Aaaaah, the memories. Just today i found out that people actually care to put up footage of old Gameboy Color games on Youtube. And this is the first commercial game i’ve worked on, back in 1999!

Armorines – Project S.W.A.R.M.

It kinda looks and seems awful now but back then it was awesome! I’ve put a lot of thought into scripting the behavior of the enemies, those green jumper aliens for example. They actually try to charge at you if they’re at the right distance, they leap forward and when they are close to the player they’ll just try to run away with some zig-zag jumps. And if the player shoots at them they jump away at a 90° angle. It seemed pretty organic to me back then, i guess it seemed more random than anything to most people though. But … these were my first experiences creating what you might call AI!

Those were the days …

… and then came Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX! If i remember correctly i’ve written most of the design document over the course of 3 months. There really wasn’t much else to do at that time. I don’t remember exactly what the production hold-up was but the polish that went into the game design document payed off in the long run. Everything fell in place almost naturally and the team was so excited about this game, everyone put their best efforts in.

Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX

I’ve basically scripted 99% of the frontend and ingame menus of this game. That included designing the screen layouts and flow. So basically this is were i learned a lot about screen design and user interfaces. To this day i still think it’s the greatest game i’ve helped build, simply because i also appreciated the experience crafting it as part of a jelled team.

Oh yeah, that intro video (!) you see before the title screen … you know, we’ve had like 50 Kilobytes of unused space on the 1 Megabyte cartridge left and, you know, we didn’t want to see it go to waste. So we’ve spent some time capturing this video and compressing it until it filled exactly the remaining space on the cartridge. We also recorded some of our best runs for each level which you can unlock by beating a level’s objectives. This goes to show how dedicated we were!

Sadly, NEON Studios is now defunct but they formed a new company, named Keen Games.