[IMAGE: Game Cover]
This game was released in 1994 on Amiga AGA/CD32. My work includes graphics, animation, visualFX, game design and boxart.
I worked on Game Design, Level Design, Art, Animation, etc.. basically everything apart from code and sound. This game was created entirely by myself and my good friend Søren Hannibal (now working at Microsoft Gamestudios, Seattle). I was (as I remember) made in about 9 months.
[IMAGE: Intro]
[IMAGE: sprite sheets]
The graphics was created using Brilliance on an Amiga 1200. The sprites for the planes were handdrawn (I remember the loop-the-loop was quite exhausting to make). All the backgrounds were also handdrawn. I choose this 45deg tilted view eventhough the game actually was just plain top-down. One of the main inspirations, S.W.I.V., was top-down (and obviously the art style was heavily influenced by THIS AWESOME GAME) and I wanted to make the vehicles and buildings more interesting by showing facades and sides. That decision came back to haunt me later because all the vehicles that had turning parts could’nt just be rotated in the drawing-program but had to be drawn one by one. Placing the lighting dead-front-center allowed me to flip most of them in x direction to save time though. Fortunately for me, we had just gotten 8 Silicon Graphics workstations at Core Design and none of the artists (except Billy Allison) used them. The 3D rendering packaged called Wavefront was installed on them and it was’nt excatly userfriendly so I can’t really blame them. Only the basic functions were available in the GUI most advanced stuff was only available through an awkward scripting interface. But hey, I was willing to put up with the bad UI just to have a SGI workstation sitting on my desk next to my Amiga 🙂
Søren and I had just done one of our last Amiga-demos featuring small men walking across the screen in a weird scenarion of headbanging and axe-killing (check it out HERE on you tube. It’s actually a small intro for THIS FUCKED UP DEMO). At some point (and I don’t really remember when) I got the idea to add them to the game, probably because the environments seemed a bit dead and I though they would bring it alive… It certainly did and from there on it just got more and more crazy ending up with polarbears and women pushing baby-trollers. Those animations were really fun to do.
The box cover was actually rendered in wavefront but for some crazy reason it was not possible to find a printshop in the midlands that were able to transfer the RGB image to a CMYK one without completely fucking up the colors. The final solution was to hire an airbrush artist to copy the rendered image instead. Weird. The rendered image had ofcourse alot more contrast and detail. There was a lot of really lo-tech solutions at the time. Søren actually created screenshots by dumping the framebuffer but again the company that did the box could’nt use RGB images. The ‘normal’ way of creating screenshots at Core was to actually photograph the screen when the game was paused… amazing…
You can find some more info and screens at the hall of light.
RedBjarne 