Introduction


The Kit Construction Game is a tool to create video games for the Amiga OS in a simple and fast way. Now the Kit is a " work in progress " and is not ready yet, however is possible to try a demo of one game realized with it. The game is a vertical shoot' em up like " 1944 ". The Graphic and Sound have a good impact and the style is like the coin-op. The Kit is developped using the SDL Libraries so on processors like 68000 runs slowly. This because the programmer will realize a multiplatform project.. I' d like to thank Gunnar von Boehn for his time and for this little interview . Now let's start with the interview :


Can you please introduce yourself and tell us what is your job ?

My name is Gunnar Von Boehn, i am born 1972. My first computer was a Commodore 64 which i used a lot and i learn computer's program.
I'm quickly switched to the Amiga in 1986, my first model was an Amiga 1000.
On the Amiga I wrote some stuff like packers, intros and a lot of gfx demos for some groups (PowerStation, Traxxion, Asia, Dope).
During these years I accumulated a nice collection of Amigas which I used for testing programs ( A1000, A500, A2000, A4000, A1200 and CD32) Like anyone who love videogames, my dream was to create games . I worked on a few different types of games:


Only Ravage was released as Demo in the scene
I was for some time with Benezan Electronics. They did the Amiga-Link network cards.
At Benezan, I had the pleasure to see some very interesting hardware projects. I took part in the develop of an Amiga 3D GFX Card.
This was fun, the card really worked ( I still have a prototype ) But this card was never produced because the Amiga market was crushed already.
Another very interesting project they had was developing industrial controlling computers using the early Coldfires. The software for the Coldfires was developed on Amiga and actually ran on Amigas too.
In 1998 I left AmigaOS and my A4000 starting work as Linux consultant.
In 2003 I got a Pegasos with Linux for a project.
The speed and the Amiga feeling of the Machine got me really hooked up again I got a Pegasos for myself and started using it on MorphOS and Linux.

What is your job now ?

I'm working as developer for MySQL and did some work on the PowerPC optimization of the MySQL server for Pegasos Hardware.
On the AmigaOS/MorphOS site I felt that one of the big deficits is a good webbrowser So I joined the Aweb developer group and participated on Aweb.
With interest I'm following the work of Genesi and other Neo-Amiga HW manufactures. I hope that Amiga could create a good userbase maybe with a cheap mainboard as the Efika.

Why do you start to develop the Kit ?

Last Christmas ( when I was waiting for the birth of my daughter ) I'm talking with my wife about some things and we concluding that AmigaOS needs more games.
So in the old days I wrote some new games for our platform. I figured that a Construction Kit would be better than a "simple game". So recently I started working on the Shoot-Em-Up-Construction-Kit and on the first game "1944" developed with it.
My thinking is that each type of game has slightly different coding requirements.
1944 hass planes and needs shadows of the planes.
An underwater game might need bubbles and water effects.
A space shooter might need particle explosions.

I would release this KIT as Open Source as soon as it's fully working.
Off course, to develop this Kit, I must create some games with it.
I want to include the first level of each game with the Kit so that others can see how they are done. I hope some GFX artists will help me, so that I can focus on the coding.
The Kit will be released under BSD license so that people can re-use code of it to create commercial titles.
If someone want to join and help this would be great

Thank you for this interview


The demo of the game is available on this site. Here some screenshots: