After seeing many videos online, especially a recent Street Fighter 2 demo by Neeso Games (who are also working on a version of Jackal), it got me thinking that maybe we could speed up development by bringing our existing assets into the Scorpion Engine and do some tests.

The Scorpion Engine is a fast and flexible game creation kit for Amiga, offering a modern Windows IDE for development.

The editor is a fine piece of kit designed by Erik Hogan - it takes the hassle out of many graphic & tech related tasks and offers many clever speed optimisations.

So I spent a weekend setting it up, including the tiled level 1, a player and some enemies. After some intial tests at 50fps it was clear that with Amiga 500 + expansion settings it wasn’t going to be able to support it without slow down.

Luckily the Scorpion Engine has a 25fps option (this was the frame rate we were initially targetting anyway). Using this option the game runs solid and feels fantastic, being able to support many characters on screen at once without any obvious signs of slow down. This is important as if a framerate is established from the start, your eye gets used to it and it feels good.

Check the test footage…

And see that Street Fighter 2 tech demo below: