A classic game from Micro Power originally created for the BBC Micro back in 1983 and then ported onto the C64 the following year where I came across it. This one has been on my radar to recreate since before the millennium, where I was tinkering about with the first versions of Blitz and Blitzmax on Windows. I had a few attempts at it – none of them successfully because, for a galaxians clone, it was a pretty clever bit of code and I was definitely punching out of my box at the time.
Looking back on my original effort that got the furthest (as I still have some of the old crappy blitz source code for that) the closest I ever got to finishing this game was more like space invaders rather than galaxians, which is where its roots come from. The main different mechanic from that game is the dropping of eggs on the players horizontal movement path when they swoop to the ground, which the players couldn’t go past until they were destroyed. You couldn’t touch them actually because they just blew you up in a very nice explosion effect.
I always used to like the scrolling colour cube effect around the border of the title screen on the C64 game and I did spend more time than I should have on trying to do something like that with my blitz version instead of actually getting the gameplay element done first. When I failed at that then I was still procrastinating on the actual tough parts of the coding to do the bird flight movements by trying to do scrolling high scores on the title screen instead. Looking back this was my way of convincing myself that I was still working on getting the game completed while avoiding the part I needed to get done because I was stumped but didn’t want to just shelve it. This happened with a ton of my game ideas and had been the case ever since I first started trying to make my own games back in the early eighties. The easy ones to recreate had a reasonable chance of getting done – even with my microscopic attention span – but the harder project had practically no chance. I usually knew this in my mind before even starting them but the one thing I did always have was that initial enthusiasm that would convince me that I’ll get that done this time.
This is why I have my personal game creation database that I created recently to replace my old spreadsheet. I’ve noted down every game I’ve ever attempted to create, and that I still remember, and the numbers are not good when it comes to the completion statistic. More on that database in another post.
So, back to Swoop, and I approached it as just the designer this time. Claude was going to do the nitty gritty coding side as I now mostly work with the team idea where I run the project and do all the design work and Claude is my lead (as well as solo) developer who creates the actual ideas. For some projects where I’m familiar with the language, such as Gamemaker, i’m able to do some parts that are just not worth going into micro detail in prompt conversations, but mostly i’m in the background looking at the bigger picture. It gets stuff done for me now and it’s really cool for working through some of my older ideas that I thought I’d never return to just for sentimental reasons. Some of this stuff, like Swoop, will probably see the light of day and get put up on Itch for other people to just play with, and I’ll likely always give away the source code on git. A lot of it, such as my Rhino project (another post) was finally put to rest just for me and Grandad.
Swoop has pretty simplistic graphics so I just let claude create them within its actual project with simple pixel animations. It’s not going to win any awards for artwork but it looks a little more modern than the C64 one so that’s good enough for me. The important part was the tough, speedy and smooth gameplay. The game had to have that as well as the explosion animations and sounds to feel like a game that you could have been playing in a large arcade cabinet at the back of your local chippy in the early eighties.
The endgame – at least its ended for now unless I ever feel like I need to add to it (unlikely) – isn’t a bad effort. It’s not going to hold the younger generations attention for long because they want GTA and 3d shit these days but doddery old fuckers like me might appreciate a bit of a classic blast. I’ve held off on releasing the beast until I’ve renewed my apple developer licence so I can put up a proper build without all the security crap that people have had to go through with my gamemaker stuff on Mac. The game is also built in java so there shouldn’t be any issues with having both a Mac and Windows build up there once I do.
Here’s a link to the wiki page on the original Swoop game created in 1983/1984 by David Elliot – Swoop
TLDR: I finally did remake Swoop. It’ll be up on https://xerra.itch.io soon.