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Title Hybris
Game Type Shoot-em-up
Publisher -unsure-
Players 1
Copatibility OCS, ECS and AGA (no enhancements for better chipsets.)
HD Installable No
Submission Nathan Wain Profiled Reviewer

Review
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
This game is your classic style vertically scrolling shooter. (Like
Xevious, Slapfight, Vulgus, but most especially like Terra Cresta.)
One from the golden age of the A500 days - easily fitting on a single
floppy, and quick to load.

SPECIAL HARDWARE/SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
A joystick. (Surprise, surprise.)

COPY PROTECTION
None.

MACHINES USED FOR TESTING
A500, 0.5Meg Chip, 0.5Meg Fast, Kickstart 1.2, external Floppy drive,
Thompson RGB monitor.

A1200, 2Meg Chip, 32Meg Fast, Kickstart 3.0, 340 Meg Seagate 2.5" HDD,
GVP Cobra accellerator-board (68030 and 68882 at 50MHz, without SCSI),
additional floppy-drive, Supra 14.4k Modem, 1942 MultiSync monitor.

A4000, 2Meg Chip, 16Meg Fast, Kickstart 3.1, 1.2 Gig Quantum HDD,
Toshiba 16x CD-Rom, additional floppy-drive, Supra 14.4k Modem, 1942
Multisync monitor. (Standard 25MHz 68030 CPU)

Hybris performed *identically* on all three machines. (Almost unusual
for a title of this era.) :-)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
This is a Terra Cresta wannabe, no doubt about it. You can blow up
special installations on the ground which yield additional pieces for
your ship. The ship can seperate into a flying 'formation' of these
pieces for a limited time. Some buildings on the ground can block your
shots, and they're usually placed right in front of those damned turrets.

If there were the occasional roaring animal encountered on the landscape
the similarities could be almost legally-questionable. Fortunately
the shoot 'em up genre lacks originality in abundance, so no Great Giana
Sisters situation was ever likely... (More fortunately Terra Cresta has
nothing to do with Nintento.) ;-)

GENERAL OPINION
This is a damn good Terra Cresta wannabe. It contains all of the
gameplay elements that made Terra-Cresta so good, and then the authors
just went and did their own graphics, levels and SFX. All of which
still look good today. (Something that cannot always be said of titles
from back then.) Of all the classic shooters I've seen on the Amiga, I
feel this and BattleStorm are the two greats. Hybris, though not quite
so full of eye-candy as BattleStorm, does have the advantage of not
having mid-game loading sequences.

This is a game you can just load up and see how far you can get. It has
it's own autofire, so those who are unable to click the fire button
rapidly for sustained periods needn't be put off. The levels are purely
linear, so you needn't be stressing about which exit to take. All you
have to do is build up your ship, and use the three smart-bombs and three
formations to your best advantage.

The graphics and sound are all pretty, functional, and accompanied by a
great soundtrack that just adds to the game without ever becoming
repetitive or annoying. The level of difficulty progresses at a nice
rate - novices can last more than thirty seconds, and hardcore shooters
will have plenty to keep them occupied. The themes of the levels also
change markedly at certain points, so it's not just the same aliens in
bigger numbers.

CONCLUSIONS
A great game to while away the evening, or remind people of the great
stuff that made the A500 the legend it was. It's the kinda shoot 'em up
people make when they don't get sidetracked by too much eye-candy or
effects. A polished title, right down to the credits-sequence.

Was the game Hybris based on any particular arcade game or combination of games?

It was to some extent inspired by popular games from the arcades of the time, but of course there was also a lot of our own inspiration in it.

Who came up with the name Hybris, and does it mean anything?

It was actually Søren Grønbech, who did Sword of Sodan, that came up with the name, and who we were working with at the time. He had heard the word in "ancient history" in high school. It means to be over-courageous... fits well with the game ;-)

How long did the game take to write?

Hybris took a little bit less than a year to develop.

How old were you when you wrote the game?

I was 16 when I wrote Hybris.

Wow! What was a typical day like while writing the game? 9am to 5pm?


It was definitely not 9 to 5 ;-) Often it was late into the night, or should I say early morning. I went to high school at the same time, but managed to get stuff done even on school days. Torben, who did the graphics, was in the US part of the time, and I went over there for school holidays... sometimes extending the holidays a bit ;-) Then we worked at all kinds of odd hours...

What was the development system you used?

Both Torben and I used floppy drives in the development process... yes it sounds a bit old school ;-)

It was not so bad though, since I would load all data files into fast mem initially, and there it would be safe until I turned off the computer. So it was only saving and loading the source files that took a bit of time.

The game seems to have silky smooth 50Hz scrolling. Does the game ever drop a frame or were all the attack waves designed so it's always a constant 50Hz?

Hybris should never go down in frame rate because most of the graphics are sprites. Bobs, which are relatively more processor demanding to display, are only used for ground enemies, and the center part of your own ship.

The game makes heavy use of sprite tricks! (Disabling sprites in an emulator yields a very empty screen!) Can you recall any interesting stories about the development of the sprite routines?

The biggest effort on the sprites was the score sprites "on top of everything". The rest of the sprites are grouped in such a way that no problems occur in practice.

The score panel at the top of the screen uses a nice trick where sprites 0 and 1 have their sprite data set and are repositioned horizontally across the screen "racing the beam". Did you come up with that effect or had you seen it in another game?

Good description of what actually goes on technically :-)

This was Torben's idea and was not seen on the Amiga before. There was an immense amount of fiddling to make this fit. It is essentially timed down to the exact processor cycle ;-)

Can you remember what was the most impressive vertical shooter on the Amiga before Cope-Com set the new standard?

Thanks :-) I actually don't know what was there before. I did not play that many games at the time... I preferred to develop them ;-)

Did you borrow any ideas/tricks from other games? (Specifically related to Amiga hardware tricks)

We got inspired by what we saw in the arcades, but how it was implemented technically was entirely our own doing. It may sound a bit arrogant, but we were pretty sure that what we were doing for the game was the most advanced on the Amiga ;-)

Are there ever situations in the game where more than 8 sprites will be on the same line and hence an object will disappear? Or was everything carefully designed so that wouldn't happen?

It was designed not to happen... but I will not rule out that it can under some circumstances...

I believe the game is running in 32 colour mode, but in reality you only have 20 colours for all the backgrounds as the 4 sprite pairs use 3 pens each using up the other 12 colours. Is that correct?

Torben designed the formal palette very cleverly so even if we could not reach full 32 colours we did have substantially more than 20. For starters, the "transparent colour" of each of the sprite pairs, i.e. colour 16, 20, 24, and 28 could be used freely, since they were never shown in the sprites ;-) But actually the number of colours on the screen is more like around 100 due to the copper effects. That is why it looks so fresh even for today :-)

Was it hard for Torben to design all the graphics that would fit into the restrictions set by the Amiga hardware? Was he a programmer at all so understood the limitations or you set them down at the start of the project?

We did not make so many plans from the beginning, but rather started work to get things on the screen. Even if Torben was not a programmer on our projects at that time he had earlier made small demos on C64 and therefore clearly understood the overall tech specs of the Amiga... so that was relatively smooth. But of course there were a lot of revisions of graphics and code along the way ;-)

Was Hybris the most technically advanced shoot'em-up on the Amiga at that point in time? I personally didn't own an Amiga when the game was released but can't think of much before 1989 that was as technically advanced!

Thank you. I believe so as well and it got a lot of attention from gamers at that time and as one Amiga magazine wrote "...stunned shooters. Had to be dragged away from the joystick!"

What was the reason for making the display area 256x256 pixels? Was that more to match most of the arcade games at the time or was it done to enable more DMA time?

The main reason for having the black edges of the left and right was to give an arcade feel. On many arcades the screen was turned 90 degrees to give the "tall effect", which is highly suitable for shoot'em-ups.

Can you tell me a little of the technical details about how you stored the enemy attack wave data?

The attack waves on Hybris were quite interesting. First, I used a 32 bit longword to hold each of the x and y positions. The lowest 16 bits were the "decimals" and the higher 16 bits were the position in pixels. This made it easy to access the pixel position directly (only when moving the enemy were the "decimals" necessary).

The wave movement is actually quite simple. There is both a "speed" that is added each frame, and then an "acceleration" that is added to the "speed", also each frame. This continues for a certain number of frames, whereafter the next set of parameters are loaded. This is what gives the "wavy" movements. Each of the attack waves are initiated when a specific position on the level is reached.



Did you design the entire game on paper before coding or did it evolve as it was being written?

No. It was very much a dynamic process. Very little was designed upfront. First there was just a ship and some desert background ;-)

The music and sound effects in the game were brilliant (in my opinion!). What kind of specification was Paul van der Valk given for creating the sound?

Yes, you are not alone out there ;-) We did not really put any requirements upfront. Paul was a coder, so he was really able to manipulate the sound to his liking. And it did turn out as some of the very best music on the Amiga...

Did you decide in advance a certain amount of memory would be reserved for sound and Paul had to stick to that limit, or was it a bit more flexible? Was there a memory map?

Yes, we did have a memory map for the game. I still have it on paper in handwriting ;-) It was however not defined from the beginning. At one point when we needed sound FX and music we made room for that and we did think a bit about it on the way and adjusted continuously.

How did you end up meeting/working with Paul?

For Hybris we knew from our contacts within the Amiga demo scene a Dutch scener, who knew Paul VDV.

There was a "how to crack" tutorial posted on the internet in the early 1990's and it specifically mentioned Hybris as a difficult game to crack because it purposefully used up as much memory as possible (of the 512k available at the time!). Was there any attempt to use all memory possible to make it hard or was it simply that all the graphics and sound in the game took up a lot of space?

We did use almost every single byte of the 512Kb, because we needed it for the game ;-)

Do you have any idea about sales figures for the game?

Yes it sold quite a lot, at least somewhere in the tens of thousand worldwide.

Were you given a set fee for writing the game, and did you get royalties?

I got an amount when signing the contract and when delivering the final version. There was probably also another milestone along the way. I was supposed to receive royalties, but since Discovery went bust this never amounted to anything :-(

Was it a risk making an Amiga exclusive game at the time? (I think Atari STs were apparently 3 times as plentiful in the UK as Amigas then)

We were hooked on the Amiga right away, and never thought much about the more limited Atari.

Were you ever asked to make an ST version of the game?

We did talk about it a bit, but since Discovery disappeared it did not materialize so we decided to stick to the Amiga for further development.

How accurate were the self-portraits in the Hybris attract sequence? Ciáran Brennan in his review for The One magazine stated that "those couldn't possibly look like the authors!" Your response?

You can see that it is us, but I think there is a bit of artist touch in there as well. "Pixel pushing" was the trend of the day ;-)

How happy were you with the reviews of the game?


That was one of the really fascinating parts, being just a teenager and having your product described in a magazine distributed all over the world (recall it was well before the internet!). I still have some of the original prints. Hybris got pretty good ratings, so we were quite pleased.

I am very happy that somebody took the time to make a list of the reviews as this would have been hard to find. We used it quite a lot for Battle Squadron ONE when we got restarted... and will also need it for Hybris :-)