Otaku No Zoku

“Pitfall 2 : Rumble In The Jungle” was developed as a Nintendo Gameboy Colour game in the Pitfall franchise for Activision.

Unfortunately the game never made it to market even though it was pretty far along. The development of the game sprang out of an earlier development of several ports of classic Atari 2600 games that I was working on. The games were meant to be released as an anthology pack but that never happened and I hadn’t quite learnt my lesson as to just how messed up Activision was becoming. I pushed ahead with developing Rumble In The Jungle but after much screwing around by the publisher I had to conclude that this game was never going to see the light of day.

I did manage to create a versatile level editor though. Below is a screenshot of the editor running in “2600 mode” that let me use it to re-create original Pitfall 2 levels. The editor is actually capable of creating more advanced levels than those found in the original Pitfall 2, along with being able to re-generate the original Atari 2600 Pitfall 2 ROM with new level data.

I did intend to release the new levels as brand new games for free, on the ‘net, but never found the time to create a game engine that could use the data, all I was able to do was create a ROM hack of the original Pitfall 2. Time, there is never enough of it. *heavy sigh*

— Justin Lloyd

Civilization : Call To Power was an interesting project to be involved with.

The Lead Programmer was Steve Marrioti. A nice guy who would prefer to keep his nose in the code than in other people’s business. And I can’t fault him for that.

As I had just rolled off of the Pitfall 3D project on the Sony PlayStation, which I joined quite late, I was now looking forward to working on a new project almost from day one. The code base wasn’t yet in place and we were creating almost everything pretty much from scratch.

I always felt like a bit of a fifth wheel on the Civilization project though. I was directly involved with the graphics engine with Steve Marriotti, game state save & load which I was solely responsible for (save & load state of a turned based strategy game is the biggest pain in the arse system you can possibly imagine), the artificial intelligence working with Karl Meissner who later went on to work at Fireaxis, design & programming of the GUI with Ryan Higa, and involvement with a dozen other subsystems throughout the game. Other than Steve who was the Lead Programmer I don’t think there was a programmer on the team that touched more code systems than me.

There were a number of interesting stories that happened on this project. One of them concerns the Linux port of Civilization.

Joe, “Mr Ogre” was a big Linux nut who helped me figure out the patches I needed to make to my Linux kernel I was running on a box at home to get it to do IP masquerading for use with my ComCast cable modem.

Pretty much from the day the project began Joe was “secretly” working on a Linux port of Civilization: Call To Power. One day Joe turns up in the office and shows off Civilization. The engineers, Producer, and Lead Designer gather round Joe for a couple of minutes and we’re all wondering why the graphics look a bit weird, why the mouse is invisible, etc. Joe has CivCTP running on Linux right there in the office.

A couple of days later, at our weekly meeting, it is announced that Activision would like to release CivCTP on Linux. All the engineers are stoked. I’m not a big fan of Linux during this time, and I realise the financial risk that Activision is taking with this move so the gesture is well appreciated.

It is impressed upon the entire team that we are not to breath a word of this Linux port to the press or individuals outside of the team. This is for multiple reasons but one of them is the expected backlash from the parochial Linux community should Activision decide that a Linux port is just not viable.

So the project moves forward a year, all the time Joe is diligently making sure that CivCTP runs just fine on Linux. He even has a Linux box under his desk now. When it is finally announced by Activision that a Linux release of CivCTP will occur.

Loki Entertainment of course takes all the credit for performing this difficult porting task. Which leaves me rather puzzled as I know for a fact CivCTP already runs on RedHat Linux. I’m sure Loki made sure that it ran on multiple distributions, and created a fancy installer, but I’m curious just how much work they had to do…

Some day I’ll have to put up some more anecdotes about the “Christmas Tree variables”, the Perl Script that Joe wrote to create it, snarky comments left in the code base, ASCII artwork scattered throughout the code, fragments of other game designs left in the code, the 800 page design bible that the Producer printed out and gave us each month, making the AI too smart,

— Justin Lloyd

This was a video poker game for Windows 95 & Windows 98. I believe you can now find this game on an eGames CD-ROM collection. — Justin Lloyd

This software product was not a game but a screen saver that simulated boids flying around inside a box. It worked like a “snow globe”, in the center was a desert island, with a lone palm tree, gently lapping waves on the shore, “seagulls” — I’ll use that word to describe the boids very loosely, the boids were white and exhibited simple flapping animations — the box would slowly spin on the centre axis with the boids flying around. There were also fish in the sea that exhibited simple flocking behaviour too. I recall around the same time I wrote a screen saver called “lightspeed” that was like the starfield screen saver from Microsoft which streaked long multicolored stars past the eypoint. It looked very appealing for the time on 16-bit colour displays with no 3D hardware.

These screen savers were bundled as part of a package by a British company and I know that at least one graphics card manufacturer had some sort of OEM deal to distribute them too.

Need to find screenshots. Anybody help me out?

— Justin Lloyd