Interview de Rafael Baptista

Puissance Pocket : Exactly, how did Helixe Transcendentale start ?

Rafael Baptista : My friend Kurt Bickenbach and I were working at THQ as part of an advanced technology group. We were looking at all the next generation game machines. We had a PS2, an X-BOX prototype, a GameCube prototype, and an AGB. We liked the AGB the best. It was the most fun to program. And we thought it was so cool to see a game running on the tiny little AGB screen. The original AGB dev kit was not portable, but a large circuit board almost as big as a sheet of paper. We were even more excited when we first got a prototype AGB that was in the actual AGB case. It was even cooler to see that little screen floating around in your hand.

Anyway we were working on a game engine, and got pretty far with it. We showed it to some people at THQ and they really liked it, so they asked us to quit the technology group and start our own internal game studio. We hired two more guys, Chris Bruser and Peter Lim, and started working on our first AGB game, Rocket Power: Dream Scheme.

A few months later the project was progressing well, and the stock market crashed. Some friend of ours had started their own game company, but because of the stock market crash they had all their funding pulled, ( which was too bad because they were building this really great MMPORG ), so we hired a bunch of them and started a second team. They did our Wild Thornberrys: Chimp Chase game ( in about 6 months! ).

Now we are hiring a third team, and we are working on three games to ship next year.

Puissance Pocket : When did you start to develop on GameBoy ?

Rafael Baptista : None of us had ever developed handheld games in the past. Some of used to do 3d PC games before. Some of us are just out of school.

Puissance Pocket : Have you got more informations about your two announced games : Wild Thornberrys: Chimp Chase and Rocket Power: Dream Scheme ?

Rafael Baptista : The games have shipped in the US. They should be shipping in Europe soon. There will be a French version of both games. There will be a German version of Wild Thornberrys. We have already done the localizations and shipped them, they should be arriving in stores there any time now.

Both games have secret codes that give you extra powers. The codes are easy to guess. If no one guesses them, we will probably reveal the codes.

Puissance Pocket : What are your future projects on GBA ( what sort of games, involved technologies ... ) ?

Rafael Baptista : I can't tell you what the exact games are because they have not been announced yet. I can say that we are going to make at least one more game with the current sidescroller game engine that we used for the last two games.

Our other two games are going to use 3d rendering for characters, and isometric rendering for the environments. You should expect to see those games come out near the end of next year.

Puissance Pocket : Has it been hard to make the games on the GBA ?

Rafael Baptista : GBA is a great machine to program for. Its pretty straightforward. Its a relatively simple machine architecture. The hardest part is data compression. The game carts we are using are 4 megabytes. Its very hard to get a game as large as Rocket Power into 4 meg. Uncompressed, and expressed as bitmaps, each of the 19 levels in Rocket Power would be over 64 megabytes.The AGB is also not very powerful in terms of raw CPU power, so you have to be very careful how you do things.

Puissance Pocket : Had you got enough time ?

Rafael Baptista : There is never enough time to do everything you want. We work hard to get as much as we can into a game before it ships. Still, the 9-12 month schedules we have been using are pretty reasonable time frames for putting together what is basically a 4 meg file.

Puissance Pocket : Have you got any project for Gamecube ?

Rafael Baptista : THQ has many GameCube projects. Our studio, Helixe, only does GBA.