Top row: Chris Lipscombe, Virgil Manning, Glenn Broadway (me), Sarah Prince (née Lloyd), Yvo Zoer, Dave Bowler, Russ Dunham, David Wilson.
Bottom row: Liaket Ali, Warren Humphreys, Matt Sansam, Bob Plested, Cameron Kerr, Anthony Hicks, Steve Haggerty, Nathan Summers.
Sometime during 1995 SCi organised a now infamous event. The ‘Off Site Meeting’. A group of programmers, artists, producers and testers were invited to Rhinefield House Hotel in the New Forest, for an all-day meeting, to discuss the future of game development at the Southampton Studio.
I had been talking to James Sharman (a programmer at SCi) about possible applications of his excellent 3D rendering technology and at the meeting I proposed we develop a 3D update of SWIV, a game previously published by Sales Curve under the Storm banner.
I recently discovered that Rob Henderson (who was the most senior SCi employee at the meeting) had actually coded the C64 version of SWIV. I’d also forgotten what a good looking game SWIV was on the Amiga.
Development
It was considered a good idea and we began development. I think the first stage was a technical demo that went off for approval before we were given the go-ahead to complete the game.
James Sharman did almost all of the hard work on the game. He was later joined by a second programmer - Richard Matthias. I produced most of the designs; although to be honest we didn’t work to a bible and instead employed a much more organic approach. After fleshing out the general scope of the game I was accompanied by Pieter Warmington in creating all the graphics for the game. Mike Tucker and Dan Little were testing the game as we went and later became the main level designers. Early levels were outlined by me, but by the end of the game pretty much everyone on the team was creating levels. Paul Zimmer produced all the sound effects for the game, including for the FMV sequences. Paul also created two music tracks (one of which appeared as CD audio on the disc). Other music was provided by Simon Posford (Hallucinogen) and Louis Nicastro.
Graphics
For the in-game models I used a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 computer running software from Wavefront called 3Design (which was actually a module from TDI Explore). This was a fairly unique tool, with no on-screen UI (everything was accessed using context sensitive right click menus). I had a system where I would model very low poly vehicles and buildings in 3Design and create tiny texture maps in Photoshop (v2). I ran them side by side and used the UV mapping tools in 3Design to tweak the position of the textures.
3Design and Photoshop being used to create graphics for the game.
For the full motion video sequences (FMV) I believe we used Alias PowerAnimator. We rendered out the shots that had been roughly planned on little storyboards, and then edited them together using Wavefront Composer, another unique tool. The game starts in a fairly green environment, moves to a more arctic setting and then the player hitches a ride to the moon. From here they are transported to Mars for the final set of levels. I was quite into the Fortean Times in the early nineties (Bob Lazaar, Aliens, etc.) and there was a big hoo-ha about a ‘face’ on Mars. I incorporated this into the game and it became the final boss.
I produced all of the 2D graphics. The early levels were preceded by a short mission briefing (which actually used a top down render of the level map). I created a bitmap font (Futura bold italic I think) and the in-game on-screen graphics. These comprised a little map bezel that span around in the corner (modelled and rendered in 3D) and some power-up icons that stacked up on the left hand side of the screen as you picked them up. Finally there was a 3D font that was used in game whenever a pick up was collected or when an objective was destroyed.
SWIV 3D Assault
For the US release of the game we added an extra set of levels, which took place on the alien home world. There were also a couple of new animated sequences linking these levels to the existing game. Here is video I compiled of all the FMV sequences from the game (also shown below). I can’t find any game play footage from these final levels, although I do have access to a copy of SWIV 3D Assault so hope to be able to grab some.
