Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Matt Verran Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: new game: E-motion ! Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 19:49:00 +0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 80 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 81-86-231-76.dsl.pipex.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031205 Thunderbird/0.4 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en Well E-Motion is online now at: http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~frktlx/ Let us know what you reckon to it, and pass on any levels you design. There's some interesting stuff from Jon in the 'interesting' folder in the zip, concept art and art style info. Here's the history (from the readme): Matt: Well this is weird. Last time I looked at this code I was a naive student working from a tiny box bedroom in a shared house somewhere in Manchester. Aphex Twin on the stereo (RDJ Album), sure this game was going to get signed, published, marketed and make us millions... I look around where I'm sitting now, workplace still a bedroom? Yep (well for the stuff I love making anyway). Shared house? Nope, thank god, own flat now. Manchester? It somehow became Hull and then, even more mysteriously, I ended up here in London. Aphex Twin still on the stereo? Of course (drukqs). Published games, lots of cash? It's probably best if I don't warm up my cynicism for the commercial games industry, lets just say we worked bloody hard, and we didn't make millions. But anyway I'm putting the finishing touches to a game I started writing with someone I met over the internet and ended up working with in real life. We shared the fun of getting our games canned, eating at Yankee Burger, being derided via email, being frozen by the Humber wind and ultimately being made redundant. This was the first game me and Jon worked on together, and it was probably the most fun to create, I hope you like it. Jon: My memories are becomming very murky now of how things first started-out on this game. At the time I was working on a project that had gotten hopelessly out of control... it had started out as a first person shoot`em-up and developed into a snow-balling human physics emulation project. When you're working on a project commercially you're considerate of deadlines and your employer's costs, but when it's just your own time and your own money (and you didn't have a dead-line to begin with anyway) then a project can grow and grow and grow. So as it happens this was a perfect project for me because I had already done a lot of physics (mechanics) work. The physics engine that I was writing was more complex though and the main work in getting the physics of Emotion to work, was in stripping-out the unnecessary stuff from my existing physics engine so that it would work in just a 2D plane and so that it would be fast enough to get a reliable 50fps or 60fps. The most fun bit to program in this game was the stretchy and saggy elastic graphics... I was toying with whether to try it or not because it's one of those things that can take a lot longer that you think and we only had five weeks to finish the whole demo initially. But I tried it and it worked practically first time and looked very effective...even considering I had very few polygons to play with because resources were tight. Think how beautiful the same concept would look on a current day system with loads more polygons and high res. Unlike with my snow-balling project we finished release one of Emotion in the allotted time of 5 weeks ready for prospective publishers to see... the graphics have been tweaked and so on since then but essentially the game was all there from the off. Then....then... a whole lot of pain followed -- mainly the pain of waiting and of dashed hopes after various fallen through deals with this and our other Darkhex demos....I expect it is the same kind of experience for novelists when they finish their book and excitedly send off their manuscrip to publishers. So here it is....we almost forgot about it all together, such was our mental block of the traumatic period it kicked-off. So as soon as it occured to us that our little ol' game was sitting there unreleased, unplayed, and unloved, we raced to make a few last mods and a few more levels and get it out there to whoever wanted it. Thanks to all the Yarozers who gave us encouragement during those days when Matt, Marc and me were waiting for publishers to get back to us on this and other demos...I hope you enjoy playing this living piece of that history.