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1. EAGB: Firstly introduce yourself. What's your role at Slitherine?
Iain: There are 5 of us
at Slitherine Ben is the programmer. He's the clever one who's written the 3D engine on the GBC.
Mike is the designer. He's built the levels that go into the game.
Dan is the character artist. He created all the characters in the game and drew all the cut scenes. He is the one
drawing all the pictures for our comic that is about to launch.
Fad is the bitmap artist. He takes character designs that Dan has created and draws them in a format that the GameBoy
can accept. It means working in as few colours as possible with very few pixels, so its a completely different
skill to normal drawing.
I'm the Producer. My role can best be summed up as "glue". I'm a sort of project manager/QA/designer.
I take the things everyone else is working on and give them feedback on how they are working or any problems. I
usually have the latest version of the game because I'm getting stuff from everyone.
2. EAGB: Can you tell
us a little about Slitherine? Where are you guys based? What's your background in the gaming industry?
Iain: Ben formed the company
over a year ago after leaving Psygnosis. He wanted to do something that had never been done before. He was toying
up between a real time strategy game or a 3D first person shooter for GBC. We think he made the right choice, though
not the easiest one! One of the strange things about Slitherine is that we work remotely. We have 3 guys in Lincolnshire,
1 in London and I'm just out of London.
Ben, born in Australia, is a self-taught programmer of the old-school. He started writing Video games on the Atari
ST and Amiga in the early 90's. After studying Artificial Intelligence at University College London, he began working
for Psygnosis, Liverpool. Whilst there he was involved in the development of a large number of titles including
the award winning 'Colony Wars' and 'Colony Wars Vengeance', 'Psybadek', 'Tellurian Defence' and 'Wipeout X' for
the Playstation II. Ben is the lead programmer at Slitherine. It is also little know that Ben cracked the Enigma
code during WW2.
My gaming background, well that's a hard one. I've been playing games as long as I can remember starting out with
the handheld Donkey Kong type games and the Atari console, but work wise I've been in the industry for 6 years.
I started out at Intelligent games, then moved to Eidos, then to Slitherine. I've worked on quite a few games in
that time, but here are the ones you may have heard of Simisle, Red Alert Mission disks, Dune 2000, Urban Chaos,
Deus
Ex and now T-Tex.
3. EAGB: Tyrannosaurus
Tex is looking pretty interesting. How on earth did you come up with a plot that involved cowboys, robots and dinosaurs?
While we're at it, can you also explain the plot behind T-Tex?
Iain: The plot comes from
the twisted minds of Ben and Dan. According to Ben, Dan was returning some videos when he fell down a well and
was stuck there for 3 days. He had nothing but the videos to entertain him. One was wild wild west, one was Jurassic
park and one was terminator. When found all he could mutter was "cowboys, dinosaurs, robots..." continuously.
Since then that's all he's been able to draw, so we had to come up with a game idea based around that. Whether
its true or not I cant say, but to be honest I'm skeptical. What are the chances of finding a VCR down the bottom
of a well?
4. EAGB: A big thing in first person shooters is the weapons. Can you tell us a bit about the weapons we're
going to see in T-Tex?
Iain: There are a number
of guns in the game ranging from Tex's trusty colts to lasers and grenade launchers. Each has a very different
effect. One extra thing we've added is that different guns effect different targets in different ways. E.g. your
laser is great against a robot, but no use vs dinosaurs. You have to use the weapons to your best advantage so
there's an element of strategy to it as well.
5. EAGB: A first person shooter like T-Tex must be pretty processor hungry. What kinds of frame rates are
we likely to see in it? Does it slow down at all when you get many bad guys on the screen at one time?
Iain: T-Tex is very processor
hungry, but by stream lining the code and careful level design we've maintained the great look with a high frame
rate. There's no point in a first person shooter that's not fast! The frame rate is around 20-30 fps.
6. EAGB: Many First-Person Shooter's these days don't include maps. What made you decide to include one?
Iain: One of the things
we're hoping with T-Tex is that we will introduce a whole new section of the market to first person shooters. Because
3D can be confusing if you're not used to it we've tried to put in a few helpful features for the newer players.
The 2D map is one of those. If you get lost you can always bring it up and find where you went wrong or to help
you get out of a maze.
7. EAGB: What made Slitherine go for something as ambitious as a first person shooter, when you could have
gone for a proven Game Boy style game like a side-scrolling platformer or something?
Iain: This is all Ben's
doing. He was looking for a challenge, something that hadn't been done before. As well as that to make a game stand
out from the crowd you need to make it different. We don't have huge marketing muscle and we don't have any well
established brands to use to get people to notice our games. We just have to make them the best and innovative
games there are so people will notice them for their own merits.
8. EAGB: From the screenshots I've seen, I've noticed you've managed to have resizing in the bad-guys. Now
I know that the Game Boy Color isn't designed to handle sprite-resizing, so how did you guys pull it off?
Iain: The way it works
is that there are multiple copies of the badies sprites in memory. It required some clever swapping in the code
to allow it all to work, but that's all in now. There are about 10 zoom levels and the objects are all drawn out
at these different zoom levels. It actually ends up looking better than scaled sprites because the artists have
complete control over how each frame will look and where each pixels is. When scaling an algorithm is used to shrink/enlarge
and you never know exactly where each pixel will be after this happens.
9. EAGB: I've been following T-Tex pretty closely over the year and I've noticed that the graphics are constantly
getting better looking. How did this take place in the design process? Did you primarily focus on the gaming engine
and then worried about the graphics later?
Iain: That was exactly
it. The first stage was to get the game engine up and running. The initial art work was all done by Mike, which
is why it doesn't look as good as the stuff we have now. Mikes not an artist and he was just creating placeholders
before someone else did them properly. They were actually quite good though, so they ended up staying in the game
longer than expected. When Fad was taken on he redid all of the in game artwork which was around 3-6 months ago.
Since then he has been retouching and polishing to get it looking as it does now. We're not touching the art any
more now, its all complete. Its just the last few programming glitches that we're tracking down now.
10. EAGB: Your game seems to feature many high-color pictures. How do these work into the game? Are
just at the start to set the story, or are they also used in-between levels?
Iain: The hi-colour screens
are used to tell the story as you progress through the game. They are a form of reward for the player. Every time
you achieve something you will get a few hi-colour screens telling you what you've done. They are looking really
nice. Dan's also been working on a comic strip. This is launching on our web site next Monday. This will tell the
story up until the start of the game. It is in the same style and quality as the in game cut scenes, so if you
check it out you'll get an idea of what is in store for the game.
11. EAGB: Tyrannosaurus Tex also has a multiplayer mode. Can you tell us a bit about that and what
styles of gameplay are involved in it?
Iain: The multiplayer
mode is an integral part of the game. It is not a "bolt on" feature, but has been designed in from the
start. There are special arenas for multiplayer, and you can play as any 1 of 5 of the main in game characters.
The different characters have different weapons and abilities so the style you play will depend a lot on which
character you play and everyone will have their own favourites. If you are the T-Rex you must hunt your opponent
down and try not to let them shoot you before you get the chance to bite their head off. If you are the tank you
must be careful not to run out of your limited supply of ammunition.
12. EAGB: Has there been anything you've wanted to do in T-Tex but have proved impossible?
Iain: We've got everything
we planned to into the game. In fact as we went along we kept finding ourselves saying "wouldn't it be cool
if..." and lots of new features got added, which is one of the reasons its taken so long! There are things
we want to do for our next games, but these are all new ideas that came out along the way and not things that we
cut from the T-Tex design. Some of them are going to be great, so I'm not going to say much about them for now
:-)
13. EAGB: I know that T-Tex has sparked the interest of gamers around the world. Have you been getting
interest from other companies in the industry?
Iain: We have had a little
interest, but we've not much time to follow it up recently. Now Tex is almost out of the way we'll have more time
to look at what's next. We'd really like to do more 3D games ourselves anyway, rather than license the engine out,
but we'll see what happens.
14. EAGB: A couple of months ago Nintendo unveiled it's next handheld, the Game Boy Advance, to the
world. Have Slitherine had a chance to look at it yet? If so, what are your thoughts of it.
Iain: We played with it
at ECTS this year and it looks awesome. We're really looking forwards to starting to play around with it, but we
haven't started yet. If we can get a game like T-Tex running on GBC imagine what we can do with GBA :-)
15. EAGB: Do you have any idea of when we could see Tyrannosaurus Tex on store shelves?
Iain: This ones still
a bit sketchy. There are contractual negotiations holding everything up at the moment. Once they're done we have
the final QA approval at the publisher and localisation (translation), then we submit to Nintendo. If they find
problems it could cost more time. I'll let you know as soon as we have a firm date.
16. EAGB: Finally, what can we look forward to from Slitherine in the future? Have you got any other
projects on the back-burner that you're allowed to tell us about?
Iain: We've got a few
ideas in the pipeline but I cant say anything about them at the moment. I suggest you "watch this space"
:-)
17. EAGB: Thank you for your time, Iain. Is anything else you'd like to tell us?
Iain: I've already mentioned
it, but we are launching our online comic "The Adventures of Tyrannosaurus Tex" on Monday 13th November
at www.slitherine.co.uk. The first episode "The Mysterious Black Cowboy" will be posted and every 2 weeks
we'll post another episode. We know Tex's background and character and we want to introduce him to everyone. We
also know that people are waiting eagerly for this game to the hit shelves. We know its taken a long time, much
longer than we thought it would and to say sorry and give the eager fans something back we've created the comic.
The last episode of the comic will end where the game starts. We hope you enjoy it.
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