Games

Published Games

During my 9 years as a games developer I worked on several different games below you can read my thoughts on the games that were released, plus details of what I did on them

Grand Theft Auto - The original open ended gangster game, not as well known as GTA 3 and it’s two sequels, but the original GTA set many of the patterns used in the later installments, including the large open city, the missions, side missions, the car collecting cranes, hospital/police station respawn points, multiple radio stations, the list goes on. I was originally working on the Sega Saturn version of the game, this was dropped because of lack of interest in the Saturn. I then moved onto the PC version, where I wrote the original scripting engine that made all the missions possible, before that point the game took place in short missions (about the same length as a normal mission in game) and then you would be taken back to the menu, the problem was the maps were massive (256×256 blocks each) and since missions were timed there was no incentive to explore, so the whole world was opened up and you could choose when to take a mission, there was no time limit and you could have as much fun as you wanted doing other stuff.

Urban Chaos - Not the new Urban Chaos game, but the original, with D’arci Stern and Roper, set in the fictional Union City in the months leading upto the end of the millenium, a fully 3D game broken into areas of the city with specific missions to perform as you play a rookie cop who’s drawn into a world of gang bangers and secret cults. With the help of an old military friend of her father’s D’arci has to uncover the truth and save Union City. I worked on the PSX version of the game, working on the game 3D engine, Front-end and was also build master for the PSX version (which usually meant hanging around late to burn multiple CDs at single speed to send to Eidos)

Nicktoons Racing - Just like it sounds, Nicktoons Racing was a cart racing game featuring characters from Nickelodeon cartoons, including Rugrats, Ren & Stimpy, The Wild Thornberrys, Spongebob Squarepants and Hey Arnold, it was a fun little game with multiple modes as you would expect from a cart racing game, not Mario Kart, but still good. I worked on Front-end, FMV playback, sound and also time-trial mode, I’m most proud of the ghost car rendering, this is done by rendering the ghost cart to an offscreen buffer, then plotting that buffer semi-transparent onto the screen, this removes the normal problem of ghost vehicles with overlapping polygons cutting through each other, it’s more expensive to render, but since there’s only you and the ghost this isn’t a problem since the normal game would render 5 other carts.

All-Star Baseball 2002 - Being British means we dont really get baseball over here (they show it late night on Channel 5, but it’s not popular), so why Acclaim chose us (Software Creations) to do a baseball game I dont know, we wrote the GBA version of the game, it featured the full season mode, quick game, All-Star matches, Home run derby, all the features you would expect from a baseball game, it also featured a trading card game, where you could trade cards with other players over the link cable, I wrote the front-end engine, the trading card linkup, base systems for the GBA, the front-end data compiler for our editor (called Scary, after Scary Spice), I also added a small pong game to the credits screen (R,A,L,L,Select IIRC) although it’s hard to beat since the GBA plays a really good game and you’ll likely lose points through bordum.

Super Monkey Ball Jr - I love SMB, such a simple concept, excellently realised, when I got the chance to work on the GBA version I jumped at the chance, originally started at Software Creations before the company went bust, the original team joined our old boss (Andy Onions, Carrier Command) and started a company to finish SMB Jr, of all the projects I’ve ever worked on it’s the one that went the smoothest, mainly because we all knew what we had to do, and were left to get on with it, no pointless progress meeting, no lengthy arguments with designers who didn’t know what they wanted, we simply sat down and wrote it, using the Gamecube as reference. I worked on the front-end engine, base systems, ingame UI engine and the Monkey fight mini-game. I think that Monkey fight turned out really excellent, it’s certainly the noisiest game on the GBA, and it mimics the Gamecube version really well, it even supports 4 player linked play at 60fps.

Unpublished Games

Obviously not every game people works on sees the light of day, however some of the best stuff I’ve done has been for projects that no one has ever seen, below I’ve detailed a few of the ones I remember, both good and bad.

Kid Kirby - A kids game on the SNES, and my first ever game project, I was originally brought on the project to do the front-end, we had some mental idea about having a 3Dish rotating map which never worked properly, in the end we went with a photo album layout for the front-end, the game was mouse driven allowing us to make the front-end easy to use with large friendly buttons, we even had a cool Nintendo intro (at the time nintendo didn’t really care what you did with their logo, as long as it was recognisable) with the logo embossed into the cover of the album that faded in, the book then opened to show the title page.
The game was played with a mouse, you didn’t control Kirby directly, instead you used the mouse cursor to grab his skin and pull it back, when you let go of the mouse button he would go flying away in the opposite direction, you could also slap him upwards in flight, or slam dunk him (useful for getting onto high, into tight spaces) or transform him into various forms. It was probably on of the most unique game play ideas ever conceived, and I’ve not seen a game like it before or since.
Later in the project I was working on all sorts of things, I wrote a nifty little morphing shape screen fade-in/out system, drawing lines into HDMA lists (complex to do in 65816 assembler with 3 registers), I worked on setting up collision functions for some of the more bizarre block types in the game, worked on the level editor (written on an Amiga), wrote editors for colour bars and the fade system.

XS (PSX) - XS was a first person deathmatch game, way before Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, there was XS, a deathmatch only arena combat game with weird weapons and opponents. I was put onto the PSX version after being pulled off of Full Metal Pigeon (later released as Frenzy and unrecognisable from the original idea) and put onto the project from hell (everyone likes it too much to cancel it, but not enough to fund it properly), I wrote all sorts of things, I started doing AI, ended up writing just about every part of the game and by the end I was the only person on the project. I remember the day I was told to write a document incase anyone else picked it up again afterwards, I joked that I would be gone by Friday, I was only 2 days out, the day after the Christmas party half the company was sacked, that was Tuesday or Wednesday the next week.
NASCAR Racers (PSX) - What were creations thinking, they signed up to do two racing games on PC/PSX in about 9 months using 1 team, well both PC versions were finished, but were nothing to write home about, we finished Nicktoons Racing, but NASCAR racers became another hell project, the license wouldn’t allow us to do anything, the game was so easy on the PC that you could win every mission (race) just by holding down the UP key. On the PSX we had all sorts of problems, we had to throw the entire PC game away, because it would never fit into the PSX, let alone the liberal use of DirectX code directly in the game code. The final nail in the coffin was when they cancelled the TV show on which it was based.

Tork (GBA) - Tork was originally an Xbox by a small french company called Tiwak, the game was about a time travelling cave-boy called Tork and his friend tyranasaurus, he had the ability to transform into different creatures to help him complete his mission of rescuing his father. The GBA version was an isometric game with large scrolling levels, plus some extra bonus levels, one using a cool rotating engine a bit like Nebulus (but curved like this \_/ rather than straight, plus into the screen racing sections on the back of your tyranasaurus. We had an excellent level editor that allowed us to build the underlying structure and then paint the level on top, place entities and objects in the world. The xbox game got dropped by THQ and our version was dropped too, Tork was later released in America, I haven’t gotten to play the finished game, it does like the game we had early versions of to develop our version from.

Other stuff

I also write stuff in my spare time, and before I started, I’ve had two games appear on magazine disks, one for the BBC Micro and one for the Archimedes, I’ve also entered two Ludum Dare 48 hour contests, here’s a few things I’ve done.

Castle Blackheart (Archimedes) - Originally conceived as a game to sell to a magazine, this game is top down, a bit like Gauntlet but not as good, the game tells the cliched story of an evil wizard imprisoning a princess and you playing the good guy coming to the rescue. It only had 8 level, only moved in 4 directions, used flip screen scrolling, but it was complete and published.

Black Widow II (BBC Micro) - I started this in 1989, but getting an Archimedes stopped work on it, in 1993 my Archimedes broke and while it was being fixed I dragge my Beeb out and found this game, in two weeks I finished the game and sent it off to Superior Software (the biggest BBC publisher), I didn’t hear anything for months, so I sent it off the Acorn Computing (nee The Micro User) and they wrote back and said they would love to publish it. It’s now available for download at The Stairway to Hell along with a full map (that I made using PrintScreen and Paintshop pro). There were loads of extra ideas that never made it in, like the grappling hook, multiple weapons, but it does feature a drop anywhere inventory, pickups, keycards to open doors and dynamite to destroy the reactor at the end.

DiceMan in the DiceMan Cometh - Written for a Ludum Dare 48 hour competition, the title is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s actually a really cool little game, you play as DiceMan who has to make his way to the exit of each level using dice to add platforms, remove blocks and platforms, and kill enemies. There were only 5 levels, mainly because of the time constraints of the competition, and partly because it’s hard to come up with levels that are not either Really easy, or Almost impossible to complete.

…Flies - not really much of a game this one, another 48hour contest, I didn’t really put my heart into it, I had a simple idea for the theme, but it never really made a game, the idea was to herd flies into areas of the screen, using attractors, there are 4 types of flies, Earth,Air,Fire and Ice. An attractor attracts the same type and repels the opposite type, the mouse pointer could be changed to any of the 4 types, it would collect the same type and kill the opposite type. However the game was too random, depending on the spawning of flies it would either be really easy to complete a level or really hard, and often had nothing to do with the layout of the level. The other problem was with flies flying through walls at random. The flocking code worked really well, but a flocking algorythm does not a game make.

PML (PocketPC) - Not really a game, but a game library, PML stands for Pocket Media Library, it’s a library designed to allow quick and easy development of games and other graphical pocket pc applications. It was developed originally to allow me to write a remote control app for a PC media player, however I ported DiceMan over to the pocket PC using it in a couple of hours, it works similar to SDL except it’s written in C++ rather than C, using classes and namespaces, it features a simple sound engine, bitmap graphics handling (with flip and rotate) handles both portrait and landscape modes and provides a linear frame buffer no matter which order the PDAs display is orientated.