Tyrian I suppose the most helpful thing for me in creating Tyrian was a single-minded stubbornness. The sort of thing that keeps you working on a project while getting reminded that it would be nice if you had a real job. ;) Creating a game is not necessarily easy or fun all the time. The only way it stays fun is when you have people around you that are easy and enjoyable to work with. That's the real key to sticking with a project, I believe. While I suppose one could write the whole game without any feedback or support, it would have to be a pretty dull existence. Tyrian was interesting because we started out very small - just Alec and myself writing back and forth about this silly scrolling starfield and a bunch of ships floating around through the use of simple mathematical equations. Later I managed to stick in scrolling backgrounds to his great bemusement, though it did use my pitiful artwork... We showed the game to Apogee and Epic, though neither directly took the bait. We ended up being taken up by Robert Allen, then working with a division of Epic called Safari Software. Really, those were the days I think he enjoyed the most. Granted working with me was a major pain considering all the hard work it entailed, but I like to believe that the important thing is that we never gave up or jeopardized the project by doing something like asking for lots of advances. That the work was inevitably worth it. And so we progressed, receiving wonderful artwork from Danc. Words cannot describe the excitement of receiving artwork from him. Far surpassing our expectations, we received tilesets, huge spaceships, and lots of enemies. It was always very exciting to sit down and look through a new email message containing artwork. Each time it was something special - some level of ability that I didn't possess sent us this - always more than I needed. I've always found myself far more impressed when sent something done in some way I couldn't really comprehend. A sort of innocent bliss. This artwork transformed the game into a much more impressive shooter, inspiring me to work on more scrolling backgrounds, enemy capabilities, and much more of everything. We even ended up creating in all seven different interfaces, each really interesting but totally confusing from a user's point of view. I deeply regret not being able to put in the rendered ship in the bottom half of the interface as we originally planned, but I can't deny that the simple text menus were so much easier to understand. Sometime during one of our few trips to the Epic office we were told that Tyrian had surpassed their expectations and was going to be a full-fledged Epic game. That was a shining point in the project! It made everything that much more worth the effort. After that, through a great deal of effort I implemented multiplayer net capabilities, tons more levels, weapons, effects, etc. And then we were told to do an Episode 4. So we did. That ended up pushing Tyrian up to version 2.0, adding a lot more content to the game. I would get giddy sitting around counting up the number of minutes the game took to play. Such a long shooter was hard to fathom from what I was used to. Throughout all this, I think it was the mentality at Epic that really made the game work for us and managed to get me to complete it. Getting Jazz T-Shirts and little free game disks really helped me to feel the camaraderie and loose enjoyment that I think Tim greatly inspired. I know that he stays in his office all day and prefers that, which then inspires others by example. It really was necessary to visit Epic to work for them. It would have been too difficult, otherwise. Still, visiting Epic was not always fun and games, at least for myself. One of the times I was there we ordered out for pizza - thin crust. This really made me sick and I stayed that way throughout most of the several week visit, to the concern of my teammates. Still, I kept working on anyway as much as I could. Heh, it was still pretty awful, though. Of course, the *next* time we went, I believe, Alec had his car with him. That was also pretty bad because he crashed the car. I think that was my first auto accident, so it scared the heck out of me! Who would think that working on a video game could be so perilous? But otherwise those were some of the most enjoyable times in my career and I wouldn't ever trade them. While everything seems to be changing, there was just something 'right' about that time to work with Epic. It was just a bunch of gamers and creators getting together and given the freedom and incentive to do what they could to make a game. That's all there really has to be, really. 'Course I won't say that money doesn't help. While I really dislike asking for advances, Tim would slip us a check when we visited, which was really great (considering this was back in the day when we were still in high school/college and didn't make much money.) A question I've thought would be interesting to ask someone is 'where were you when you wrote this?' Well, right now I'm laying in bed in a totally dark room, illuminated by a white screen on my Libretto laptop (which is also probably producing Binky Rays), while others watch tv downstairs. This is in Arizona, a very hot place I seem to have migrated to in a strange twist of fate. Also on this little laptop...? Why, every bit of code and text in Tyrian, of course, as this is one of the computers I'm now developing the additions on. Never thought I'd see the day that I'd be adding *more* to the game... | Tyrian Origin .
{Programmer} (pl.) are extremely strange.