Nectarine

https://www.studio-quena.be/cyborgjeff/site/2000/07/12/867-outm-up/

Out’m up is one of those pieces of music that I composed and am particularly proud of.

With summer just around the corner and exams still a long way off, I have to admit that all my attention is focused on the next Demoparty in Belgium, the Inscene 2K.

We already had the chance to go last year and this time the Pype brother and I have decided to go all out! I’ve already got the two titles New Millenium and Tic Tic Tac in my diskettes, which will be presented in the Soundtracker categories, and over the last few days I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the soundtrack for the little shoot’m up that Pype is programming in Assembler for the 100k game category.

Out’m up, as it’s called, is a nice challenge without transcending the genre. But it’s an opportunity to highlight the little pixels that come to life, all the scrolling work and the integration of the S3M Player from our P.P.P. Team Software team. It may not seem like much nowadays, but for us it was an extraordinary step forward in our video game creation projects!

In order to leave 3 tracks for the special effects, I set myself the challenge of composing all the music for the game on the 3 other tracks in this file format, integrating all the music sections into a single file and using fairly basic sounds, reminiscent of the video games of the previous decade and which are beginning to make a name for themselves in the Chiptunes category.

The sounds may be basic, but it’s the melody that sets the work apart and means that even today, when I listen to Out’m up, I’m still travelling through the years. The mix of bass and treble melodies, the changes in tempo that punctuate the voyage of our ship… it all works really well!

By the end of June, the calmer introductory music had been laid down, and during the month of July it was expanded to include 2 levels of music, each preceded by a « Start Jingle », invincibility music, level clear and a hiscore, and even some digitised vocals by your devoted Cyborg Jeff… little touches that would find their way into the Super CJ Land album a few years later.

Amongst the jingles, you might recognise a nod to Twilight Zone by the band 2 Unlimited, one of the first melodies I learned on my synth in 1993.

Out’m’Up is a shoot’em’up, crossing over between Tyrian from EpicMegagames and Space Invaders. Note that nearly all code has been rewriten or debugged for the occasion. A brand-new sprite engine (hundreds of 32×32 sprites!) has been written because Gedeon/ParadiseStudios didn’t like the way i managed collisions in Crazy Brix. In OUTmUP, you get a pixel-precision collision detection with lightning-speed effect.

I’d like to credit Pierrick for the idea of a Shoot-m-up, even if he was really too late with his sprites.

All you’ll have to do is pass each UFO wave, shooting as much alien starships/ufos as you can, collecting bonuses for powerups.
5 lives – 5 hitpoints – 7 waves – that game is too easy!

Source Code includes Kris’lzw compressor.