M1 design (the dual tails are parallel, not slanted).

The second one was inspired by an animation work of Maltese that he presented at the 1992 edition of Bit.Movie, called 500 TL vs Ferrari, made with Deluxe Paint. It used 8 colors to use less memory but colors were good and so people not even noticed it. It placed at eight place.

That gave me some ideas that maybe using a similar approach i could create a small size anim file for the intro a la Psygnosis, and also helped me in do the jump towards making animated shorts.

Later in 1993 i made that animation participate to the Pixel Art Expo in Rome, where it placed – if i remember clearly – eighth too.

Powder from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Why at the end the animation did not come out despite the CD format? One of the reason is that we should need to split all sprites to be put into the eneditor and use that to animate, the second -and most important – one was that at the end we forgot of it.

Among the countless open trenches that Powder – but not only – was leaving around, there were also other plans to embellish the game.  Later in 1992 Agony came out and sported beautiful introductory screens for each level. Nobody asked me to, but i thought we could show those too in the game. So i started to work on Dpaint using half brite modes to create some of the introductory screens. The first to be created was the game over screen:

 

The Game Over screen – sorry for the low quality since is taken from a video

Then i started also to work on the several levels, with mixed media, like in example Factory, was started from a screen grab of the opening sequence of “Blade Runner”; i worked on it a bit, pity the tape quality was bad…

 

And then the City Screen, done by hand, where i tried to use some daring perspective and reflections done by hand (was however later used in the game handbook  cover)

Then the ruins main screen:

and the Clouds screen, unfinished, despite being probably the best one…

 

Also there was an attempt to do a game map, even this unfinished, but at just 32 colors:

 

 

I also was trying to find a good way to do the ending; one of my ideas was make the ship land in a carrier on the sea; i also made an ending song for it:

 

Music: Powder – End Game music (1992) [unreleased] from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

At the end the final song has been replaced with the actual one, lightweight and included as different song in the main MOD file.

One thing that so far i forgot to mention is that at the time i did not had a monitor: all the graphics was made on my 1982 15″ Grundig Color TV plugged through RF modulator. Indeed was looking much better there (for gamers) than on a monitor screen, but instead Filippo, Nicola and Maltese had one so they were able to pinpoint when sometimes inaccuracies happened.

And other parts of the game started to take life. I was able to Factory, Space and Ruins soundtracks:

Music – Powder – Factory level music- 1992 from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Music: Powder – Ruins (1993) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Music – Powder Space in-game soundtrack -v2 – 1992 (unreleased) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

 

And also the bosses idea started to take their place. First boss levels to be conceived were City and Space. For city the first idea was a giant armored ship that, however, due to color reduction did not looked too well:

 

So one day i decided to redesign it using the juxtaposed coloring and also giving a wink to Thunderforce: the result is a badass red flying carrier mothership shooting lasers from the front, with two openings where a red version of the city winged ships comes out and that needs to be destroyed in two phases.

Test rendering of the city boss

The background was then designed to be coherent with the game progress too, located in the huge hangar of the winged wtite ships, neatly stacked in floors.

A screen capture of an actual boss fight

Things were finally starting to make sense together and i was optimistic for Powder to see the light of day and for us to have a niche of work using our machines; unaware of the tragedy that was slowly unfolding in the other side of the ocean and that would at the end alter our lives…

…in WestChester,Pennsilvanya.

The Powder diaries – 4 – The tale of the Lost Poster

TradersCo

[Names are changed to protect the innocent]

Was through the computer club that we got in touch with a couple of guys from Bologna. According to their card, they were having a commercial software business but were planning to enter into the games market as well. Two tall guys, well dressed and kinda well mannered;

They call their company TradersCo.
In order to impress them more we tried to do another crunch time to have a more polished product. The map in ruins and factory were basically completed, excluded some extra particulars.

Also, since Forest was scrapped due to unsatisfying graphics while working on the einsteinSoft demo, the main enemy –  a huge robot ant – was put apart as well; however i managed to change the palette and recover it for ruins in the first part of the level. However even the Graveyard level of Maltese followed same early departure.

The original appearance of the giant Ant with Forest palette: head is in 8 colors, body in segments of four

To this I also added the work in what could be used as the game package and advertising page: a poster 100cm x 70 cm with the M1 equipped with laser is facing the viewer with the Factory level in the background. The poster was done with mixed tempra and pencil colors and to finish it up I worked all night up to 9 am before one of our meeting.

We had a couple of talks in Bologna and then they did the offer. It was for an amount of – according to Maltese – 2.500.000 italian lire; a pretty tiny amount even for the time; at the moment I cannot remember if we were taking any royalty on sales. However we decided the offer was inadequate. They did not take the answer too good and we did not heard from them again. Plus I never went to know what happened to my poster.

Struggles between game work and studies

In the meanwhile of powder development, was also busy in trying to push forward my studies: in order to improve my calculus skills and since going to Ancona everyday was starting to be too expensive, plus in order to recover my math huge gap was having the help of a tutor; however, in the class calculus teachers were sneakily inserting special cases that were only discussed in the classroom lessons and, if like me, you were studying at home, chances were you WILL f*** up at the partial test.

So, when I was not studying, was working on designing sprites and graphics for powder; focusing especially on ruins and space, that seemed left behind. Especially space.

Having the light source from below presented a good deal of challenge; plus into space,missing the atmosphere, shadows are much more contrasted than at lower levels. Last but not least, wanted to picture the planet below in a more realistic way; the idea of having the planet was given to me from some magazine showing earth from outer space; an exhibition of NASA pictures in Senigallia gave me more hints on how to proceed and also ideas on how to improve the level color palette, honestly kinda bland. Since I was determined on not to use dithering, had the good intuition to work a bit like expressionist painters, mixing colors to achieve better gradients using what is called “Juxtaposition” of colors, where colors are paired together according to lightness and assonance.

A close-up of part of the space tileset- especially in the top left structure is possible to see the justaxposition of the colors to create a more soft shadow and an intermediate shade of grey – without dithering!

For the planet, i wanted to hint the sphericity using a sloped horizon that develops up and down across the 30 screens of the level. Initially was just supposed to be a flat lower part of the screen, same as the opening of Rayxanber II on the PC-Engine, however the new effect seemed more realistic.

Here is possible to see the tiles that were supposed to represent the planet below, and the slope going progressively up and down to hint sphericity.

Finally, the strong shadow contrast allowed me to create several enemies with just four colors palette and still making it look good. Some were even kinda B-I-G, like a fat satellite passing by.

Both the big satellite and the space station section are made with just 4 colors.

MatrixSoft

The offices of MatrixSoft  were located next door to a pizzeria and not too far from the mathematics,physics and natural sciences faculty of Bologna university. 
For those not aware of MatrixSoft  history, the software house was founded by Mr.Architect, a journalist that used to write for a pretty important italian computer magazine, which had a vision to offer “simulation of real life experiences” and, in fact, so far most of MatrixSoft  games were sport simulations; convince them to publish Powder would have been a tough sell, but was a good way to increase our job perspective.

Me and Maltese met with the then lead graphic coordinator: Mr.Merovingian. He let us know that – obviously – they were not interested in Powder, however our graphic talent might have proven handy but, to be sure, we would need to undertake what they called a “test sample” work. This kind of unpaid gig was – and I think still is, in other fields – a way for MatrixSoft and presumably other software houses (and not only) to have their cake and eat it.

Designers had to do small gigs like design of map elements or game sprites and, if deemed adequate, they might receive more gig,paid this time.

So I  was assigned a couple of gigs: the first was to design a tileset for a deep forest; the second one to design an enemy, follower of a secret cult; both presumed to be used on the new CreepyGuy game series, based on an interesting ideas: small adventures for a small price monthly sold in newsstands – the main source of software for most italian kids.

The enemy I drawn was inspired by the Egyptian God of Dead Anubis (if only i knew what a coincidence to some AROS fork project ^^);

 

The Anubis Accolite animation – no, not AROS related 😛 

After an adaptation from my manga-ish palette to the CreepyGuy one and little adjustment for the animation, that was it.

Same for the forest tiles, disappeared onto oblivion. Thought those assets were deemed no good and so were discared. Little did knew those were used in two of the CreepyGuy issues, until one day i found the footage on Youtube.

Following those first attempts, they gave us assets for another oncoming series, work name MangaMan for which we had to create a Japanese metropolis environment and some enemies; my turn was a yellow ninja – actually wanted to do an harlequin ninja but then it appeared confusing to the eye.

 

The ninja animation: more or less the same moves of the Anubis accolite
plus going up and down the stairs

Even of those have no recollection on whether were used. However i still have the tiles and the test animations. Since i was adamant to really land a job in the game world i documented myself and worked hard on try to recreate a typical japanese suburban area environment.

 

  Part of the Tilesets for the MangaMan project

An assembly test with map tiles

The tileset for CreepyGuy and the other project were a bit different from the usual 16×16 used on Powder: those were 16×10, guess in order to have a better vertical elasticity.

I also wanted to propose a soundtrack for that game, however have no clue if it was ever heard…

at the SIEL

Trying to catch attention from the specialised press, me and Maltese packed our work copies of Powder and headed in Milano. There, we were trying to meet two different group of people: on one side Mr.Wheat and wolfSoft and on the other side the computerMag crew so that,maybe, if they interview us,some publisher might get interested. We tried to talk again with computerMag already some month earlier but at the last minute nobody was available to interview us; so was our idea to meet the columnists at SIEL, a now defunct Consumer Electronics show in Milano, also to try to have a clue about latest trends. We visited the expo and at the end we went to the publisher stage. There had occasion to talk with one of the columnists about the game – well, more having a multitasking conversation while he was playing Thunderforce IV on the Megadrive. By the way, me and that columnist are actually cooperating to the same open source project now[hint,hint].

I remember also that i seen running Wolfenstein 3D in some PC in the fair, and that was at the time mind blowing for me: had a strong feeling that times were about to change.

The Powder Diaries – 3 – A tour in Bologna Hinterland

EinsteinSoft

[NOTE: Names were changed to protect the innocent]

Summer of 1991; Me and Maltese were eager to work in the then promising italian/european games industry, beside working for what will become Powder.

EinsteinSoft was one of the emerging software houses in early nineties,together with MatrixSoft – still in Bologna-and WolfSoft in Milano.

It was also the first software house me and Maltese contacted to try to work in game development beside powder-at the time still unnamed, responding to a “call for talents’ ad appeared on a computer magazine.
At the time EinsteinSoft just released its first game, and was having another couple of games in the work. We got held of one demo through one of our “dealers” and thought we could do better, both in music and in graphics.

So we prepared a couple of demo disks,with some test graphic from m-type and what was still not powder, and I added a disk full of mod files-some made for the occasion and now mostly lost.

After a couple of weeks maltese received a call from Mr.Pinky, musician and supervisor at EinsteinSoft; he was interested in meeting us, but not too much for me and Maltese skills, more for the game we were working on.

Einsteinsoft was located in a small town in Bologna hinterland and,due to having lost the same train that the programmers took, I was a bit late in reaching their office -or better basement. Beside the logo on the doorbell nothing in that two story condo could have announced a software house.

Right next to a washing machine an elder lady pointed me to a door nearby where was a small office with a couple of Amigas and c64,  there were empty boxes for their games ready to be shipped and a couple of mass floppy duplicators.

There I found back Tomas, Nicola, Marco and met in person Mr.Pinky and the producer and owner of EinsteinSoft, Mr.Brain. Mr.Pinky  was a pretty handy, well enthusiast and maybe a bit naive guy dressed casually in jeans and t-shirt: blond,tall, short hair and an acne problem; Mr.Brain was much more business minded and seemingly with interests in more than one activity (i still remember EinsteinSoft calling card was also having in the flip side a video and software duplication service logo), dark curly hair,in a grey suit,red tie and dark shades even indoor.

Talks were on the distribution, royalties (verify) and timelines; a playable demo with at least two levels for an incoming computer fair and then – probably – a contract.

Prototype

The rest of the summer  and early fall 1991 we worked hard to create at least two semi-working level of the game. The choice ended up in the first two levels: sea (now removed) – designed by Maltese and City, designed by me. The game got called provisionally Prototype – which was both a reminder of its provvisional shape and also a pun to R-Type :).

Me and Marco worked on design a logo for the preview in interlaced med-res; was an interestig mix of organic and high tech.

 

A work file of the Prototype logo; the final version got lost in a disk error 😦

 

And around that period, the first draft ot the title tune came up: a completely different rhythm from the final one but the base melody was laid down; after a couple of days i put that to rest, since was running short of ideas on how to unravel it.

Music – Powder – Main Theme Music Draft – 1991 (unreleased) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

 

Even The gameplay of powder went through several transformations while we were working on the new demo. First we had the idea of keeping all weapons at once with no limitations; however the programmers – especially Nicola that was an hardcore gamer – complained that in that way the game was too easy, so we thought several ways to implement some sort of progressive power up.

One of the ways was to keep transformations available from the beginning but with reduced firepower, then either at the end of the level or halfway to meet a shop – pretty popular in other shooters – where to use the accumulated credits – obtained killing enemies – to purchase upgraded versions of the weapons. To run the store we thought to use a character digitized out of the Spaceballs movie: Vinny (in italian Vincenzo or Vince), the sidekick of the notorious space mobster Pizza the hutt. The moves were almost perfect for a store: how it speaks and turns, the funny nervous tic, how at the end points at you the fingers as to say “you made a good deal,man” not to mention the shady look perfect for a sneaky second-hand weapon dealer! However at the end we decided for a credit system: the more enemies you kill, the more credits you get to change your ship.

Wish i had some screenshots of it, but Maltese lost all amiga material since he moved several times across Europe.

Same time around, had the first draft of the Ruins level boss; was not supposed to migrate in a robot yet but the wicked statue got build up easily. Trivia: its face is (deliberately) reminiscing of a girl that I used to be infatuated of .

Somebody in a small city not too far from Fano is having a deja-vu…

And a “little touch” of ego, as big as a mountain top never can miss…

Yup, is a Mount-Rushmore-like Devs Mass portrait that one!

Despite we were supposed to release with EinsteinSoft, we felt this game was our pet project, and claimed ownership on it; so at the end we sent the demo of the game to an italian magazine, hoping to produce some hype.

Took some month but It did.

A small article the size of a coupon appeared in the November 1991  issue ;

The snippet appeared on the magazine

 

The day the magazine came out I remember at first the excitement to find out the small article and the picture of sea: i called all the others on the phone and we were all excited. However the excitement rid not last long. The same day Tomas called for a meeting at his home: Mr.Brain wanted to talk with us.

That afternoon we were all in Tomas den while he and Filippo were talking at the phone with a slightly upset Mr.Brain, that was mentioning how we break its trust and violated ethics talking about the game with the press on our own, that did not liked at all how we were – according to him –  trying to pressure  in publish the game and raising the price by raising the hype and that, in short, he did not want to publish powder anymore.

And so that was the end of our relationship with EinsteinSoft.

Plus, we also convened that using the Prototype name would result in more problems and some stigma, so at the end the name Powder stuck and became final.

Five Bedroom coders in search of a Publisher

That however did not stop us to look for a different publisher for our game. Just remember that those were the early nineties and Internet was still a toy in the universities rather than a mainstream media. Even having a modem and be able to call BBS in 2400+ BPS were still a bit a privilege – not to mention the telematic-unfriendly phone fares in Italy at the time. I remember me and Maltese preparing a couple of demo disks for graphics and music and again trying to submit it to Konami – that at the time was expanding its presence in europe with the Gametek label, dreaming a game related job in London or in UK; however nobody answer us and our written and spoken english at the time was WAY worse than now

Around that time Maltese went in touch with Danny, a member of a local computer club located in Pesaro. The so-called club was, in short, a sort of Pirate’s den where games were rented or sold; i still remember the walls covered of wooden shelves with red and yellow floppy disks for Amiga; this was before the piracy laws changed so all operations were legit. However, Danny and the club owners, had some leads about people in Bologna willing to enter the computer game business and interested in publish our game.

Plus, by the end of the year, finally the main theme was done the way we know. mostly. Was missing the final piano solo at the end.

Music – Powder Main Theme (1991) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

 

 

 

The Powder Diaries – 2 – a Summer of Coding

A summer of Powder

The summer of 1990 has been one of the most intense times since; me thomas filippo and nicola were busy in working with powder and also trying to go to the same college. Marco was more adamant in getting in the game industry straight away and was trying to focus deeply in the game. So its work was in a more advanced state.

At the time powder was being written using the Seka Assembler, but later developers found the Asm-One assembler to be more performant and switched.

Taking advantage of its parents busy schedule, me, Maltese and sometime Tomas were using Maltese living room and bedrooms as development studio. We planned powder to have ten levels, five of which with Maltese graphics and five with mine. My levels were supposed to be (according to our internal naming): city,factory,ruins,forest and space while Maltese levels would be: sea, starships graveyard,clouds, Maze and final. Maltese also took in its hands the player ships design – for coherency and also because was better able to design the tilt of the ships.

Maltese started to sketch ships for the game and, for test purposes, adapted one of the main ships he designed for M-type to the Powder palette; Tomas andNicola loved it and started to fantasize about power ups; we were looking for a way to avoid the Power Up syndrome too,and recently we had occasion to see a Toaplan coin-op called Hellfire, where the player ship was able to switch fire positions, and thought we could have different way of fire available at once. At the beginning we had only the normal shoot and the laser, then we expanded to include homing missiles, the orientable cannon and the armored bomber. Another coin-op we took inspiration and in exchange we had parallel ideas to was Air Buster, even though rhytm and play actionwere at the end different.

SBE and SPE

The game has started using a 16 full color palette; it was the convinction of Nicola and mine that the actual use of dual playfield (three bitplanes for foreground, three bitplanes for background) was too chastising for a nice arcade-like graphic style, so we decided to reduce the frame rate at 25 fps and keeping the palette full 16 color. This would have allowed big sprites moving at a decent rate. However the code review of Tomas and Filippo shown that lot of raster time was lost and that keeping all elements at 16 colors was going to waster raster time and memory,. so they came out with an idea; it was possible to enable or disable less bitplanes using some selected palettes; they called the system SBE/SPE (Single Bitplane Enabled / Single Palette Enabled); that gave us graphic artist a way to create sprites with less colors but with interesting schemas. Then the use of those palettes were enabled by flags in the enemy editor.

This work file from Space shows all 2/4 and 8 palettes available.

Looking for a title

Well it was hard to find an appropriate name for yet another shoot’em up: most of the names were pretentious and bold looking: Thunderforce, Herzog Zwei, Cardiaxx, Io, R-Type, Salamander, etc. I suggested Powder both for the assonance to the gunpowder and also for the skill of our ship to reduce enemies to dust (in italian the name “polvere” can be used for powder, dust and occasionally ashes).

I was trying to create something that was unseen on amiga – at least at the time – like a multiplexor(?) robot made with all pieces where you can destroy the shell first then you have to destroy the internal machinery; it was supposed to be placed as city boss but at the end it had to be scrapped due to memory constraints and for the bad look of the rotated pieces.

The game graphics also got reworked. The first level to be reworked was Forest, suppsedly set in a redwood forest; palette got adjusted to a milder shade and the background tiles reworked based on some encyclopedia and magazine photos. For the ruins level I remember took inspiration from my art school books and tried to reproduce several architectonic features and monuments; plus the sky was much more in the purple tone, since the idea was we were liberating an alien world.

Factory, instead, was inspired from my night outskirts around Ancona, especially by the oil refinery, its compicated towering and piping structure and the way was glowing at night, together with the glowing lightnings over the Adriatic sea on rainstorms; all reminded me strongly of Blade Runner (guess you realized am a strong aficionado of this movie,huh?) and inner piping of structures like the Atmospheric processor in Aliens. It was sharing the original city palette at beginning.

A very important thing that hoped could distunguish powder – at least aesthetically – was the idea that every level got a different light sourcing and every object – including the player ship -would be affected by it; that meant more work but also a more immersive feeling.

Fall 1990

It was september, time for university entry tests. It was our intention to work together and,if possible, to stay together. With the exception of Maltese, more determined to work straight out, me and the programmers underwent entry tests in Cesena and Bologna respectively.

Tests were pretty hard for my background and, beside Tomas attempt to decode the barcode close to quiz answers by hand, nothing else particular comes to my mind. however at the end, the team suffered a split. Nicola was admitted in Cesena , Filippo in Bologna and finally me and Tomas went to pursue Electronic Engineering in Ancona, or “Tyrell Corporation”, as i called it inside my mind.

Ancona

So in the fall and winter of 1990 my course of study in Ancona College started. The Engineering faculty is located in a place called Monte d’Ago – on the top of one of the hills surrounding Ancona; to reach it i was,from the Ancona train station, required to cross the street, reach the bus stop, take the overcrowded bus to the cemetery below, then go uphill on the slope for another 400/500 feet with no sidewalk to the entrance of the main movie-theater-like classroom located in “quota 145” (no names for floors, just the elevation in meters). Do everything in reverse to go home, not mentioning train problems, bus problems,etc. so when possible i tried to go there with the car, but then finding a parking was sometimes next to impossible, since was not the only one.

However, was there listening to the teachers talking about disciplines that were at a WAY higher level that me, an art school student graduated from a side institute, were able to handle properly, but i was trying. I found myself trying to follow and copy almost painstakingly the most of the stuff that teachers were writing (badly) in the whiteboard; beside that, the work on Powder still continued, albeit slowly, on the evenings at home or in some of my notebooks, with sketches for enemies and maps and trying to create animations, that was a bit hard since the Dpaint version I was using was still at 3 – that means no onion skin, just a lot of back and forth on frames to make sure the animation was right.

Some reworking had been made to the factory level: after one discussion with thomas that said that the level and concept “looked like sh*t” i was so upset that modified the palette and reviewed all of the graphics already done working all night for it! Fctory was at the core of my idea of different light sources – together with space – and i really did not wanted that scrapped out!

 

A workfile of Factory – there are three screens full of blocks like this!
In the top left a couple blocks remaining from the old version above,
that was having a much more contrasted lighting

Even soundtracks were progressing, albeit slowly. Was around this time that i created the soundtrack for space, the one for factory and had to rework the boss track that I did for city, making it the main level track, due to the fact that programmers got fed of it and that they thought the boss track was more suitable for the level action.

Music – Powder City Level soundtrack v2 – 1990/91 (Unreleased) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Had also my first event-driven soundtrack done: the one for the space level; our first idea was to have at least two point of interaction: one with the energy less than 50% and the other one with less than 10%.  It was also meant like this due to the fact that at beginning we expected the player to have only one life.

Music – Powder Space soundtrack v1 – 1990 (Unreleased) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

 

The powder Diaries -1 – The seeds are sown

I tried at least three times to write memories about this game; it was our mother lode project and writing about it in a satisfying way is a good deal of text and so is not easy. This is the first part, talking about the beginnings and how the idea came out.

the Beginning: QUAZAR, Nike and M-Type

In 1988 had occasion to met with Max,another amiga user. We were exchanging games and tools; one day he showed me a demo made by some schoolmates. Was a simple demo with a starfield and a scroller plus a ripped module but was kinda exciting for me. Since I got my amiga 500 I was intrigued by the crackers intros and, having finally the opportunity to know one of those groups – albeit tiny- was a good chance. so i started to cooperate with them.

Around the same time, i got in touch with Nicola Valentini – nicknamed Nike – that liked to swap software and was trying to learn assembly for coding; i later found out he was in the same classroom with Filippo and Max: how small world, isn’t’it? However, he was coding small intros for which i helped do the graphic and the music; it went with the nickname “Nike” but haven’t found its stuff anywhere

Filippo and Thomas lived in a suburb of Fano, called Centinarola; Especially Thomas used to live in top of a hill in the middle of marche landscape, and we were used on Fridays to reach the place and sit upstairs in the old kitchen – where he had its own lab – to do code experiments and decide what to do next.

and after a couple of simple demo, one came out that was a bit unconventional: using balls we made an animation of a figure; using the joystick we were able to move balls around and to create animation frames. So in the spring of 1990, the internally called “Pupo” Demo came out, and was a mild success.

Quazar Anniversary Demo a.k.a Pupo (1990) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

I knew Marco Maltese since the eighties; we were both spectrum users and both were  building our games in Basic on the ZX spectrum and compiling it; actually he taught me some trick like using IN ports to read keys or joystick, or to use the IS compiler rather than the FP to have dramatical increase in speed – with the sacrifice of tihngs like DIM and other advanced instructions, though.

When Amiga started to be sold in the 500 model he was working in a local computer store in Senigallia, actually he was also dating the daughter of the store owner, but this is secondary: in its position he was exposed to a good deal of hardware and software and had occasion to test the 500 beforehand. I started to get some software such as Deluxe Paint or other utilities even BEFORE to buy my own 500, because once i saw it i falled in love with it; was able to buy my Amiga 500 in summer of 1988 and started to meddle with dpaint.

Both me and mMaltese were r-type fans and estimators, snd that was obvious: r-type came out in 1987 and set a new standard for horizontal shoot’em ups both in the graphics and in the gameplay, providing,with its beam cannon, an elegant solution to the power-up syndrome.

We begun to plan to build a worthy evolution of the game, hoping to squeeze the amiga machine with 32 color graphics – if not 64 with Half Brite – and HUGE enemy sprites. However,our knowledge of the new hardware and a proper workflow for the capabilities of the machine was unknown to us: surely the Amiga Basic would not be able to handle the mass of graphics we had in mind, and at the time AMOS was still just an hypothesis,not even vaporware. At the end our designs were mostly brainstorming and a way to improve our skills in a more powerful environment than the Spectrum and C-64 one. I was composing music on the sonix program first, then SoundFX and at the end Noisetracker – a Soundtracker clone; and he was designing ships on dpaint, but everything was kinda hanging waiting to have the way to develop. Our knowledge of BASIC was not going to cut it this time for our expectations – that included as said big bobs, maybe even lot of parallax scroll.

The project was called M-Type (a pun between R-type and the initials of Maltese), and i remember its idea was to have multiple ships with multiple way of firing; in some way this predated the idea of powder but also of the future evolutions of the R-type franchising, especially R-Type Final – that came out in 2003.

That is the problem when you live in the future: everybody else that follow your tracks – consciously or less – ends up looking like a copycat.

February 1990

At the time I was an art student; well not exactly: being sent to repeat my fourth year in Art school twice, despite my efforts and overnight work  this in italy means you are done with high school, and not in a good way. so went to study in a private institute to get my five year degree (called “maturity degree” in italy) and in the meanwhile was continuing to work on some graphics for the M-type project; my ideas were mostly on paper about semi-organic ships (imagine metal ships with blood vessels protruding from it.

Tomas and Filippo were trying to make some games to increase their skills in assembly coding; Tomas was working on a side volleyball game a la “Power spikes“, and we had the idea to use non-human characters for it; i recovered a funny hairy character i designed for an old BASIC spectrum game and made it the main player;  the provvisional name was “alien volley”.

Then one day me and nicola were talking about the recent r-type conversion – made by Factor 5 – and how we were thinking we can do it better. Was intention of nicola to learn to program in assembly, and a video game seemed to be the right project. Keep in mind that at the time there was a shortage of good horizontal shooters on the Amiga: the best so far was R-type, and then Blood Money – despite being technically good – was very difficult; plus Menace was too easy.

That spring Nicola went to a trip in Budapest with the school for five days; however, i think he got struck by a lighting or something like that, because when he came back home started to write a tool to compose maps, that we called MED – acronym for Map Editor; was a pretty simple tool that allowed to choose a group of tiles from a page and to copy it in the scrollable area, ten blocks at the time. Blocks were 16×16 pixel and 16 color depth. He also started the base code for Powder, at the time with only the ship shooting in the scrolling landscape.

And so I started to design the first map of the game: city. At the beginning the inspiration for city came to me from blade runner and the several cyberpunk stuff trending in that moment, so that the round building and the grey stones one survived all the way to the final game,albeit modified and improved. Same for the monorail tracks around; the only thing that did not survived was an olive color in the palette (thought because one of my first enemies was a flying version of my first car), replaced by the light brown.

Some early sprites that I made for the player ship when i started to work with Nicola – also see the test for the factory ship at night on the top

At the time was nicola itself to convert the IFF graphics in raw format (RAW format under Amiga mean that the bitplanes are saved one after the other uncompressed), then in the future we found some external tool for that, maybe prepared from demoscene coders.

One day Nicola shown up at Thomas since was asking help on how to fix the code for the game, that was kinda behaving poorly;  Filippo and Tomas decided to help Nicola and at the end all of them decided to join together in building the game. There have been some moments I wish was able to capture, like when Tomas found a weird routine in Nicola Code and commented aside “How the f***k is possible to wait for the blitter this way?”.

I also prepared the first music for the game; i found the guitar chords in a demo that was using wireframe graphics for text and meters (forgot the name) [EDIT: was Vicious circle from The Vector Analizer intro of Prophets] and loved it; at least for one year this music was on our ears while trying to test stuff. We were thinking at a way to make the music react with the game so there are at least two or three situations sketched up.

Music – Powder city soundtrack v1 – 1990 (Unreleased) from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Since we were still planning stuff, Nicola wanted more variety on the graphics and thought my ship was not too fancy; so i thought Maltese was the right guy and so did let him know about our project. The other liked its graphics and so at the end he was in too.

So far was able to work on the game just sporadically since was also busy with my final exams, but after the half of June, finally relieved of the taks, was able to get more involved on it.