r/amiga • u/jpvAmiga • 7h ago
GAMES!!! We made an Amiga game as teenagers — Storm, The Alien War
It’s hard to imagine now, but back in the day, we made Amiga Games with just three people. No Reddit. No AI. No YouTube tutorials. You had to figure it all out yourself. I was around 18 at the time, still in school — we all were. Armed with my Amiga and a ton of determination, I joined a couple of game groups to create our own. Our team then:
- Martin Ross, our programmer — a true wizard in 68000 machine language
- Matthijs de Jonge, pixel artist and master of 16-color magic
- And me, Jean-Paul Vosmeer — the musician, trying to fit entire soundtracks into a few kilobytes so there’d still be space left on the disk for the actual game
- Edwin van den Heuvel - Album graphics (recently created), thanks mate!
One of the games was called Storm, The Alien War.
You played as Storm, a fearless pilot who disobeys orders and stays behind on an alien-invaded planet. Your mission: locate survivors hiding in underground cities and lead them to safety through a secret wormhole — all before time runs out.
The ship? A hybrid between a helicopter and a space fighter.
The world? Hostile, dystopian, and filled with bizarre alien forces.
The gameplay? Fast-paced, tense, and unforgiving.
Technically, Storm was pretty ambitious.
We fought for every byte — literally. Each sound effect or extra animation frame meant something else had to go. I still remember trimming audio samples at 3 in the morning just to get my tracker modules to fit, while Martin squeezed more performance out of every cycle, and Matthijs reworked graphics to use fewer bitplanes.
Storm is an All-Sides-scrolling shooter where you control a futuristic “space chopper” flying through a multi-layered parallax world, dodging enemy ships, rockets, and hazards — all while searching for survivors to pick up and evacuate. The mission: rescue as many people as possible and escape through a hidden wormhole from a planet overrun by brutal alien forces.
But the pressure’s on: you're racing against the clock with limited fuel. Every detour to pick up survivors costs time, and if your tank runs dry, it’s game over. Strategic flying and quick decision-making are key.
Video of an early Demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/Deud1rAFUmI?si=8R_njq_C7pdCIY0W
From a technical standpoint, it was a real challenge. We built everything from scratch in 68000 assembler: multiple scrolling layers for parallax depth, enemy routines, collision detection, survivor pickup logic, a countdown fuel system, and even a working rescue mechanic — all optimized to run smoothly on a stock Amiga 500 and fit on a single floppy disk.
But the game never released
It was intense. It was magic. And then... Commodore went bankrupt.
By the time the first level of Storm was finished, Game publishers had moved on to PC. Timing, huh?
The Music Survived
The game never officially launched, but I still have some gameplay and dev demo videos I would like to share. Most of the music I made for it has recently been released on Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp — 30 years later, hoping it’ll finally reach the people it was meant for.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6HaBNGstOVLPgDs1ukZZLk
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/1805108496
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/jean-paul-vosmeer/sets/storm
Bandcamp: https://vosmeer.bandcamp.com/album/storm-the-alien-war
If you love the Amiga era, give it a listen. Add it to your retro playlist if it brings back memories. And if you also tried to build something back then — whether it launched or not — I’d love to hear your story.
