PROGENY

Jeroen Verbeek, Amiga ProgramerPeter Jo., Artist

John Hall, PC ProgrammerKevan Stannard, Music

Jeroen Verbeek
Amiga programmer, Design and 3d

It all started in mid 1994 when I started writing routines for an arcade shoot'em up game for the Amiga (which was still popular then!). It was aimed purely at the CD market. It had to have great graphics and great music, in bulk.

In the first few months I went through 2 artists and a producer. The 3rd artist, Peter Jones, had an amazing history in traditional animation. He'd worked as an animator on various cartoons (including "Popeye", "Treasure Island" and "Scooby Doo") and had huge amounts of enthusiasm. Peter and I became the design team for PROGENY.

We each had an Amiga 1200, mine was expanded and Peter had an animator's lightbox. OK, we were working on an Amiga shoot'em up. Nothing new there. What we needed was a PC version that played and looked exactly the same. So, I contacted a good friend of mine who just happened to be the only programmer in Australia (the world?) capable of the job, John Hall, a brilliant programmer.

John started designing the PC engine, Peter was furiously drawing nature backgrounds, and I beavered away on the Amiga version and play engine.

A year later and we were still at it. It is now July 1995. I just wasted 3 months as a UNIX support person at a college in Sydney. Peter had finished most of the level backgrounds, the Amiga engine was ready and the PC version was now taking on real shape.

All we had to do now was finish it!

To finish it we needed aliens, waves, animations and music, in bulk.

I called a friend of mine, Kevan Stannard, who had written wonderful music for games before this, and he started writing the music for the game. Peter and I, by this time, rendered mountains of aliens for the game. The demo level was done and sent all over the world. There was light at the end of this very long tunnel AT LAST!

Now Kevan is writing music that we would go out and buy at HMV if it was available there! John is making the PC jump through burning hoops (Amiga people: he has copper emulation happening on PC!!). Peter has just scanned the best set of caves we've ever seen, and I am rendering aliens, making waves, waves and more waves.

Now, we have a company set up called "BOING", and the light in that tunnel is getting brighter ...

Memoirs of an artist.
Peter Jo.
Art, 3d and Design

I was of the opinion that computers should be melted down and made into transistor radios, and that computer games were a waste of human endeavour!

When Jeroen approached me, I was filled with self-doubt. Animators work with anatomy and pencils, timing and movement. An animator draws feelings. The animations were the easiest for me - just a reflex action.

He was asking me to be a background artist! I had never painted a landscape in my life!

So with second hand computer and my lightbox, I just used common sense and to my relief it seems to have worked.

The first 11 cels took 3 weeks, the last 11 for the mountain level took 4 days. After 12 months I had become slicker.

Coming up with over a 100 alien craft was the toughest challenge. In order to avoid reactionary thinking I had to be "out there", and often didn't know what day it was. Some of the best aliens were done on no sleep! 90% of genius is just being there!

From the start I set out to strive for reality and never to forget that we were in the entertainment business. We did everything the hard way, not being lazy in the production.

We made this on "no" budget. We're happy, and we think you'll enjoy it!

John Hall
PC programmer

John has had to overcome some severe problems in getting the game to work on the PC.

So far most scrolling games on the PC have had their graphics all fit into video RAM, have had to conserve video RAM by using chunky textures, or use slow drivers to access the video card's functions. The grahics needed for any 1 level for the game is far too much to fit in video RAM, so most of it has to come from main RAM, The problem with this is that the transfer speeds from main RAM to video RAM over the PC bus is extremely slow. VGA cards also have a total lack of interrupt capability, this becomes a problem when you're trying to lock the game into the video frame rate.

To overcome these problems John has come up with a rather unique algorithm that greatly increases transfers from main RAM to video RAM. Nearly every VGA resgister there is has been tweaked to get it working on most video cards and monitors There are a multitide of video cards of which the video RAM addressing differs in all of them when you want to access memory over 256 Kb, and memory bank switching is slow. VGA cards also don't have any interrupt capabilitiy, so this had to be emulated. The Amiga has a display coprocessor that also doesn't exist with VGA, this offers several nice palette and display tricks. This 'copper' also had to be emulated. So John came up with a software technology breakthrough which would take care of the above problems, allowing lots of graphics data to come from main RAM.

So over the past year, John has designed and programmed the PC graphics engine, including Amiga copper chip emulation and video interrupt emulation.

John, while doing the "impossible" on the PC, has also been teaching at a certain Sydney computer college. This meant his game project time has been limited (bills have to be paid!), this along with numerous PC crashes, windows GPF's, and the inability of Windows were multitasking/processing is involved (now fixed by switching to OS/2) has probably made John feel like he's in Hell or something!

Kevan Stannard
Musician

You're sure to be impressed ...

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