Travel back to the 13th century on a quest for vengeance on an island close to the port city of Sakai, Japan.
On a dark and fateful night, when Yoshi’s family were enjoying a quiet dinner, the family suddenly were attacked by an evil Vampire who had come to the island on a ship from China in search of new blood…
This cruel and evil creature entered the house, annihilating Yoshi’s entire family and turning Yoshi himself into a vampire.
Yoshi was a Shinobi apprentice who witnessed how this vampire had cut his family’s life short in such a tragic way. He swore to have vengeance and set out to find and destroy the vampire, no matter what the cost…
The development of NinjFeratu by Amiten Games began in 2019 and has been stalled for quite some time for one reason or another (although Johnny Acevedo, the lead dev behind this promising title, was still tweaking it frequently since it began).
We are excited to report that in mid-2022, the development has finally resumed. All the tools and routines used for Amiten Games’ previous venture Coco Banana, have been leveraged. Albeit, those routines have been tightened-up to reduce the chaotic spaghetti code and improve the structure to make way for “AmiGen Engine V1.0” (Ami from Amiten and Gen from Generico).
The game utilises one of the Amiga hardware features called dual-playfield in which 2-playfields overlap to create a parallax-like effect. These 2-playfields, the foreground and background, are made up of tiles that move on the screen in the Amiga’s chip memory and they are of different sizes that the engine moves according to the mapping of each level in the four possible directions, right, left, up, down, resulting in a very interesting effect with many possibilities. The drawback of the dual-playfield mode is that it limits each playfield to 3-bitplanes on the OCS and ECS Amiga’s chipset. This means that the development team can only use a maximum of 8 colours for each playfield, where 1 of these colours is transparent to make up the graphics resulting in a challenge to create graphics with only 7-colours remaining. But thanks to great artists such as https://ansimuz.com – the author of the tile set or Yann Massard (intro screen and box art) and Johnny Acevedo himself creating and animating all the game sprites and levels design with a lot of patience, little by little, the game is starting to look very nice.
The music has been composed by Simone Bernacchia (JMD), and this time Simone has done an incredible job in creating music tracks between 18-30 kb in size and only using 2-channels for each song (leaving 2-channels free for game sound FX). I encourage you to check out this video where Simone talks about his mod techniques that he likes to call micro mods or micro samples: https://youtu.be/UkK6TDyz7wk?t=1818
The sound FX in NinjFeratu is also quite special. Johnny created the FX by extracting samples from the sound chip known as K051649 (better known as Konami’s SCC sound chip). He recorded the sound output of this chip as well as from some MAME ROMs. Then he changed/modified/optimised those sounds further in SoundForge, and then converted them to the Amiga IFF sound format, and finally inserted them into the game build.
NinjFeratu will run on any Amiga with 1MB of chip RAM, and when completed (Johnny estimates sometime this year), will be made available free of charge on https://amiten.itch.io. Additionally, there are plans to make a limited batch of physical copies for sale that contain the classic big box, floppy disk and manual.
Leading up to the release, Amiten Games will make available several demos on their Patreon page, showcasing the development and taking in feedback from the community. There will also be some small beta demos released to the general public occasionally on their https://amiten.itch.io site. So, go and check it out and then head over to https://www.patreon.com/AmitenTV to support this very promising production!
