PUZZLE BOBBLE

Interview With FUSION

Ben Honebone, newest member of the AMTIXCPC team, talks with Miguel Vanhove, coder and one part of the Crazy Piri team who are responsible for bringing Puzzle Bobble to the CPC.

BEN HONEBONE: Thank you Miguel for taking the time to speak to us about this wonderful conversion of Puzzle Bobble that we thought we’d never see on the Amstrad! We know that you and the Crazy Piri team are no strangers to making games for the CPC, so the question is: why Puzzle Bobble?

MIGUEL VANHOVE: The main Crazy Piri team (LeZone, KOOPA, and myself), had just finished making a Wheel Of Fortune style game (that will be released soon), and I wanted to make a small 64k game next. Stephane ‘Shaan’ Liuzzi, who did the sound on the game, is long time friend, a great musician and a C64 lover who introduced me to the demo scene 25 years ago. He is a fan of Taito’s games and music and noticed there was no conversion of Puzzle Bobble for the Amstrad, so he wanted to test the Amstrad sound chip by making this game because he thought it was better than the SID chip (I am summarising his words).

BH: How long has it taken the team to make the game and what was the development process like?

MV: It’s hard to say. Stephane had the idea on February 7th this year and by February the 10th we had the first working prototype running and a base to work from. I posted the first preview of the game on Twitter on February the 17th and Benjamin ‘OneVision’ Yoris joined the team 8 days later to create the game’s graphics (I think he thinks my graphics suck!). With this addition we decided to increase the game size to 128k to accommodate all the new graphics and music. Communicating via Discord, Benjamin and Stephane created the assets and hoped that I could integrate them into the code! Because I’m very kind, I always added their creations into the game. Including the gestation time we could say the game took 9 months to make. There were a lot of pauses since we all have day jobs and we were only able to work on it during evenings, weekends and holidays (sorry babe).

BH: What compromises did you make while developing the game due to the hardware disparity between the Amstrad and the arcade original?

MV: In the first version of the game we did not add the gravity and shine effect to the balls. We added this with v1.1 of the game but because the Amstrad does not have hardware sprites and the screen resolution is smaller than the arcade version, we could not add the same amount of animations as the original. Benjamin did a great job working within these limitations.

BH: The in-game backgrounds featuring classic Taito CPC games are wonderful. Who came up with that idea and how did you implement this feature?

MV: It wasn’t my idea. I originally wanted to make a 64k game and I didn’t yet know how to manage the extra RAM available with a 128k game. Benjamin is a big New Zealand Story fan and once he had made that background for the game and Stephane had made 2 or 3 tunes, we needed the extra RAM. Once we had that support in place we could add a lot of new content to the game. Some time ago I ported Brixen to the Sega Master System, which doesn’t have a lot of memory. All the data is handled via different slots that the main application can access easily. I used the same kind of design for Puzzle Bobble on the Amstrad. The lower 64k of memory is used for the base code, music, sprites, and for the display buffer. The higher 64k is used as a compressed

drive. This allows us to port our game over to the GX4000 easily in the future.

BH: We’ve heard you are making a version for the GX4000 console. How far along is that and what kind of improvements and additions can we expect from it?

MV: As I mentioned, the game only requires 64k of RAM, so porting it to the GX4000 will be easy. We will add features that couldn’t be included with the current version on the original CPC hardware. The GX4000 has hardware sprites, more colours, more memory, and maybe we can include a SID tune that we could make with DMA. Benjamin and Stephane are already working on new graphics and music. You can expect this improved version within a few months.

BH: We also heard something about a “special surprise” in the GX4000 version on Xyphoe’s YouTube stream. Care to elaborate on that for us?

MV: Not yet. Just imagine what we can do with the extra memory!

BH: Is Crazy Piri entering #CPCRetroDev this year?

MV: No. We like contests and #CPCRetroDev is one of the best contests for the Amstrad scene. However there are admission rules and restrictions that we don’t have to adhere to if we publish the game ourselves, such as having to work on a real Amstrad CPC 464 without expansions, and giving permission to sell physical cassette editions of the game.

BH: Can you tell us about the history of Crazy Piri and why you’ve chosen the Amstrad as your platform of choice?

MV: My first computer was a Schneider CPC 464 (the Amstrad brand that was sold in Belgium), with a green screen monitor. I began coding on it using Locomotive Basic and in 1990 I switched over to PC with the Schneider EuroPC (still Schneider but not Amstrad anymore). I returned to the Amstrad in 2007 via the Nintendo DS and the CrocoDS emulator. I started buying machines in 2016, starting with my first CPC 6128 which I began to code on a few years later. At the end of 2019 the Facebook group ‘Amstrad CPC pour toujours and beyond’ organised the ‘#CPC GameDev Contest 2020’. I contacted KOOPA, a Belgian member of the group, to see if he would like to join a development team as a musician and enter the competition. KOOPA then found LeZone, a great graphic artist, and together we formed Crazy Piri. We then took Brixen, a game I had developed myself, and improved it. I am not a musician or a graphic artist, so it’s not hard to do better than me!

BH: What’s next for Crazy Piri and what can Amstrad fans look forward to from you in the future?

MV: We have a great number of productions in progress. We don’t know which one will be announced next, it depends on our ideas and motivation. I would like to explore the capacity of the CPC Plus range. As long as I can learn new things, I’m happy, and I’ve still got a lot to learn from the Amstrad.

BH: We’d love to know more about your personal history with games, what games do you love and what are currently playing?

MV: I’m not a great gamer. I prefer to code games rather than play them. Even during the original Amstrad era, I coded more than I played. I prefer homebrew games to tripple A titles. I like the games from Rusty Pixels on the Spectrum Next, and the one from Mega Cat Studios on the MegaDrive. If I had to say the ten games I play the most it would be Bomb Jack, Boulderdash, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Warcraft, Indiana Jones 3, Transport Tycoon, The 4th Coming, Grand Theft Auto V, and The Last Of Us.

BH: Any last words you’d like to say?

MV: Thank you for your interest in our games. We hope to still be doing this for many years to come. And please, Lord Sugar, if you’re reading this — RELEASE AN AMSTRAD NEXT!