itch.io

Thanks for your reply.

My bad: I had send the emails from an address other than the one associated to the itch.io account. I have now changed the email associated to the account (it is easier for me) and sent the email again (from the same address as before). After 20 minutes, though, I still have not received the receipt with the ticket number.

Hi everybody,

starting 16 days ago, shortly after its release, my game Gemdalus received 11 fraudulent purchases. I say "fraudulent" because they are all like this:
* the emails all follow this pattern: <name>.<surname>.<3-digit number>@gmail.com;
* they've been made by credit card via Stripe;
* the card holders are all from the US (but the IPs are from various countries);
* the card holders names and addresses are all exposed on the invoices (which is quite uncommon);
* all the payments are of $5 (the minimum amount);
* the game was never downloaded.

I have emailed itch.io's support 9 days ago, but I did not get any answer yet.
Did anybody else experience this? If so, did you get it solved and how? Should I issue refunds? I wouldn't want to be subject to chargebacks.

Glad that the problem is solved :)

Thanks a lot for using APEO, finding it useful, repoting the problem, mentioning me in the thanks list and the intention to make a donation!

A word of warning about the timings: measuring a machine's speed is tricky and AMOS just isn't suitable for that. But if the tests performed at startup are closely related to the actual in-game code, then they are somewhat reliable.

Finally, I had a look at the preview: Pong+Arkanoid, what's not to like? ;)

Your machine should definitely be able to run APEO and the APEOed executable without problems.
I don't have AmigaOS 3.2.x, so I can't make tests on that OS.

The fact that you get a crash when passing no arguments is suspicious - you should get this message, instead:

APEO

ERROR: could not parse command line or bad arguments.

Could you try to run APEO without arguments after booting without startup-sequence and see what happens, please?
Also, could you send me by email (contact@retream.com) your program original executable? I would process it for you and send the APEOed executable to you, so that you can see whether it works or crashes.

EDIT: also, please try the new version I have just uploaded, as it fixes a major bug that might well be the cause of your headaches (this was due to the fact that Hex$() produces always the shortest string possible, whereas at a specific point the code needed exactly 8 characters - see the history log for the details regarding what ensued).

Could you provide the following details, please?
* Kickstart/AmigaOS version
* Amount of CHIP/SLOW/FAST RAM
* Size of the input file

Another insider look...

In the early stages, the design of the game included as a main feature the necessity of uncovering the mazes by visiting all of their corners. This was conceptually and visually cool, but terrible from a gameplay point of view, as it made the game hard and destroyed completely the strategic aspect of the game (at the beginning of a level, being able to see the whole maze, with its bonuses and maluses, allows the player to choose the best strategy to complete the level while amassing as many points and extra lives as possible).
Therefore, the idea got replaced with a much milder one, according to which the unvisited areas of the mazes were simply darker. That was nice to the eye, but it did not really add much.
So, also the second idea got canned and the two bitplanes that had been reserved for it were used to double to the number of background colors and for the transparecy-based effects that provide feedback when a gem/bonus/malus gets picked up.

Somebody expressed their appreciation of the game music. I thought that the technical details might be interesting to everybody, so...

Right from the start, I wanted: 

• the game to run on stock machines;
• the game to run at 50 fps;
• music and sound effects to play at the same time, without music instruments being cancelled by sound effects;
• the music to change dynamically depending on the game situation;
• the game to fit on a single DD floppy disk;
• to have everything load at boot and thus avoid loading while playing.

The unusual route I took was the easiest on the hardware: pre-recording the music as various sound samples to play on 2 of the 4 Paula channels, thus leaving 2 channels free for the sound effects.
This allowed the music to be made of virtually infinite channels. Therefore, I went for 8 channels: 2 for drums (I could have used more to be honest, but, really, it would have hardly made much difference), 1 for bass, 1 for strings and 4 for the melody synth (given that the instrument echoes, it needed space). Of course, more notes and more instruments could have been added, but that would have made the music too intrusive, whereas I wanted it to be just a background accompaniment.

This video shows the "normal" music (i.e. the music that plays when no bonuses or maluses are active):

The downside of this choice is that the samples take a lot of space - especially considering that I went for a rather high quality: 28604 Hz. As a consequence, the music is mono (this halves the amount of data) and shortish (each tune lasts only a few seconds). The fact that music is mono is hardly a problem: since it is just a background accompaniment, the subtleties of stereo are not that important. The fact that the 5 tunes that the music is comprised of are short is counterbalanced by their frequent switching from one to another due to what happens while playing.

In the end, the music ended up taking 1304526 bytes (i.e. almost 1.25 MB), for a total duration of 45.6 seconds. Such size was the limit to leave enough CHIP RAM (which is limited to 2 MB) for the rest and to have the data fit on the floppy disk.
By the way, to actually get the game to fit on a floppy disk (FFS-formatted, so with a capacity of 880 kB, metadata included), I had to compressed the tunes. Luckily, I had some methods and tools ready, as I had originally developed them for SkillGrid (that game also uses pre-recorded music, although it is stereo and decompressed in real time): I just had to choose those that would produce the best results and write the unpacker routine that would decompress the data at startup (unfortunately, I did not have it for the method that produced the highest compression ratio). Compressed, the music amounts to 622067 bytes (about 52.3% compression ratio).

Side note: I used the same compression method also for the other tunes (which are combined toghether into a regular tracker module) and the sound effects.

Grazie mille a Yankee, al quale auguro di divertirsi tanto col gioco!

Thanks a lot for considering the game so good :)
Enjoy!

Grazie mille della comprensione e della disponibilità!
Salutoni

Più che una proposta di collaborazione, è un regalo: apprezzo molto, grazie davvero!

Detto ciò, preferisco fare tutto da me (RETREAM = 1 persona), così che tutto sia fatto come e quando dico io, senza dover dipendere da altri. Se un giorno vorrò, preparerò da me un pacchetto WHDLoad. Pertanto - e mi spiace e mi imbarazza farlo - devo declinare la gentilissima offerta.

Vi auguro il meglio e ringrazio calorosamente!

Heartfelt thanks to you for your continued support!

Thank you, much appreciated!

Thank you!
Hint so that you can enjoy the game even more: check out the manual to learn how the bonuses, maluses and mechanics in general work - you'll get further and amass more points ;)

Esatto: Gemdalus è dichiaratamente ispirato a Oils Well (menzionato nella backstory e nel manuale).

Grazie dell'apprezzamento :)

Gemdalus was conceived by accident. While working on the remaining level of QUOD INIT EXIT IIo (a Commodore 64 game), given the toughness of such task, I decided to take a break and finally produce a game with PTDS. One night, during an unescapable, restless and sleep-blocking brainstorming trip in bed, all of a sudden the core idea of the game popped up, without any connection to the train of thought it broke into, inspired by the Commodore 64 game Oil's Well. It immediately won me over, although it definitely was not suitable for PTDS (it was perfect for ALS, instead, which I am always happy to put to use).
I instantly decided that I would keep the mechanics simple, even if this sort of games lends itself to countless twists and expansions (after all, I have already satisfied my appetite for deep and complex mechanics with several other games of mine).
Choosing the name was quite troublesome. The obvious Gems Maze (which mirrors perfectly Oil's Well) was too simple and generic. After considering various (terrible) alternatives, I came up with Gemdalus, from Gems + Daedalus. Initially it did not sound particularly good, but little by little it grew on me and, eventually, thanks to its uniqueness, became final.

Thank you :)

I'm sorry, but it requires AmigaOS 4 or Windows. If I remember correctly, MorphOS had (has?) a software that made it possible to run (some) AmigaOS 4 executables, but I don't know if it helps in this case.

Thank you, I'm happy you consider QIE IIm that good, even if it is just a 16 kB game (QIE IIo will bring the full experience hopefully in a not so distant future). Just a quick note: it's "Init", not "Innit".

Feel free to experiment. I'm just glad if anyone finds a use for PTDQ/PTDS.

Just for clarity: the tradeoff for speed is that PTDS' horizontal resolution is internally half of LORES', even if, physically, the screen area is the same (dots are spaced by automatically interpolated dots - for a full explanation, please refer to the documentation); the splash screens of the PVE or Zoomaniac demos will give you a good idea of what texts look like in PTDS - any of why PTDQ is preferrable for such use.

Thank you.

PTDS is a way to set up the Amiga display hardware in order to have it display a chunky framebuffer without any C2P conversion. It is not tied to any OS or language.
That said, it is definitely not suitable as a generic graphics driver due to its low resolution, approximate color output and limited colors. PTDQ offers higher resolution, more clarity and more colors, but it also requires C2P (although faster than the traditional one) and still has limited resolution (the equivalent of LORES).

Congratulations on solving the issue!
(I had suspected that it might be NTSC, hence my question about the game being slower.)

Yes, the game is indeed difficult, but that's mostly because it's a single level (zone, in the game's terminology) as it had to fit in 16 kB. QUOD INIT EXIT IIo will have 5 zones of increasing difficulty.

Enjoy!

Both games use the same tecnique and are made to run at 50 fps without ever dropping a frame. What do you see, exactly? Is the screen refresh less fluid or is the game slower altogether? Maybe something's wrong with your equipment (settings)? Hopefully we can solve the issue.

As shown by the "History" posts in my releases here on itch.io, you'll see that all of them have been updated multiple (even tens of!) times - that's because I produce an update whenever I see room for improvement or find a bug or an error. Maintaining the releases on multiple platforms would be (and actually was, in the past) a time-consuming pain.

Much appreciated, thank you!

Thanks!

Beh, sì, è tanta... ma è un gran piacere!

To be honest, yesterday's update is nothing special: it only improved the manual a little bit. But, of course, I'm glad you liked it :) Thanks!
For more interesting developments, if you don't do it already, keep an eye on QUOD INIT EXIT IIo's development log ;)

(E grazie anche per lo "strepitosi" - anche se sono uno solo.)

Ah, sorry, I thought you intended to focus only on the QIE games.

I'm more than happy that you noticed the common backstory and that you appreciate it! It's purely ornamental, but I found it fun to connect totally unrelated games in such a weird way. At some point I stopped as I could no longer afford to update the manuals (especially those formatted for printing, where changes can be painful or even impossible) of the past games and re-package and re-release the latter every time I added a new game to the "saga".

Glad to hear that - thanks! The games are indeed born out of jolly times enjoyed with friends and they do intend to spread some cheerfulness around :)

Thanks for considering the games worthy of a video :)
However, to be honest, until QIE IIo is finished, the series doesn't amount to much: there's QIE and then there's QIE IIm, which is only a 16 kB, 1-zone version of QIE IIo (and such zone is a smaller version of one of the zones included in QIE IIo - in fact, when/if QIE IIo is released, QIE IIm will be probably retired).

Thanks!

Thank you.

Thank you.
Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the issue.
A few questions:
 * which version of the game are you playing (you can get it by typing in a shell: Version "Ring around the World")?
 * what are the machine specifications (Amiga model, CPU, OS, etc.)?
 * the first time that an object duplicated, what was it and which was the recent sequence of actions until that event?
 * could you send me the savegame, please (it's in the "snapshots" directory)?

The music track "Prockressions" was written while fiddling with the RETREAM guitar (shown in the demo itself) after it got fixed and overhauled. It was not made for Hertz Overload, but rather Hertz Overload was made for it.
Thinking of a way to let others enjoy the music brought the idea of making an Amiga production, which immediately suggested the creation of a player capable of a sufficiently high quality. In the past, I had never tried CPU-based audio playback, but a quick experiment showed that it was doable and quite easy. That led to the development of a set of tools that generate and play sound files in custom formats aimed at minimizing the CPU load (later released separately as part of the AQA package). The tools proved that the Amiga can reach remarkably high frequencies (much beyond 70937.9 Hz), which pushed me in another direction: making something more artistic than a player, and that simply meant... a demo!
Hertz Overload was being made for no specific demoparty. When it was almost finished (May 21st, 2024), I checked out which demoparties were about to come and found out that the 68k Inside 2024 was only a few days away! It looked like I could meet the deadline (May 25th) easily, but, of course, on the last day all that could go wrong went wrong, so I could not make all the little changes and additions that I had planned.

OK, thanks! If you can, please play the game from the beginning, as the duplication of the item makes me suspect that an incompatible savegame was used.