Update [Fri 13th Oct, 2023 11:40 BST]: As IndieRetroNews reports, Pixelglass Games has just released a new demo of its upcoming Doom-like Grind for Amiga & Atari ST over on its Patreon.
The demo called 'Darkenward East' v0.3 is set within one of its early levels and is designed to be a showcase of Grind's visuals, art direction, and gameplay.
To coincide with the private release of the demo, Pixelglass released a roughly 4-minute video of this level in action, which is captured on an a1200 with fast RAM and runs at around 25-30FPS. According to Pixelglass in the video's description, on a vanilla a500 with 512+512 RAM (the game's minimum requirements), it will instead run at around 10-12 fps instead. You can watch the video below:
Original Story [Mon 26th Jun, 2023 12:05 BST]: Back in 1993, Amiga owners weren't able to join their PC-playing friends when Doom started to take the gaming world by storm, with the Commodore home computer never receiving an official port of the Id Software title.
The Doom programmer John Carmack, at the time, in fact, famously denied fan requests to port the game to the popular computer, remarking that the Commodore machine simply wasn't powerful enough to run the game. This meant that Amiga players had to make do with a bunch of clones from other developers — none of which could quite compare to the original.
Now, though, a company called Pixelglass Games is working on a fantastic-looking Doom-like called Grind, which is aiming to finally give the Amiga 500 the Doom clone it truly deserves (as spotted by IndieRetroNews).
Grind is a game that draws from Steampunk and Lovecraftian influences. It is being worked on by John "Tsak" Tsakiri and initially began life as a project called Dread (which was announced all the way in 2019). That project received a ton of praise for its impressive use of full-screen resolution, high-quality textured walls, and smooth frame rate. However, it eventually had to split into two, with its original coder Krzysztof Kluczek becoming unable to work on the project in a team, due to "certain obligations". As a result, Kluczek has kept the Dread name and is now working on that game independently, while Tsakiri has started work on another title called Grind using Dread's incredible engine.
Here's a description of the project from the game's website:
"Pickup your time machine and travel back, dive into an alternative universe where Doom was never released for PCs in 1993, but several years earlier on the humble Amiga 500! Grind is a new fps game powered by the amazing Dread engine: a mindblowing achievement which showcases what was really possible with Amiga's original hardware!"
If you want to support the project, it has a Patreon. You can also join the Discord here for updates.