I originally worked in the film industry back in the 80's but also knew my way around computers and digital technology. I also used to teach animation production at a local university. As a teenager I used to write my own computer games on the ancient TRS-80.
My first CD-i title I worked on was Caesar's World of Gambling where I was hired to direct all the voice over for that title. You see at the time (early days of CD-i) most of the people I met at Philips were good at the technology part of the equation, but rather inexperienced when it came to other tasks like dealing with actors, scheduling productions, doing creative direction in a way that got the best out of people, etc.
My first CD-i title I worked on was Caesar's World of Gambling where I was hired to direct all the voice over for that title. You see at the time (early days of CD-i) most of the people I met at Philips were good at the technology part of the equation, but rather inexperienced when it came to other tasks like dealing with actors, scheduling productions, doing creative direction in a way that got the best out of people, etc.
Anyway, much later, I was hired at Viridis by the owners (Christopher and Lee) to help them with this title called "Zelda" that had just gotten green light for production at Philips. (In fact, the name "Viridis" was a play on the Latin word for "green" )
So after going through the production design, and realizing that we had absolutely no budget at all, we had to get pretty creative.
This first big problem was the top-down motion capture of all the human characters to turn them into game sprites. Viridis had no money to rent a studio to shoot this properly; all they had was a 12x15 foot office with an 8 foot ceiling that I attempted to turn into a studio. It was basically impossible to shoot anything from the perspective needed for top-down sprites, so I had to get creative to make it work.
So after going through the production design, and realizing that we had absolutely no budget at all, we had to get pretty creative.
This first big problem was the top-down motion capture of all the human characters to turn them into game sprites. Viridis had no money to rent a studio to shoot this properly; all they had was a 12x15 foot office with an 8 foot ceiling that I attempted to turn into a studio. It was basically impossible to shoot anything from the perspective needed for top-down sprites, so I had to get creative to make it work.
What I did was mount a large mirror on the 8 foot ceiling and place the camera on the floor shooting up into the mirror and back down to human actor. For the walk cycles I put the actors on a black motorized treadmill with registration marks and shot video of them as they attempted not to fall off the treadmill and break their heads. (We took the hand rails off The background was extracted by our artists and sprites were created. If we didn't like the way a sprite looked or was animated, we would shoot it again.
I painted one wall of the studio Ultimatte Blue so I could shoot all the blue screen FMV sequences. This was a total pain because we basically had no room, and for the longest time Chris and Lee were too cheap to install extra power lines for the lights. (One day I tripped all the breakers for the office lighting a scene, and it crashed all the development stations and servers. I got my extra power lines soon after that.
I painted one wall of the studio Ultimatte Blue so I could shoot all the blue screen FMV sequences. This was a total pain because we basically had no room, and for the longest time Chris and Lee were too cheap to install extra power lines for the lights. (One day I tripped all the breakers for the office lighting a scene, and it crashed all the development stations and servers. I got my extra power lines soon after that.
Once the bluescreen video was shot, then we had to laboriously digitize every frame (no realtime capture at that point). I would let the capture run over night. The next day I would start the background (bluescreen) removal. This would sometimes take 4 or 5 workstations several days to complete a sequence. Very primitive, but we were working with Mac Quadra 700s.
One of the many good things about working on Zelda was that I worked with Randy Casey, who was the lead engineer. This was one of Randy's first projects, and we got along well together. Randy eventually went on to Novalgic and was lead on a whole bunch of successful flight sim games from them.
One of the many good things about working on Zelda was that I worked with Randy Casey, who was the lead engineer. This was one of Randy's first projects, and we got along well together. Randy eventually went on to Novalgic and was lead on a whole bunch of successful flight sim games from them.
Some of the background terrain textures were shot in Hawaii by me from a helicopter in the previous fall before starting the project, but they were vacation type pics and not paid for by the actual production. We were desperate for interesting terrain photos, so everybodies' holiday pics were fair game. We even sent some of the artists out with cameras to shoot macro shots of textures in the neighborhood.
All of the video was shot at our offices on Santa Monica Blvd. in West LA.
Viridis always seemed to have budget problems; eventually when the Zelda was pretty much done, they laid me off. (I also worked on other game titles for them at the time, most of them never released.)
All of the video was shot at our offices on Santa Monica Blvd. in West LA.
Viridis always seemed to have budget problems; eventually when the Zelda was pretty much done, they laid me off. (I also worked on other game titles for them at the time, most of them never released.)
Anyway, I went on to Philips as a game producer where I managed their top selling CD-ROM game Fighter Duel, plus other titles such as Voyeur II and a bunch more.
Viridis, like a white dwarf that swells to a red giant, eventually had scores of people working there after I left (when I was there it was maybe 15- 20 people). Eventually Viridis couldn't make payroll, and many of their employees left. The end came not long after that for Viridis.
Viridis, like a white dwarf that swells to a red giant, eventually had scores of people working there after I left (when I was there it was maybe 15- 20 people). Eventually Viridis couldn't make payroll, and many of their employees left. The end came not long after that for Viridis.
As far as I remember (I was the Philips project manager on Voyeur II), there was never more than fairly rudimentary code for the CD-i version. By that time Philips had refocused efforts on the PC and Mac platform.
That doesn't mean that more complete code doesn't exist, but I am certain that I would have seen and reviewed it if it did. You never know.
Perhaps InterWeave (the developer) had more complete code, but never submitted a test disc to Philips when the CD-i version was cancelled.
BTW, one little known piece of trivia is that InterWeave also submitted a short game demo of how they would have handled "The Crow."
That doesn't mean that more complete code doesn't exist, but I am certain that I would have seen and reviewed it if it did. You never know.
Perhaps InterWeave (the developer) had more complete code, but never submitted a test disc to Philips when the CD-i version was cancelled.
BTW, one little known piece of trivia is that InterWeave also submitted a short game demo of how they would have handled "The Crow."
One funny story about Voyeur II was told to me by Robbie (owner of InterWeave) while we were working on the project....
InterWeave was set up in a large house in Woodland Hills in LA. There was smaller house behind the larger house where Robbie had a recording studio and also space for his engineers and artists. Computers were running all the time as the artists and engineers were on deadline, and they had several computers just chugging away on the video compression alone.
In L.A., the city will sometimes scrutinize residences with unusual electricity usage as this is a good indicator of an illicit marijuana growing facility.
InterWeave was set up in a large house in Woodland Hills in LA. There was smaller house behind the larger house where Robbie had a recording studio and also space for his engineers and artists. Computers were running all the time as the artists and engineers were on deadline, and they had several computers just chugging away on the video compression alone.
In L.A., the city will sometimes scrutinize residences with unusual electricity usage as this is a good indicator of an illicit marijuana growing facility.
So one day the police show up at Interweave and wanted a tour of the property. I am sure they thought that when the looked in the rear facility they would find a whole array of metal halide grow bulbs and a complete pot farm. When Robbie took them in, of course they were completely shocked to find a bunch of sweaty, sleep deprived programmers, and cranky graphic artists! The police left, not know what to think.
I remember that Nintendo had final approval rights over the product, and they did see and approve all the Zelda games, but I don't think they were ultimately that interested. I think they thought of CD-i as some little niche product that they could safely ignore.
It wasn't my favorite either. The decision to use DYUV backgrounds killed the gameplay for me. The background scrolls took too long. Given the size of the project, Randy (the engineer) did a great job considering he wrote almost all the code himself. The CD-i platform was so technically limiting (once the decision had been made to use DYUV backgrounds) that doing anything complicated was extremely frustrating. I remember when we discussed sound effects during gameplay were were literally haggling over 1k or 2k of free RAM and how best to use it.
All the music was composed by our talented in-house composer, Mark, who, believe it or not, also played Gaspra in the cut scenes.
All of the houses were constructed as scale models by our model-maker, Jason. The same goes for the interior sets in the cut scenes. The interior of Gaspra's observatory was actually about 18 inches across. There were some photoshop enhancements, but the props, characters, models, etc. were definitely "old school" simply because we didn't have time or budget to do it any other way and still get the quality we wanted.
ZA was never meant to be a sequel to the other CD-i titles; in fact, what Philips did was farm out the Zelda projects to three different developers and got three different games. We may have seen a little of the other CD-i Zelda games during development, but it didn't influence ZA at all. You have to remember that ZA was released last because the title spent a couple of years in test at Philips! So much so that after we finished production of ZA and turned the first test build into Philips, I went to work on another outside project for a year, then came back to Philips for another year and half, and the damn thing was still in test. It spent something like two years in test, which was longer than the game took to develop.
There are many reasons for the long test period, some of which are long and boring, but certainly the game didn't need to spend that long in test.
I had my own run-ins with the test department with some of the later projects I managed, so I was not particularly surprised.
One of the big problems of spending so long in test is that your chances of fixing certain bugs actually diminishes. This is because your primary programming resources get deployed to other projects, or worse, leave for other jobs. If you lose your lead programmer because you spent too long in test, it might be impossible to fix certain bugs without ripping all the code apart and sending the whole project back for extensive regression testing. This is one reason why I favor short but thorough testing strategies. Sadly, this was not done for ZA. I suspect by the time ZA was finishing up in test, Randy (lead programmer) had long ago left for greener pastures at Novalogic.
[Thanks, Jimby, Duke, TGN_rogue]