The mid 1990s was the era of the Amiga Doom clone, a gold rush time when developers strove to reproduce the delights of Doom, or more commonly Wolfenstein 3D, on Commodore's machine. Commercial publishers released a series of games, including Alien Breed 3D, Gloom and Fears. Demo scene coders showed off their textured mapped mazes. In the PD scene programmers created engines which often were intended to become full games. aGTW delves into this last category with a series about engines for games that weren't.

Other games in this series:

AMRWolf

Dent A Wolf / DentECTS / Dentaku-26

In 1994 "Text Demo" was an engine looking for a game. Two teams of programmers and artists came together to each create a game based on the engine. One was called Mystic Tank and the other, which we are concerned with here, was called Shade. In the words of the Aminet readme file:

"Shade is going to be a DOOM clone featuring Magic instead of Weapons. It also is going to have lots of RPG elements. Kind of a cross between DOOM, Magic Carpet and Dungeon Master (if that's possible :-))"

The Text Demo engine was originally the work of John Hendrikx, who also wrote the Smart File System (SFS). The engine itself is excellent, featuring stairs, water and dynamic lighting. It's set in a large outdoor area so brings to mind games like Dark Forces.

Michael A. Krehan wrote a neat level editor for the engine. The team have kindly allowed this level editor to be released (see the downloads section). Note that the level editor didn't reach the stage where it could produce files that the TextDemo57 could run.

Zak Jarvis worked to create the game's textures, which give the engine a very professional feel. Zak has shared some of the graphical work that he did for this engine with us. Head over to the Miscellaneous area to see these textures and backgrounds.

Zak has also supplied an updated version (571) of the Aminet engine. Amiga Games That Weren't talks to Zak, Michael and John about their work.