In BrewOtaku #001, we interviewed Erik Hogan, the creator of the Scorpion Engine.
Hi Erik. Please introduce yourself, for those who do not know you.
I’m a Kiwi from Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand, a retro gamer and a retro game developer, and the creator of the Scorpion Engine.
For how long has the idea of Scorpion Engine shaped up in your head, before you begun working on it?
It sort of had been floating off and on for several years before I started to work on it properly. At the time there was a constant influx of titles made in the Backbone engine which, while a great tool for non-developers to use, ultimately results in games that are slow and inflexible even on the fastest Amigas. It was originally “Project SubZero”, a pun on the character’s “backbone ripping” fatality, as the tool began life as a mere asset ripper for Backbone.
Why a Windows based tool?
Do you plan to support other Operating Systems? If so, which ones. Mac and Linux have always been the intention, but for various reasons it hasn’t yet come to fruition. I do expect native support for those two systems to come sooner or later, but people have had various degrees of success using Scorpion in emulated and virtual environments such as Wine or Parallels.
How perfect is the interoperability, as Scorpion Engine compiles for Amiga and Genesis?
It’s complicated. The Amiga and Genesis (along with Neo Geo, the newest target being developed) share a 68K processor but have little else in common. Logical code such as collision detection is identical between the platforms, whereas there is abstraction for system specific issues like audio, graphics, and memory management. While the majority of Scorpion games could target both the Genesis and the Amiga, since each system has radically different strengths and weaknesses, some fidelity may need to be dropped in a conversion.
How is the community feedback so far?
Generally, pretty good, and I’m very proud of what the engine has been used by third parties to make, and I feel many Scorpion games have been thoroughly enjoyed by the wider Amiga community. It has been noted that skepticism of the engine has dropped over time as games with high performance, high levels of graphical fidelity and complicated gameplay systems have emerged.
What is your motivation to support the creation of games for older systems?
I’ve always wanted to make games, daydreaming about what I would make if I could from well before the time I knew the first thing about development. We do tend to want to play more games, like we did as a child, and so making games that run on classic computers and consoles is something I find very appealing.
What’s your most favourite Scorpion Engine game and why?
There’s a lot of really high-quality Scorpion games but at the same time, it’s an easy question to answer. Mixel’s ‘Creeping Me Out: Hex Night’ has been a kind of flagship for Scorpion game development for some time. It is massive in scope, story, gameplay features, and levels.
Do you consider Scorpion Engine beginner-friendly?
I do, but admittedly there are things about it that aren’t beginner-friendly. Documentation and tutorials are lacking, the workflow may be pretty alien to people that have a different mindset to myself, and sometimes simplicity is sacrificed in order to keep the engine fast and flexible on stock Amigas. All of these I want to gradually address in future, but for the mean time the English Amiga Board (EAB) thread and Discord server are great places to find help and collaboration.
What are your future plans with this Engine?
Neo Geo support is the immediate future goal, along with continuing to expand support for the Amiga and Mega Drive chipsets. Scorpion games can’t do 100% of what their host computers and consoles are capable of, but we’re always getting that tiny little bit closer.
