
SMARTY AND THE NASTY GLUTTONS - MAKING OF
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The development of the game began in 1992, when a Finnish software company
Avesoft and it's head designer Jyrki Kummola hooked up with Eero Tunkelo
in order to start realizing a vision of a chase-and-run style platformer
Jyrki had been planning for some time. Eero and I had some discussions
about the project and I quickly joined the team. Some graphics had
already been drawn and we started coding straight away.

Jyrki had a great vision about the characters of the game and the story
behind them. What remained a bit unclear, however, was the aim and plot
of the actual game itself.

After realizing that the first draft was difficult to grasp and somewhat
uninteresting, a new approach was taken. One of the artists,
Mikko Lipiinen, and myself were at that point pretty much the only
ones who had the time and motivation to try a makeover of such a large
scale. Somehow we managed to pull it off and after many months we had a
new version with clearer aim, smoother gameplay and a new graphic design.

The graphics, music and sound effects were crafted by highly talented
friends among the Finnish Amiga scene. Hans Zenjuga had drawn the original
graphics and also made a great contribution to the revision. Mikko was
totally irreplaceable with his multi-talent in design, graphics and sound
as well. Music for the game was composed by Sami Jrvinen, Juha Kujanp
and Aleksi Eeben. Sound effects were made by Aleksi Eeben and Ville Hyvnen.

We also had help with the coding. While Eero and myself worked on the
game engine, the disk and sound system were done by Jouni Korhonen and
Jarno Paananen, respectively.

We simply could not have made it without these guys. Besides Jyrki's
strong vision, we received great practical support from Avesoft's CEO
at the time, Kimmo Kujansuu.

By the time we had a playable preview and the game was about to be
wrapped up, it was already mid-1995 and the Amiga had just started
to go downhill. We tried to get a publishing deal for the game but
didn't succeed. That sort of stopped the development and the
Amiga version was left unfinished.

There were efforts to port the game to 8086 machines. A great
deal of work was put in by Hirvikorpi brothers, but at some
point the task started to seem overwhelming and PC gaming was
going to a completely different direction with 3D graphics and
so forth. Therefore the development of the PC version also
quieted down.

Project Comeback 2017-2020
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Many years passed. Eero had acquired the copyrights of the
game from Avesoft's heritage. Jouni, who had been somehow
attached to Amiga scene all this time, found a disk with a
playable preview in it from Eero's old stash of disks and
with Eero's permission cracked his own code and
released the preview.

This encouraged me to contact Eero after a long time,
and then the idea of finally finishing the project came up.

I hadn't done nearly any coding for twenty years, but got
really interested in it again and also rediscovered
the fun of it!

I happened to have the time to spare into finishing the project.
So I decided to relearn the 68k assembler and Amiga hardware.

After some studying of the code, I realized that it was pretty
sloppy written by hasty and youthful minds. Therefore I decided
to review it line by line. While making myself again familiar
with all the details of the game engine, I tried to do some
optimizing, debugging and improvements as well.

Jouni's help has been invaluable throughout the Project Comeback.

After the break he had dug out improved versions of his old
packer routines and had also refurbished an old DOS-based loader
to be used with Amiga Disk File format and the 'new old' packer.

Besides that, he has patiently answered my frequent questions
about Amiga hardware and coding. Thanks a million, buddy!

Until this day, I haven't stopped marveling the talent and effort
of all the people involved in the project. So many hours of hard
work have been put into this game.

The finishing touches on the code in order to wrap things up for
good are my tribute to all the wonderful friends with whom I've
had the pleasure to work with and share the fun and beauty of
the Amiga. Thank You!

Special thanks to Ville Jouppi for play testing with an
unbeatable selection of different hardware combinations.

I hope that this game will bring joy to the friends of the Amiga
and retro-gaming still out there. I would also be most happy
to receive comments, questions or any kind of feedback.

This project has given me a whole new meaning to the word 'release'


