Gruesome Castle Designers

By Craig White
September 2, 1998

Please describe your company, Gee Whiz! Entertainment. How did you
guys get started and stay alive?

John Passfield: Gee whiz! began a long time ago, in a country
far, far away–actually it was 1993 in the land down under known as
Australia. I met Steve Stamatiadis through a mutual interest in comic
books. We discovered that we both liked computer games and decided to
try our hand at writing some games for the Commodore Amiga. The genesis
of those first sorry attempts became Halloween Harry and Amazon
Queen. We later hooked up with Tony Ball and Robert Crane, who had
PC experience and pooled our talents to bring our creations to the world.
We lived off meager advances from publishers and have survived since
on our royalties from Halloween Harry, Amazon Queen and Zombie
Wars.

What are some of your previous efforts and how well did they do?

John: Our first game was Halloween Harry, an arcade platform
game. It was released in 1993 as shareware by Apogee and did pretty
well. It was one of the first VGA platform games from Apogee. It was
later released at retail by Formgen as Alien Carnage.

After that we did a point-and-click adventure game called Flight
of the Amazon Queen for Renegade. Renegade was a cool little UK
company that was swallowed by Warner, then bought out by GT Interactive.
Queen actually did pretty well for us–in fact we lived off the
royalties of that game for a good while. We did over 50,000 units in
Europe, which is peanuts for the bigger developers but was quite nice
for us. Also, we had a 50/50 profit split deal, which meant we got more
money at the end of the day.

Our last title was Zombie Wars, a sequel to Halloween Harry–now
available to buy online for only US $9.95 from our web page (http://www.geewhiz.com.au—plug!
plug!). We’re still getting royalties from that game, which helps
pay the rent.

What does your job position require you to do?

John: I put Director of Development under my name in e-mails,
which doesn’t mean a whole lot. I actually do the shell and editor programming
for our adventure games (i.e., I don’t touch the icky low-level code),
as well as answer the e-mails and stuff. I also, on occasion, do up
schedules and budgets. Both Steve and I design most of the games together.

Steve Stamatiadis: I’m basically in charge of all things visual.
I design the characters and locations based on the game design stuff
John and I work out for the game. Then the “fun” stuff begins
and I take all that design work and transfer it to realtime 3D models.
With that comes all the associated textures, animation and assorted
graphics required to make them work in a game. I also see it as my job
to push Tony for cool new effects for the game while Tony keeps getting
shocked at the number of polygons I make his engine push around.

Tony Ball: Well, as John put it, I do the “icky low-level
code.” Most of my time is spent working on the 3D graphics engine
being used in all of our upcoming titles. I also take care of other
stuff that John has no interest in doing, like writing classes for interfacing
with DirectSound, and other hardware-specific stuff. I also have to
keep John’s code in check and make sure he doesn’t make my 3D engine
look bad by hogging all the CPU time! I’ve had to relearn heaps of the
maths that I failed in high school, but it’s been worth it. If only
high school maths teachers would tell kids what the stuff can be used
for … but that’s another story. 3D programming is so cool for people
who enjoy optimizing code like I do.

Please describe your current project, Gruesome Castle, and
how it’s coming along.

John: Gruesome Castle is a 3D adventure game that, although
it looks like a Mario 64 clone, is not an N64 platform
game. It’s straight-laced 2D point-and-click adventure just like Monkey
Island but done in a real time 3D world without any pointing or
clicking! We’ve got all the usual adventure stuff, dialog trees that
allow you to choose what to say to characters, inventory and the usual
adventure game puzzles. There is no jumping on bad guys heads or blowing
away the villain with a shotgun. That’d be fun–but we’re saving that
for other games. We actually designed Gruesome Castle to appeal
to first-time adventurers as well as seasoned pros. Part of that design
decision has resulted in a game with a more Monkey Island, Sam &
Max, Day of the Tentacle feel than say, Gabriel Knight or
Blade Runner.

The game is coming along well, although because we’re funding it ourselves,
there’s a limit to how fast we can produce the title. There’s just myself
on the game shell and editors, Steve on the graphics and Tony on the
3D engine. Compare that to the team on Grim Fandango and we’ve
got the odds stacked against us. But we’re hanging in there! I don’t
think players will ever realize (or care) that Gruesome Castle was
produced by just three guys in a third-world country.

What are some of the problems going on behind the scenes?

John: Our biggest problem so far has been trying to get back
to the compound to turn the power on while avoiding the raptors …
ah, wait, that’s a movie. This is reality, Greg.

Ah, where do we begin …

First let me emphasize that we very rarely have development-based problems.
We all get along great, have a clear vision of what we’re doing and
actually enjoy making games. We even sometimes manage to stick to our
schedule (we got our last game, Zombie Wars, out on time–which
even surprised ourselves!). The biggest problem we have at the moment
is lack of funding. Surprisingly, not everyone in the world is willing
to bet on a game that isn’t a first-person shooter or a real-time strategy
game. We have to constantly juggle our time between development and
the hard sell–trying to get a publisher to look at our stuff. Getting
Gruesome Castle as 3Dfx Game of the Week was really helpful in
attracting the attention of publishers.

But the biggest problem we’ve had is that a UK publisher that we signed
a Heads of Agreement with (an agreement that says we agree to work out
a full contract. Go figure.) in April has unceremoniously pulled out
from funding the game due to financial problems. They got rid of 14
of their game-oriented staff and are now focusing on educational titles
only. This has really hit us hard as once we signed the Heads of Agreement
we stopped talking to other bigger publishers. Plus they only paid us
a single signing amount that was just enough to upgrade our computers
and pay rent … Now we have to start the whole hard-sell process over
again from scratch. It’s quite frustrating as we chose this smaller
publisher because of their enthusiasm and commitment–but unfortunately
we didn’t realize they had big financial problems.

How did you come up with the 3D engine, and how does it work?

John: The 3D engine began all thanks to a little project we
began called Crazy Metal. Tony Ball is the 3D whiz here–the 3D engine
is his baby.

Tony: I wrote the engine (affectionately known as “BlastGraphics”)
from the ground up, originally with a software renderer, but we’re looking
at dumping software support altogether. The engine uses Direct3D for
hardware acceleration. We had some problems with incompatibility between
drivers on different cards, but things have improved since then, and
DirectX 6.0 is pretty cool to work with. We were using OpenGL too, but
for a small company it’s much simpler to stick with one API, especially
when it comes to beta testing. We’ve had some difficulties with the
performance of older cards, but the new and upcoming accelerators on
the market, such as the Riva TNT, Matrox MGA200, are making my job a
lot easier. On the technical side, BG uses a skeletal, hierarchical
animation system, which enables us to do stuff like turning a character’s
head independently, and all sorts of fun things, not to mention it’s
much cheaper on memory because we only have one mesh per character–the
rest is just animation information for how each skeletal node moves.
We can pre-light landscapes and use realtime colored lighting, along
with several moving omni-directional lights. At the moment, all accurate
polygon collisions occur between characters and the ground object, which
is a special case internally. We’re working on much better inter-object
collisions. We place a lot of emphasis on material properties: all materials
(textures) in the game have certain properties such as color, blending
mode, collision IDs, double-sided, etc. It’s amazing how easy this makes
some things, like knowing what sound effect to use when a player runs
over stone, as opposed to grass. All the code is in a DLL so it can
be accessed from MS VC++, or BCPP Builder. This lets me make changes
and profile the code without needing to compile any games which use
the library. The interface to BG is very simplistic so we can whip up
demos, and make alterations to games in no time at all … at least
that’s the plan (grin).

What advantages does a 3D game offer the gamer that a traditional
2D animated game does not?

3D offers the player a much more immersive environment. Players can
actually walk in and around rooms and inspect objects and items up close.
Camera angles can be changed at will for dramatic effect, and some really
cool effects can be produced easily that would be very difficult in
2D. Skeletal animation allows developers to produce characters that
be deformed and change shape. The clothing on characters can be changed
far more easily–just a matter of applying new texture maps without
the need to redraw every animation for that character.

Of course, all of these features are pretty much useless if the developer
doesn’t take advantage of them, or if the game is a dud. Zelda on
the Gameboy is still a fun game in black and white and 160×160 pixels
…

Tell us some of the stories you have to tell about finding a publisher
to distribute your products.

John: The funniest story has to relate to Gruesome Castle.
In September of 1997, a month after we began working on the game,
we put together a small prototype that pretty much showed off what the
game would look like, basically a smaller version of the Internet demo.
We got in touch with a lot of publishers to let them know about the
game and that we were looking for someone to pick it up. Of the few
replies we got, most of them said that they weren’t interested–one
asked why were we doing an adventure in 3D, and another publisher flat
out told us that they only do action and sports titles. Anyway, four
months later we were the Next Generation 3Dfx Game of the Week
and boy did we get a lot of response! We actually got three separate
e-mails inquiring about the game rights from the company that flat out
told us they only did action and sport titles!

Unfortunately as outlined above, we chose the wrong company to talk
to. Now that they’re no longer in the games business, we have to start
the old publisher shuffle from scratch again … I wonder if we can
be 3Dfx Game of the Week again?

What is your budget for this project, and how much of it is used for
promoting the game? Would you consider online advertising a viable option?

What’s a budget? Seriously, at this moment we’re funding Gruesome
Castle ourselves. We received a small amount of money from Europress
before they pulled out–just enough to upgrade our PCs and pay rent.
Let us put it this way, you could probably fund about 10 Gruesome
Castles for every one Grim Fandango …

We might consider online advertising–but only if we were going to
self-publish a game. We’d much prefer a publisher to handle that side
of things–they have the money and expertise.

Please tell us what it is like to be such a small developer in a world
of major competitors like Sierra and Lucas Arts. Do you think your games
can compare to theirs?

John: I definitely think our games can compare. We had dinner
in the UK once with a guy called Kelly Flock who used to work at LucasArts.
He was there during the heady days of Monkey Island 2 and Fate
of Atlantis, and he told us he was impressed with our adventure
game Flight of the Amazon Queen. That was such a great thing
to hear from a guy who was involved in some really good games–it gave
us a boost in confidence that we can compete.

The only problem with competing with LucasArts and Sierra is that they
have great marketing, distribution and an established rapport with a
lot of influential magazines. We really need to hook up with a publisher
who can get our games on the shelves. We could release stuff ourselves,
but with a $500 marketing budget no one is going to know about our stuff,
and no one will buy it. That’s the reality of the situation. Maybe with
word of mouth and favorable print and web magazine reviews, the awareness
may go up, but you really need someone out there pushing the game.

What are your favorite games and why?

John: My favorite games are (in no particular order):

• Monkey Island–one of the best games ever. What else can
  I say?
• Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max–two great original
  games from LucasArts in the same year. Original storylines, great
  humor and just plain fun.
• Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the Gameboy. A great game, excellent
  design and a joy to play. Just get over the fact that it’s a 160×160
  black and white screen and you’ll be lost in a cool little world.
• Resident Evil 1 and 2–when the dogs smashed through
  the windows I nearly had a heart attack. Great atmosphere and good
  pacing made this an obsession of mine until I finished it.
• Mario 64–I was giggling like a little boy when I played
  this. It’s a platform game and an adventure game all in one.
• Tomb Raider–like Resident Evil, this became an obsession.
  Great level design, not too many bad guys and a really great feeling
  of exploration. Who needs Indy when you have Lara?

Steve: Actually, John and I share a similar taste in games,
which is pretty much why we work together in the first place. So you
can add all of the above games plus …

• Final Fantasy 7–probably the most enthralling game I’ve
  ever played. Yes, the graphics were great but it was the plot that
  kept you glued to the Playstation wanting to see what was going to
  happen to the characters. Sure, some may criticize the game for being
  linear, but so are all of the best stories.
• Tie Fighter–I still haven’t played a better space flight
  sim.
• Banjo-Kazooie–again, another pretty game. The best bits
  in this game are where you wonder if you can do something like go
  down a hole and you actually can. Sure, it’s part of the program,
  but it’s great because it “feels” like it isn’t, which is
  a mark of great game design in my books.

Tony: My favorite game to play would have to be Warcraft
2, and as a programmer, technically my favorite game would have
to have been Doom. It was the last game I saw that actually made
my jaw drop and say “How the hell are they doing that?” Nothing
has that effect these days.

Do you have any final words to tell adventure fans, everyone?

John: Keep the faith. Publishers can only release so many real-time
strategy and first-person shooters (I think the exact number is somewhere
around two thousand three hundred and ninety four …). Eventually they
will wake up to the fact that there are people out there who want to
play adventure games.

Steve: I think the lines between genres are blurring. The old
point-and-click adventure is on the way out but a new breed of adventures
is coming. Adventures with all the best bits of the old games but with
graphics that will put all the first-person shooters to shame. Wait
patiently; that day is coming soon …

Thanks for the interview, guys!

You’re welcome.