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The Batman Pack
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Commodore released a huge number of bundles for the Amiga, one of them was the "Cartoon Classics" bundle, in which Lemmings was included. This was just about the time of the Amiga sales boom, and made DMA a fortune!
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GORE! baddies
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Tony was pressing on with Gore, oblivious to the fact that Dave was now
pulling out his hair trying to squeeze it all into the Amiga's memory. This was
to be tony's last set of graphics for Dave and DMA.
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Battle Squadron
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While this game was a standard shoot-em-up, it push the bar out on several key
areas. It was slick, pretty, and had a couple of key technical advancements.
One of which inspired DMA to try a similar effect on their own Shoot-em-up.
The Complete History of
DMA Design
By
Mike Dailly
Chapter 3
Part 2
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C64 Blood Money - finished at last!
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Brian was progressing with the debugger, and he could now view the code and step through it, allowing simple debugging.
Once Blood Money was finished, Mike got his first bonus, enough to finally buy an Amiga of his own. Splashing out around £400 on the Batman pack Mike took his new A500 home to play with. He didn't play long before the programming bug bit again, and he was soon getting down and dirty with it.
Using the framework Dave had written for the Amiga format articles, Mike started to code a basic platform game. However, like most of the games he would start outside of the office, it never got very far. Mike discovered just how hard it was to do a job all day, and then to go home and do the same thing at night.
Gary had by now, done enough animations to start a game using them. Dave brought in another friend of Mikes, Tony Colgan to start a new game called Cutiepoo. Tony and Mike first met at Abertay computer club, and since both were C64 users, both started to swap code and demos.
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Cutiepoo
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This was the days of simple games, and true to this mantra, Dr. Mallet ran about trying to kill the tribble by squishing them with a huge mallet. This all took place inside a chocolate factory - for some reason.
Meanwhile, Daves friend Wayne Smithson (who wrote Blood Money ST, and many, many, MANY! other games), had just started his own company called WJS Design. Everyone tried very hard to keep a straight face when talking about Wayne's new company name, although it was soon dubbed "We Just Steal Design".
However, Wayne was a great guy, and two companies soon started to rib each other in a friendly game of FAX wars. This was the first time either of them had access to a FAX machine, and this went to their head's.
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Anarchy - A WJS Design game
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Having just finished Blood Money on the 12th March, Mike now started on a Gore test for the C64. He managed to get the code necessary to draw the huge sprites, but by now Dave was now having problems.
Dave was busy testing his new compression for Gore, but wasn't having much luck. Even his best attempts weren't enough, he simply needed more memory. His best guess was that he needed a minimum of 1Mb of memory, and this amount just wasn't common enough at the time.
So, Dave "temporarily shelved " Gore! This was the first of many projects DMA would "temporarily shelve" and unlike walker, never pick up again later.
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Shoot-em-up Ship
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Dave had received some Amiga artwork from an artist down south, one J. Lewis and decided to get Mike working on a new Amiga shoot-em up.
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Doc Mallet
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Doc Mallet was the archetypal villain, he just loved being evil. The poor
tribbles ( named for the Star Trek pet!) didn't have a hope on their
own!
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A Tribble
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Cutiepoo's tribbles were based on the StarTrek tribble, a small, helpless bundle of fur, that was ripe for the picking.