GS: You mentioned that the Jaguar was the first time you ever saw a polygon in action. How do you feel about those?
JM:
Well...they're jolly good, and jolly useful, aren't they? At first it
was all a bit scary, since I had been entirely sprite and
tilemap-based, and at first I thought I'd have to get a calculator out
and do real maths, which was scary since I'm shit at maths. Once I got
settled into doing Tempest 2000, though, I thought it wasn't too bad and it was actually quite fun.
GS: Are next-gen graphics particularly important to you?
JM:
To me, a powerful GPU is more important. I'm not really that interested
in doing realism, but in terms of using a GPU as a more and more
powerful graphic synthesizer, I'm extremely interested. Pixel shading
is heaven to me. It's like it was made for me. It's like a bunch of
guys sat down in a room and said, "What can we make that will please
Yak?" And then they made pixel shading. Thank you very much!
GS: Yeah, Space Giraffe has things flying all over the place.
JM:
The way that game is built, you have sixteen lots of rendering going on
in some levels, sixteen 512x512 render targets that combine at the end
to produce the final output. And it's going on at sixty frames per
second! I love that kind of power. So yeah, give me more!
GS: Is it ever too much? Can there ever be too much on the screen for you?
JM:
Not in the way the game is seen now. You could of course just chuck a
bazillion things up there, but if you did that, the game would be
illegible anyway. There has to be a certain upper limit just so you can
read the game. Upper levels where two hundred, three hundred, or four
hundred enemies fly in, you're still doing stuff, and the game is still
running at sixty frames per second.
GS: I
mean, is it ever too much in a visual sense? I was watching that one
level and it was difficult for me to parse what was going on.
JM:
That was level sixty-four! That's a bit of a boss level, and it's going
to be difficult to parse the first time you get to it. Graphically,
it's much more intense than any of the previous levels.
So
I want that, I want people to say "Oh my God, what the smeg's going
on?" But the thing is, if you're actually in there playing it, you can
still read it. The cues are always there, no matter how weird the level
starts to look. Once you get used to it, you can still play, you can
still see, and you can still get through. Part of that is deliberately
the difficulty of the game, though. It will chuck graphic overload at
you every now and again, not as a flaw in the design, but as a
challenge to the player.
GS: Until I saw it in motion, I always wondered how I could understand and play Tempest 2000. Screenshots didn't help much.
JM: Space Giraffe
is the worst when it comes to screenshots. We put up screenshots, and
people see them and think, "What the fuck is going on?" You can't
perceive it at all until you see it in motion. Once you see it and
start playing it, it makes sense.
GS: A lot of games like Rez
attempt to make the musical aspect a lot more interactive, and focus
more on music as the primary factor, whereas you seem to focus more on
the visual aspect.
JM: For us -- at this
stage, anyway -- the music's the background. It's whatever you choose
to accompany your journey with, really. There is a certain amount of
interaction, and the Neon will be responding in part to the music.
One
thing I would like to explore in the future is making music more
involved with the game, so that the type of music you put on would
determine how the level played. Some music might create a more chilled
level, whereas heavy metal and heavy techno might be more intense. I've
got so many ideas, but we can't do them all on the first outing.
There
came a point when we had to say, "Look, I've got brilliant ideas about
this, but we've got to stop it here, finish it off, and get it out the
door," because we haven't got time to put everything into one go. We
haven't got the budget. We need to get it out there to earn some money
to afford to do the next thing. I'll come back to ideas like that as I
do new games.