Blobz

by bluescrn

Blobz was an Amiga game that I developed in Blitz BASIC 2 (with a bit of inline 68000 assembly) as a teenager, during my A-level years. I’d been a big fan of the Lemmings games, and wanted to be able to build levels for them. At one point, a ‘Lemmings Construction Kit’ was listed in Amiga magazines as an upcoming release – but it never appeared. And in the end, I tried to make a Lemmings-like game myself.

Originally Blobz was going to be ‘Turds’, directing the brown blobs of poop to a toilet… but they quickly became the inoffensive and unoriginal blob-with-eyes, similar to that which many artistically-challenged game developers have used as a character over the years…

My game design kind of sucked, and my pixel art skills weren’t great – but looking back, it was fairly polished for a Blitz BASIC game, and the focus on visual effects+polish (in this case at the expense of gameplay) was a hint of direction that I’d continue with, doing a lot of graphics programming and shader work in the future.

As a teenage developer, in a time before the term ‘indie game’ was even a thing, I was quite proud to see it reviewed in Amiga Computing, CU Amiga, and Amiga Format (But it was 1996 by then, the dying days of the Amiga, and new game releases were few and far between…)

I was quite surprised to recently discover that somebody’s recorded a longplay of the game (although I’m not sure why there’s graphical corropution, particularly on the map screen – I’ve not seen that before, although I’m aware of a glitch at the top of the screen which is visible on some monitors and on emulators… I hadn’t been able to see it, as it’s in the overscan area of the TV that I was using while developing the game…)