WHAT IS THIS?

SkillGrid is an endless score-attack vertical shoot 'em up featuring frenetic, tactical gameplay and comprising of a variety of different sub-games, boss battles, and in-depth scoring mechanics.

FEATURES

Original gameplay based on shooting at enemies and catching/dodging of cells

3 parallax layers (2 of which generated procedurally) scrolling at variable speed

1 fixed layer for the HUD and other effects

Real transparencies with 8 bit alpha channel

Real-time palette changes

Beautiful tiny sprites

Pixel-perfect collision detection

High quality prog-rock music in the form of lossless-packed 8 bit stereo 28.9 kHz samples

Speech warnings

Audio channels allocated dynamically for one-shot sounds

Variable afterburner sound frequency, depending on the ship vertical speed and the scrolling speed

... all running at steady 50 Hz

Single load from any media

Hiscore saving

EDITIONS

The gorgeous physical packages are available from RGCD.



BASIC EDITION: jewel-cased glass-mastered CD with 16 pages booklet, 2 floppy labels, RETREAM postcard, RGCD postcard, RGCD vinyl sticker.





DELUXE EDITION: clamshell box containing the basic edition plus 2 floppies, 4 badges pack, A3 poster (optionally rolled in a separate container).





The digital download is available here.

REQUIREMENTS

Minimum:

Amiga 1200 / 4000 / CD³²

/ / PAL display

stereo speakers

joystick/joypad in port 2

If installed:

~2 MB of space

~250 kB of CHIP RAM

~2 MB of CHIP and/or FAST RAM

For hiscore saving on Amiga CD³²

32 B of NVRAM (1 memory unit)

Note: an Amiga 1200/CD³² without FAST RAM can run SkillGrid only from floppies/CD, respectively. Any extra device connected to one such machine might steal some of the RAM needed by SkillGrid; in such case, disabling all the devices (except DF0:) from the Amiga Early Startup Control screen might help.

THE SAGA

SkillGrid is part of a saga that, as of writing, includes six different games.

BOH opens the story, with the Evil Masters bringing chaos to Earth. Huenison focuses on the fight against one of them, the eponymous character. Eventually the Evil Masters were repelled, but, as seen in QUOD INIT EXIT IIm, during their retreat, Huenison and his companions happened to pass by planet Suinio and decided to cause trouble there as well. Having witnessed the Evil Masters' cruelty, the Pemkians decided develop the defense training program that SkillGrid is part of. In MAH, years later, the danger came from the Apocalypser, the weapon that had been developed against the Evil Masters and that the Purifiers activated to destroy the Earth. Finally, KOG assigns a new task to the hero who turned the Apocalypser off.