I swear to god that is familiar…
Haha, this is the super obscure one, not a personal favorite. It is, however, very important to me personally, I spent about a year on it.
The game is 1999’s “Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin” by SouthPeak Interactive based on the Will Smith / Kevin Kline movie. It is an action/adventure game, written by Lee Sheldon (write for ST:tNG, Blacke’s Magic, and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Riddle of Master Lu game).
I handled the game logic (essentially “milestones” that had to be fulfilled before progressing in the story, think of it as a graph with M predecessor nodes and an operator and N successor nodes), pathfinding of the characters, and the UI implementation (I didn’t do the art though, just the logic).
Previously SouthPeak had done FMV games (Temujin, Dark Side of the Moon) but in 1999 figured out those were on the way out. Realizing that 3D was the future but not happy with the quality of a fully 3D environment they chose to pre-render areas and have 3D characters move around them. They used a z-map to determine depth (so that the 3D characters would shrink when going farther from the camera and could be occluded by say the log pile above). Movement was click-to-move so I handled the pathfinding (essentially A*, but back then it felt pretty complex as I was pretty fresh out of school) by working with the z-map to determine what areas were walkable. Parts of each area were also marked with a destination area to handle transitions to other areas (or a different camera angle of the same area).
The game didn’t sell well. At all. I wish I could blame it entirely on the movie tanking, but the game obviously shares some responsibility. It just wasn’t super thrilling, definitely more adventure than action. It isn’t that bad, however, and I had a great experience working on it. It would be the last of two games I did with them.
That’s really cool! Temujin was hailed as a great adventure and technologically groundbreaking, IIRC.
I didn’t know about this Wild Wild West game, but FWIW I don’t think it would’ve interested me anyway based on how dire the movie was!
Aw, I feel sorry for having never, ever heard about it.
You got us running around though: I was certain it was an action game!
I love that you picked a game you worked on, BigWeather! I don’t think there’s a chance in hell of anyone recognizing anything I worked on!
I started with SouthPeak shortly after Temujin released in 1997. I had a good time there and got to do some really neat things (GDC a couple of times, E3, etc.) and games programming was really fun (though crunch time sorta sucked). yeah, the movie tanking really killed any enthusiasm for the game. I remember our team went to the movie opening day and when we left we were “uh, yeah…” – still had months of crunch to go before ship.
Haha, no worries – very few heard of it / played it!
Was it a game? Try it out on us if so! I stopped working on games in early 2000, been mostly C#/TypeScript since, all business programming. Pays the bills, though. =)
So, what’s the rules? Who goes next? I normally hang out in the Box Art thread so not familiar with what happens here when a game doesn’t get guessed.
You get to go again, and make it easier for us. :p
Barbarian?
No, though Barbarian did have a similar (though much larger) coiled snake border thing going on.
I remember how cool I thought it was they were “yelling” at each hit.
It may not be Barbarian, but it must be European - screen estate wastage is a hallmark of the region! So, something like Realms of Arborea?
I totally suck at this Frame Game!
I don’t know why, this reminds me of Druid, while it clearly wasn’t an RPG.
Man, I loved Wild Wild West :(
The, err, movie. I was unaware of the game, because I am a bad person.
No idea on the new game.
That skeleton is very familiar…
One more hint before bed, but not picture-based:
I’m listening to the music now, probably the best part of the game, a true SID masterpiece!
I have officially zero idea: this looks like a roguelike?
The Binding of Rob Hubbard?