In the final (for now, at least) entry in this series, we are going to pull everything together into a playable “Shoot the Invaders from Space” game that has keyboard and joystick control, killable enemies, moving bullets, and a scrolling star field backdrop …

Previous AMOS Basic Tutorials in this series:

1. Loading images and configuring AMOS screens
2. “Dual Playfield”
3. Bobs and Sprites
4. Maps and Scrolling
5. Better Tile Scrolling
6. Animation & Scrolling with AMAL

There is one last popular option for scrolling the screen and covering it gives us an opportunity to introduce the special AMOS animation language, AMAL …

Previous AMOS Basic Tutorials in this series:

1. Loading images and configuring AMOS screens
2. “Dual Playfield”
3. Bobs and Sprites
4. Maps and Scrolling
5. Better Tile Scrolling

In the previous article, we created a tile map and did a simple scrolling screen using Screen Copy.

While it worked, and demonstrated some cool aspects of AMOS, it wouldn’t really be efficient for use in an action/arcade game, is there a better option? Also, can we load the map from disk?

There is also another option for scrolling the screen we haven’t investigated, let’s look at that first.

Previous AMOS Basic Tutorials in this series:

1. Loading images and configuring AMOS screens
2. “Dual Playfield”
3. Bobs and Sprites
4. Maps and Scrolling

Up until now, our AMOS BASIC programming has relied on loading quite large full-screen images as our backgrounds. That is not memory efficient, plus creating maps and levels this way would be quite cumbersome.

The go-to solution is to create a tiled map. We will look at loading and drawing Icons, and how we can display and even scroll our maps, to offer massive game worlds at a fraction of the memory requirement.

Previous AMOS Basic Tutorials in this series:

1. Loading images and configuring AMOS screens
2. “Dual Playfield”
3. Bobs and Sprites

Previously we looked at how AMOS can load images and configure screens, and layered scrolling via a feature called “Dual Playfield”.

If we are going to create playable games then we will also need graphics to represent the player and the enemies.

Colloquially we call these sprites, but in AMOS the term sprite has a specific meaning …

Previously we looked at how AMOS can load images and configure screens, setting up screen resolution and number of colours.

I also left you with a tease about this lesson, where I mentioned that AMOS has a feature where you can have layered scrolling via a feature called “Dual Playfield”.

Let’s dig into that now …