Interview de Thomas Nielsen

Puissance-Pocket : Could you present to us Progessive Media ?

Thomas Nielsen : Progressive Media is an independent development team consisting of 5 people from Denmark and Sweden, plus a few freelancers as well. The team has worked well together the past 2 years, doing, among other things, technology demos for different platforms. We all have roots in the demoscene, and years of experience in games/multimedia development.

Puissance-Pocket :Is Palladium your first game ?

Thomas Nielsen :Palladium is the first game we are announcing to the public, yes. Before Gameboy Advance, we were focused on Nintendo64, and we did do a version of Palladium for this console too. However, Nintendo64 started doing really bad in terms of unit sales at the time we were almost ready with the game, so we decided that releasing it on Nintendo64 would not be good business for us.

Puissance-Pocket :Could you give us some details about this game ?

Thomas Nielsen : We did not decide specifically on the number of tables yet. We are aiming at 3, but we want to do everything we can to push the system to its limits, and include all the tables possible. The fact is that publishers prefer games to be small, so they can keep cartridge production costs to a minimum - Our job is then to include as much as we can into as little memory as possible, and we’ll keep trying to do that until the game is finished.

As for graphics, we’ve tried to do something unique, so our game wouldn’t look like all the other 2d pinball games out there. 2d pinball looked great back in the beginning of the 90’ies, but we really feel a pinball game today should look different – There are plenty of good 2D pinball games already on GBC and PC, so we don’t see the point in recreating those.

Instead, we’re designing our graphics completely in 3d. Gameboy Advance is not fast enough to actually render the 3d models, so instead we export the graphics to a format that lets us pan and zoom in and out – That way it is possible for us to simulate a much more dynamic camera movement.

While we’re on the subject of technology, let me also mention our vector-based physics/collision detection system. To us, it’s very important to ensure the game feels exactly like a “real” pinball game - an important part of that is doing perfect physics and collision detection. Where lots of computer pinball developers take shortcuts here to save both development and processor time, we decided to do this the mathematically proper ways. A carefully designed 3d model for collision data of every table actually exists in GBA memory, and every time a ball hits a surface, the precise angle between ball and surface are calculated, and physics are applied to the ball. The image you see here is a screenshot of one of the tools we use in this process; here, the surfaces exported from 3dsmax are edited and physics are adjusted. Takes a while for us to do, but the result is amazing; we can simulate more or less all sorts of materials, and give the game the true pinball feeling.