HOMEBREW HEROES
Alejandro Del Campo - frequently known as Rhino of BG Games - is the programmer who decided Pinball Dreams could and indeed should be released for the Amstrad CPC, so we wanted a quick natter to find out more
Converting Pinball
Dreams must have been a mammoth task, who was involved in it?
Definitely we were a big team for an 8-bit game: 12 testers to adjust the gameplay (QOM, Higgy, Kukulcan, Dredd, SUTEKH, MAV, Raft, Mac, The Broth3rs, Batman, Maxit and Alejandro Valdezate), three musicians (SUTEKH, Raft and Mcklain), three other graphicians (Mac, Toni Gálvez and me), Arnoldemu provided the disc loader and I made the code and tools while Batman (BG cofounder) provided support to the development.
How long did development take and where do you even start with a game like this? We worked on it at different times between 2016 and 2018. It all started after having some crazy ideas about making a game on CPC. We had done a scroll routine as collaboration for another team and started to think about if Pinball Dreams would be possible on the
CPC taking advantage of that routine. But before starting, there was a lot of initial analysis work to find out if the project was possible on the CPC at 50fps and with the ball physics at least as good as the original. At that time we made the physics in Java on PC and then we made the maths library for Z80 as a first step. After measuring CPU cycles, structuring the memory so that everything would fit in and implementing the physics on CPC, we had solved the most difficult problem and the rest was only a matter of time.
In hindsight, is there anything you would have done differently?
Sure! I would reorganise collision codes to include more variety of materials and I would try to improve the physics, I even think we’d do it for the new cartridge support, which would allow for larger graphics and more accurate collision tables. Including all the sound, visual and gameplay aspects in one eighth of the original Amiga memory was a great challenge that would have been easier and better on cartridge, but, in general, we are happy with the result.
What kind of feedback have you received from Amstrad gamers?
Better than we expected! When you’ve been in a development for so long it’s hard to know how the public will react, and considering that we released a preview some time ago, we thought we’d completely killed the surprise factor, but it looks like we were wrong. As an example, more than 50 videos about the game have been uploaded to Youtube and there were more than 8,000 downloads in the first ten days since the release, which is a great achievement for a CPC game!
Finally, do you have any exciting future plans that our readers would be interested in?
Our plans are to continue making games and demos not only for CPC, but also Amiga, Spectrum and other retro platforms. Our next development on CPC will be a racing game based on classics like Out Run or Lotus.