As I said in this article, I used to be a big Amiga fan. It wasn’t just the games I enjoyed, but all kinds of other things, like trying my hand at synthesising music (which was awful) and making landscapes in Vista (which always, after 2 hours of rendering, seemed to have a tree right in front of the camera, spoiling the view). I also enjoyed making animations using Deluxe Paint.
I hit upon an idea, and scoured my collection of Amiga Format for clear screenshots from the game Lemmings. Once I had identified the 8 or so different frames of animation for their walking cycle and translated them to the screen, I arranged them into the correct order, and voila! I had a Lemming walking along on my screen. Exciting times.
You can guess what happened next. What are Lemmings good for? Dying, that’s right! I made some scenery (out of a selection of smaller blocks of green grass and brown dirt I had created, similar to sprite-sheets you see nowadays), devised some traps (flame throwers, bear-traps, typical Lemmings-inspired stuff), even drew the little door that they flow out of (animating that was tricky, I recall), then sent them on their merry way! Some exploded, some fell to their doom, some got splattered, some learned to fly and tried to escape, but they all died in the end. They did this over and over again, because I made sure the animation looped.
Deluxe Paint was so easy to work with, and I’ve tried a few animation programs since then, but they seem to have lost sight of how to keep things simple and I found them too complex. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the animations any more, as I wiped the discs before we moved house, then sold the Amiga and everything related to it when we had moved house.
Credit to Wikipedia for the walk-cycle gif and blurb.
