Progeny

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About Progeny

Progeny was a shoot'em up game for the AGA series of Amiga computers, unreleased, but almost finished! ;) Damn that feature creep, it's a product killer. Peter Jones was responsible for the enemy ship design and modelling, and background drawing and design, effectively all graphics and animations. Jeroen Verbeek was responsible for Amiga programming, wave design, model and texture touchups and rendering process. John Hall was responsible for PC programming, PC AGA Copper emulation. Kevan Stannard composed some very good music for Progeny, all played as CD audio.

Progeny featured 6 levels, each split into 3 sections, and a final battle level with an almost fullscreen enemy. Some levels featured significant amounts of background animation, some section in the forest level animated the whole screen. There were about 100 different types of enemies of varying intelligence, may could make decisions based on what the player was ding at the time and tried to anticipate your actions based on your movements. In the Amiga version (A1200 and up) a minimum of 25fps with over 300 colours at once, with the player sprite and weapons drawm at 50fps. The PC version (more a tech demo of the first level) ran comfortably on a 486DX2/66 and up to 60fps on the faster Pentiums of the day. Music was played in the background direct from CD.

Gameplay

The player moved through most levels from left to right over a right to left scrolling landscape with limited vertical scrolling. In the caves level the player was able to move in all directions with the level scrolling behind the payer in all directions. The caves level also had an extra hazard: you could hit the side walls of the caves. In all side scrolling levels only the player also controlled the speed of the movement. A transition animation was played before and after each level.
Four weapon firing buttons were used, each to fire a different weapon, or activate installed shields.
After each section was completed the player would be picked up by it's mothership and an armoury shop would appear. Here you could exchange salvage points for newer and better weapons. Salvage points increased by collecting small clouds of pulsating energy in the area where an enemy was destroyed.

Preview renders

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Screenshots

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The original 1996 Boing website for Progeny is available here, for the memories.