The Amiga just got a new run-and-gun arcade shooter

Polish developer Marcin Rygulski has released an early build of Strike Force Omega, Urban Chaos, a new top-down arcade shooter for AGA Amigas.

The game drops players into the boots of an Omega operative clearing out a city overrun by a terrorist organization. It draws heavy inspiration from classic 80s and 90s arcade shooters like Commando, Mercs, Ikari Warriors, Smash TV, and the Amiga favorite Chaos Engine.

From Minesweeper to run-and-gun

Rygulski is not a newcomer to the Amiga homebrew scene. He recently took second place in the 2024 AmiGameJam with Master of Minefields, a massive 350-level Minesweeper remake. Before that, he dug up and polished the source code for Sapermania, a Minesweeper clone he originally coded in AMOS back in 1993 as a teenager.

Going from carefully flagging grid squares to holding down the fire button until everything on screen stops moving is a career pivot I can respect.

Two buttons and an active strafe

Strike Force Omega is built on the Scorpion engine. Created by Erik Hogan, Scorpion is a visual game creation system designed specifically for classic 68k Amigas and the Sega Genesis. It handles modern conveniences like PNG graphics import and Tiled level editor support, using an Ink-based scripting language that compiles down to bytecode to run on vintage hardware. The engine has become a popular choice for retro developers, powering at least 16 recent Amiga releases.

Rygulski is putting that engine to work with 128-color AGA graphics and an active strafing mechanic mapped to the second fire button. Amiga shooters historically suffered from the platform's reliance on single-button joysticks, often forcing awkward keyboard combinations for secondary actions. Putting strafe on a dedicated button makes navigating the urban pixel art environments much more fluid. Grenades are mapped to the Space bar.

A shot at a full-size arcade cabinet

The current 0.8 release includes three levels. It serves as Rygulski's submission for AmiGameJam 2025, which runs through March 1, 2026. This year's theme is "Return of the Arcade" in celebration of the Amiga's 40th anniversary. The competition has been a major driver for new Amiga software since it started in 2009. The grand prize winner gets their game featured on a full-size custom arcade cabinet, plus a working 1:6 scale replica to keep.

Rygulski did not build the game entirely alone. Giovanni Fiscarelli shares co-design credits, while the pixel art tiles come from itch.io asset creator MalibuDarby. The soundtrack was composed by Simone "JMD" Bernacchia, an Italian composer who has been writing Amiga tracker music since the 1990s and has over 300 modules archived in the Amiga Music Preservation database. Bernacchia also composed the music for Master of Minefields.

Early reception on the game's itch.io page is positive, with players already requesting an ECS port for older Amiga models. The developer plans to add more optimizations and improvements before the final release.