Interview de James Daniels

Puissance-Pocket : Can you introduce your Company to us ? What is your job ?

James Daniels : Apex Designs was originally created by myself in 1994 as a name to publish our freeware Amiga titles under. The response to these titles was very positive so in 1998 we started work on our first commercial game, Payback. This was released for the Amiga (and got very positive reviews) in 2001. Since then, we've been working on porting the game to other platforms including Mac, Windows, Linux, Intent and, of course, the GBA.

Puissance-Pocket : Why are you interested in the GameBoy Advance ?

James Daniels : It's suits the game's requirements well and there's a big market. Not to mention that's rather a neat little machine. :)

Puissance-Pocket : Can you speak to us about your work on the GBA ?

James Daniels : What in particular do you want me to talk about?

Puissance-Pocket : For exemple is there multiplayers modes, what is the story, and how many levels has the game got ?

James Daniels : The story is fairly straightforward - the main character is small time criminal trying to break into the major league. What happens after that is up to the player. The game has 3 cities, each with 2 levels. Each level usually has about a dozen missions, although you don't necessarily have to do them all to complete the game. The GBA version will include lots of extra maps (the exact number depends on how much ROM space we have left) which people made with the map editor that came with original version of the game. Players will be able to play these maps in rampage mode (where you get random missions and compete for the highest score) or in multiplayer mode (deathmatch for up to 4 players).

Puissance-Pocket : What technologies have you developed for the GBA ?

James Daniels : In the process of porting Payback, we've obviously had to optimise the engine a lot to get it to run at a decent speed. One thing I'm particularly proud of is the texture mapper which has a theoretical peak fillrate of around 5.5 million pixels/sec, although in practice it's more like 4.5 million pixels/sec. This is roughly the same as a PS1, which is extremely impressive for software rendering on a 16 Mhz processor.

There are other similar routines to do plain polygons, alpha-channelled+tmapped polygons and colour-0-transparent polygons. There's also an alpha-channelled image-scaler, the 3d object renderer and the map renderer. Finally, there's the rest of the game (physics, mission, AI, gameplay), although most of that isn't time-critical so is still written in C making it fairly easy to port.

Puissance-Pocket : Is it hard to develop on the GBA ?

James Daniels : It certainly forces you to optimise your code and you need to avoid certain things like divides and floating point math. The small amount of IWRAM and the quirky VRAM bus needs careful treatment as well. However, I rather enjoy the challenge and having a fixed system does open up new possibilities for optimisation.

Puissance-Pocket : Recently, Destination Software said that they will finally develop Grand Theft Auto 3 for GBA. On your website you say that Payback is an "advanced Grand Theft Auto style game"... what is "advanced" in Payback in comparison to GTA ?

James Daniels : It depends which version of GTA you compare the game with - and it's also hard to say what features GTA3 for GBA will keep. Anyway, Payback's main features are a proper 3d engine, varied missions (stealth missions, missions in buildings), good physics and lots of levels. The game has also got loads of neat extras like replays, multiplayer and the ability to optionally play any of the maps with randomly generated missions.

Puissance-Pocket : What do you think about the "3D games" ( Ecks VS Sever, Doom, Star X...) already released on the GBA ?

James Daniels : I haven't played the 3d games you mention, but those I have played have fairly impressive engines but lack playabity. Payback's main emphasis has always been its gameplay - although having a cutting edge 3d engine doesn't hurt. :)

Puissance-Pocket : What are your future projects on Nintendo's platforms ? (what sort of games, involved technologies ... ) ?

James Daniels : I've got some ideas for future projects but for the time being the main emphasis is on getting Payback done.

Puissance-Pocket : These days, a rumor say that a new backlit GBA "2" will be released by Nintendo. It would have 2 additional buttons, a new design and a new processor. What do you think about that ?

James Daniels : I think it's plausible that Nintendo might release a backlit GBA. However, I don't think it's likely that they will change the number of buttons and the processor so soon.

Puissance-Pocket : Did you hear anything from Nintendo ?

James Daniels : No.