Dalmatian Aviation ST

Dalmatian Aviation ST is a new video game for the Atari ST currently in development.

Technical Specifications

• Target system: My (mostly stock) Atari 1040 STF (it happens to contain Rainbow TOS 1.04 but I want to make sure it works on TOS 1.00 as well) – DS/DD (720k) floppy drive – modest amount of HDD space
• One floppy containing the game engine, one more floppy per episode containing the scripts and multimedia data.
• Monochrome/hi-res only – one of the main motivators for this project is what I had perceived to be a lack of good-looking monochrome games for the system
• Scripting with a minimal version of Janet, hopefully (I think it is feasible!)

Roadmap

• Game engine in place
  • Event handling (mouse, keyboard)
  • Bitmap compression/decompression and blitting to screen
  • Figure out scripting (determine whether Lua/Janet is OK)
• Write the story
  • Figure out the plot branches
• Make the graphical assets
  • Actually use the drawing tablet!
  • Dithered w/ didder(1)
• Learn how to make AY music
  • There are trackers available IIUC
  • Apparently this is the expectation for music in Atari games, despite the on-board MIDI out
• Make the AY music
  • Do it!
• Promotional video(s)
  • Teaser trailer
  • Development journal
  • Itch release
• Release on itch.io
  • (1) Floppy images
  • AND (2) Files in a zip
  • AND (3) Fork of Hatari+EmuTOS which launches the game directly (macOS, Windows, Linux, various BSDs)
• Big box release!!
  • Research what this would actually take – Kickstarter???
  • Design the box artwork
  • Print manual
  • Bundle actual floppies