hmm ich denke der zeitpunkt kurz bevor gates of troy gold geht war wohl nicht ganz optimal.
er hat erstmal nur ein paar fragen beantwortet und wird die anderen nachreichen.
besonders faszinierend fand ich gleich die erste antwort, hier also schonmal ein teaser^^
übersetzung folgt.
1. How exactly and for what reason Slitherine formed? What are your long term aims?
[Iain McNeil] Initially it was all a bit of an accident. I was a producer at Eidos at the time & one of the developers I was working with was called Slitherine. They had a GBC 3D first person shooter called T-Tex in development, which was very cool. Nothing like it had ever been seen before on the GBC. They had no idea how to run a project or to finish things off. They had spent all their cash & were about to go under. I'd been at Eidos for around a year at that point, but previously had been at Intelligent Games for 6 years working as the team leader on all Westwood products (Red Alert Retaliation, Aftermath, Counterstrike, Dune 2000 & Dune Emperor). I'd had enough of working at a publisher & wanted to get back into development and this seemed like a good opportunity. I got involved with some financial support and to get them back on track. After a couple of months nothing had really changed and we were concerned about the lack of progress. It seems now that the lead programmer was treading water & didn't really have any ideas on how to fix the bugs that remained and so it was never going to be possible to finish the game. This seemed to have been too much for him. We don't really know what happened as he was based in the north of England and one day when I arrived from London to review the progress he just wasn't there. His girlfriend arrived to tell me that he had just got on a plane to Australia..... This came as a bit of shock and when I asked when he'd be back she said he wasn't coming back. So after investing tens of thousands of pounds in them we had nothing. The programmer had stolen his hard drive & all the source code and just disappeared. We had backup copies but without him it wasn't much use as he was the only one who really understood it & it seemed like he was having problems! The programmers dad was also involved in the game & his disappeared to Thailand! It was a very stressful time for me as the police were contacted and Interpol got involved in trying to trace him. There is still a warrant out for his arrest if he ever returns to Britain.
At this point we had a games company and no games! We took a long hard look at what we were doing then & decided that it would be best to focus on what we knew best & that was strategy games. At this time we didn't have a programmer so I built the first demo which was a science fiction game with a turn based strategy level & real time battles where you planned deployment in advance, but had no direct control. It was great fun & very addictive, but never complete. Its scope was actually much larger than Legion because as a newbie programmer I had no idea how complicated it would all be
Soon after that we took on a real programmer & decided that a historical game would have more appeal and that's when Legion was born.
This is a cut down version of the story - there have been many ups & downs along the way, but it gives you an idea of what we've been through. Its been a huge learning experience for us, but we feel we've served our time & are hoping to reap the rewards at some point!
If you see a first person shooter on the GBC let us know as it could well be with the code stolen from us 4 years ago!
hmm ich denke der zeitpunkt kurz bevor gates of troy gold geht war wohl nicht ganz optimal.
er hat erstmal nur ein paar fragen beantwortet und wird die anderen nachreichen.
besonders faszinierend fand ich gleich die erste antwort, hier also schonmal ein teaser^^
übersetzung folgt.
1. How exactly and for what reason Slitherine formed? What are your long term aims?
[Iain McNeil] Initially it was all a bit of an accident. I was a producer at Eidos at the time & one of the developers I was working with was called Slitherine. They had a GBC 3D first person shooter called T-Tex in development, which was very cool. Nothing like it had ever been seen before on the GBC. They had no idea how to run a project or to finish things off. They had spent all their cash & were about to go under. I'd been at Eidos for around a year at that point, but previously had been at Intelligent Games for 6 years working as the team leader on all Westwood products (Red Alert Retaliation, Aftermath, Counterstrike, Dune 2000 & Dune Emperor). I'd had enough of working at a publisher & wanted to get back into development and this seemed like a good opportunity. I got involved with some financial support and to get them back on track. After a couple of months nothing had really changed and we were concerned about the lack of progress. It seems now that the lead programmer was treading water & didn't really have any ideas on how to fix the bugs that remained and so it was never going to be possible to finish the game. This seemed to have been too much for him. We don't really know what happened as he was based in the north of England and one day when I arrived from London to review the progress he just wasn't there. His girlfriend arrived to tell me that he had just got on a plane to Australia..... This came as a bit of shock and when I asked when he'd be back she said he wasn't coming back. So after investing tens of thousands of pounds in them we had nothing. The programmer had stolen his hard drive & all the source code and just disappeared. We had backup copies but without him it wasn't much use as he was the only one who really understood it & it seemed like he was having problems! The programmers dad was also involved in the game & his disappeared to Thailand! It was a very stressful time for me as the police were contacted and Interpol got involved in trying to trace him. There is still a warrant out for his arrest if he ever returns to Britain.
At this point we had a games company and no games! We took a long hard look at what we were doing then & decided that it would be best to focus on what we knew best & that was strategy games. At this time we didn't have a programmer so I built the first demo which was a science fiction game with a turn based strategy level & real time battles where you planned deployment in advance, but had no direct control. It was great fun & very addictive, but never complete. Its scope was actually much larger than Legion because as a newbie programmer I had no idea how complicated it would all be :) Soon after that we took on a real programmer & decided that a historical game would have more appeal and that's when Legion was born.
This is a cut down version of the story - there have been many ups & downs along the way, but it gives you an idea of what we've been through. Its been a huge learning experience for us, but we feel we've served our time & are hoping to reap the rewards at some point!
If you see a first person shooter on the GBC let us know as it could well be with the code stolen from us 4 years ago!