Jeff Minter makes a Unity announcement, but it's not a good one
- Thread starter BuG
- Start date
Erm, is this really a problem considering the other platforms that Minter's games have appeared on? Is GameCube really not a financially viable option for a former Jauguar and Nuon game maker??
And why not just attempt to get Nintendo to publish it themselves? Is this game really anymore leftfield than Animal Crossing, Cubivore, Odama or Chibi Robo? Isn't Nintendo going to be struggling for content anyway? Did they even approach NCL?
I dunno... unless they don't figure on finishing it until 2007/2008 or something, this excuse seems a bit hollow.
fennec fox
ferrets ferrets ferrets ferrets FERRETS!!!
No, but those games either shipped or were made by someone who has shipped something in the past.
I don´t think so, Tempest 2000 was published by Atari in Jaguar for example so they wanted to get it released even with sales sinking, they had few games and I suppose they wanted to maintain its "key games" at all cost.
The case of Lionhead is different, I think is not so much that Minter can´t finish it but the fact that publish a GC game for a third party is more expensive that publish a game for your own system in the case of Atari. They have to invest in production, cases, licences... and I believe they don´t think they can recover the costs.
What surprises me is that they don´t try to migrate it to other system. PSP would be a great machine for this game.
However, a true shame. Maybe is time for Mizuguchi and Minter to work together...
So who published Tempest 3000 for Nuon?
Honestly... I think is this the sort of game Nintendo would actually be likely to pick up themselves if Minter had ever approached NCL.
As is though, just seems like a strange excuse given that Minter's almost always gone for underdog, niche platforms. GC's actually the most mainstream game platform he's developed on in decades. EA, Capcom, Sega, UbiSoft, Activision, Atari, THQ, Konami and others all have projects coming for GameCube through 2005 too, it's not like everything's dried up overnight DC style.
Honestly... I think is this the sort of game Nintendo would actually be likely to pick up themselves if Minter had ever approached NCL.
As is though, just seems like a strange excuse given that Minter's almost always gone for underdog, niche platforms. GC's actually the most mainstream game platform he's developed on in decades. EA, Capcom, Sega, UbiSoft, Activision, Atari, THQ, Konami and others all have projects coming for GameCube through 2005 too, it's not like everything's dried up overnight DC style.
I don´t know exactly the history, but I think Minter was called by the makers of Nuon to make that game (and I even think that Minter worked in the design of the machine).
So it´s not he likes to jump over niche platforms, but he is called for make something from the creators of that machines (this is what I think at least, I wouldn´t like to seem as I pretended to know what Jeff Minter thinks or so).
GC has live, RE 4 and Zelda, among the other games that are planned, should keep the system stable and living during most part of 2005. But Unity was born as a niche game, it was a risky adventure at first and know is simply suicidal with GC getting so few attention (specially in the background of being UK developers).
Llamasoft
A Brief History of Llamasoft
Being a tale of the strange and furry world of Llamasoft and the exploits of the weird, animal-obsessed creature known as Yak who creates their wares; and covering the period up to the Llamasoft/Jaguar linkup...
Prehistory
Long, long ago and far away, Doppler-shifted down the axis of time, a single random event occurs -
In a sixth-form college in Basingstoke, a maths and physics student who is really extraordinarily fond of llamas but keeps it pretty much to himself inadvertantly wanders into the wrong room. There's this weird machine in there with a little tiny keyboard and what looks like a TV bolted on the top. It's called a PET but it's not even remotely furry. There's a guy sat in front of it and he appears to be playing a crude video game.
The student asks the guy "Hey, where'd that game come from?"
The guy replies, "Oh, I typed it in".
The student's life changes forever.
The Unbearable Softness of Llamas
In 1982, after a year of selling simple ZX81 games to third parties and getting ripped off again and again, Yak creates Llamasoft. The name is particularly appropriate as, although Yak is unusually attracted to many animals, llamas are his favourites; the company is formed to sell software; and, well, llamas *are* really soft.
The first product of Llamasoft is an admittedly crude version of the game 'Defender', coded for the Vic-20 home computer. Instead of Humanoids, the player defends tiny llamas, and so the game is named Andes Attack, so as to be geographically correct. The embryonic company places small adverts in the classified sections of the computer magazines of the day and in due course sells a correspondingly small quantity of the games. They hire a small trestle table at a Commodore computer show in London and the Yak duly appears on the first Thursday of the show, armed with a beat-up Vic-20 in a large metal Welsh expansion rack, a crappy portable colour TV, and 100 copies of the game. He loads up the Vic, plugs in a joystick and wonders if he'll sell any games.
Some things happen which surprise the Yak, displacing the usual obsessive visions of fluffy llamas and goats which usually occupy his cranium:
- all the games get sold on the first day
- an American gentleman in a suit is polite to him and wants to sell the game in the USA.
In due course the game is transferred to ROM and released by the American gentleman's company, Human Engineered Software, under the title Aggressor. The llamas, sadly, are removed. The game sells a bit, but doesn't do spectacularly well. Yak is grateful of a bit of income, though, and codes up a few more games. Now Llamasoft can afford larger adverts and are starting to sell more games in the UK. Yak writes one game in only a week - started on a Monday morning, finished by the following Sunday afternoon in time for Yak to relax and watch 'Battlestar Galactica'. The guys down the computer club seem to quite like it. It's a bit like Centipede but more hard-edged. Yak sends it to HES in the US.
It is time for the Yak to be surprised again.
Imagine, if it does not cause you to feel nauseous, a sleeping Yak, twitching gently, perhaps, as REM-sleep brings him fevered visions of uncharacteristically friendly artiodactyls. The phone rings at 4AM and, trailing dissipating visions of camelids, the Yak shambles out to answer the call. He is a little upset, as he's the kind of beast who likes to lleap out of bed at the crack of noon. On the other end, a little blurred by satellite delay, an American voice rants about some game that they've been playing for eight hours solid. The voice informs the Yak that he should expect significant monetary input. Bemused, the Yak makes a few notes on the pad by the phone and returns to his pit. Waking later, at a time closer to his usual emergence, the Yak makes himself a really strong cup of tea and remembers some weird dream, something about the game... goes to the phone, finds the note, and is intrigued.
The game gets to the top of the US software charts. The Yak is surprised. The Yak receives, in due course, significant monetary input. The Yak is taxed heavily by the Inland Revenue. The Yak writes some more games and, knackered, buggers off to Peru to rest and be with llamas.
The Golden Years
The American distribution of Llamasoft games does not last long. A few games are sold and they do quite well (although none so spectacularly as Gridrunner), and then HES decide to change the type of games they sell - they branch out into business and educational software, change their game style, and no longer want the shoot-em-up games produced by the Yak. Unfortunately their new policy does not work out and they file for Chapter 11; Llamasoft lloses its US distribution and the name of Yak is soon forgotten in that country.
Yak, however, doesn't mind. The UK computer market is booming, and Llamasoft are aquiring a reputation for unusual games, always with beastie themes; gameplayers are divided, some of them plain don't like the strange games emerging for the Commodore 64, games with names like Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Sheep in Space. Some players, however, enjoy the games very much, and they form a hardcore band of lloyal Llamasoft gamesplayers. Llamasoft develops a kind of cult following, and Yak is having tremendous fun. He begins to experiment with an idea called the Light Synthesiser and is frequently to be seen at London computer shows, blasting out the Floyd, generating interactive light displays on a giant projection screen, surrounded by eight or nine Commodores, upon which the llatest Llamasoft game sells itself to the converted. It is at this time that Yak starts to produce an occasional newsletter, The Nature of the Beast, in which he informs the Llamasofties of what new games he's making, what cool new games *other* people have made, cool things he's seen and cool albums he's heard, and, well, just rambles on in a vaguely informative way. The climax of that period is when Yak, for the release of a new light synthesiser, hires the London Planetarium for a party. Video and laser graphics are deployed together. The partygoers have an extremely good time, so good, in fact, that the Yak is banned from ever hiring the place again on account of overenthusiastic partygoers smoking bush in the bog. Yak is very happy. Yak goes skiing.
This is, of course, too good to last.
Decline And...
Yak grows complacent, enjoying the success of Llamasoft. The nature of the games market is changing; companies get larger and more serious about the business, seeing that there is money to be made out of videogames. Eventually Llamasoft begin to find it increasingly difficult to get distributed, being unable to match the advertising budget and prolific output of the new software corporations. At first the Yak is not unduly perturbed, as he has made considerable investments during the boom years; he moves to a remote valley in Wales where he lives with two sheep, a short stagger from the local pub, and continues to develop the light synthesiser and write the occasional game for the new Atari ST and Commodore Amiga systems. The games are usually well received at review, but are also increasingly badly distributed.
Llamasoft tries something new: rather than sell the Yak's output directly they sell the games to another firm to market. That firm is Atari UK. Yak does a couple of games for them, but the sales are not enough to prevent the steady erosion of the resources acquired during the Golden Years. The Yak begins to be worried. The Yak is losing it.
Seeking a new direction, and inspired by the success of the new game consoles like the Sega Master System and the NES, the Yak is interested in getting in on the ground floor of a new, state-of-the-art game system. A Welsh company called Konix is developing a new game console, based on a revolutionary design by a bunch of Cambridge designers known as Flare. The Yak develops a game, Attack of the Mutant Camels '89, for the system, investing seven months and five grand. Konix run out of money, and the system crashes and burns before it gets to market.
The Yak is annoyed.
Atari UK announce that they will be producing an advanced game console, named the Panther, based on a revolutionary design by a bunch of Cambridge designers known as Flare ][. The Yak begins to develop a game. After two months something happens inside Atari and the Panther is discontinued.
The Yak is annoyed and skint.
Recovery
Yak realises that Llamasoft is in danger of going out of business. His llatest ST game, Llamatron, is coming along nicely; in fact he feels it is probably one of the best games he's ever produced. Frustrated by the fact that it is seemingly impossible to get a game distributed, however good, without selling one's soul to the majors, Yak decides to try a new and, in the UK at least, relatively untried method of software distribution: shareware. Give the damn game away. Ask for a quarter of the usual price of a game, *and* give away an extra game if anyone bothers to pay.
The Yak is surprised.
The game does extremely well. Atari ST owners pay up in droves, and although the monetary input is insignificant compared to the Vic-20 days, it is sufficient to keep the corporate camelid head of Llamasoft above water, and ensure that Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World does not run short of digestive biscuits. The Yak settles down to write more shareware, drinks a large amount of tea, scratches Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World in exactly the right place, and in due course is approached by Atari, US this time, to develop a game for their new 68030 computer, the Atari Falcon. Llamasoft are allowed to develop an extremely llama-oriented game called Llamazap, full of camels, sheep, cows, goats and - of course - llamas. The Yak enjoys working with Atari, and that they gave him the freedom to write a game in his own style. And then, one day, the Yak hears about a radical new system that Atari are producing, designed by a bunch of Cambridge engineers called Flare ][. Apparently this system is the reason Panther was axed, and it's orders of magnitude better. In due course the Yak is sitting in front of a prototype system in Sunnyvale.
The Yak writes an image warper.
The Yak puts it in a realtime loop, to see how fast it will go.
The Yak is surprised.
The Yak is in *love*.
\
-)
/
A Brief History of Llamasoft
Being a tale of the strange and furry world of Llamasoft and the exploits of the weird, animal-obsessed creature known as Yak who creates their wares; and covering the period up to the Llamasoft/Jaguar linkup...
Prehistory
Long, long ago and far away, Doppler-shifted down the axis of time, a single random event occurs -
In a sixth-form college in Basingstoke, a maths and physics student who is really extraordinarily fond of llamas but keeps it pretty much to himself inadvertantly wanders into the wrong room. There's this weird machine in there with a little tiny keyboard and what looks like a TV bolted on the top. It's called a PET but it's not even remotely furry. There's a guy sat in front of it and he appears to be playing a crude video game.
The student asks the guy "Hey, where'd that game come from?"
The guy replies, "Oh, I typed it in".
The student's life changes forever.
The Unbearable Softness of Llamas
In 1982, after a year of selling simple ZX81 games to third parties and getting ripped off again and again, Yak creates Llamasoft. The name is particularly appropriate as, although Yak is unusually attracted to many animals, llamas are his favourites; the company is formed to sell software; and, well, llamas *are* really soft.
The first product of Llamasoft is an admittedly crude version of the game 'Defender', coded for the Vic-20 home computer. Instead of Humanoids, the player defends tiny llamas, and so the game is named Andes Attack, so as to be geographically correct. The embryonic company places small adverts in the classified sections of the computer magazines of the day and in due course sells a correspondingly small quantity of the games. They hire a small trestle table at a Commodore computer show in London and the Yak duly appears on the first Thursday of the show, armed with a beat-up Vic-20 in a large metal Welsh expansion rack, a crappy portable colour TV, and 100 copies of the game. He loads up the Vic, plugs in a joystick and wonders if he'll sell any games.
Some things happen which surprise the Yak, displacing the usual obsessive visions of fluffy llamas and goats which usually occupy his cranium:
- all the games get sold on the first day
- an American gentleman in a suit is polite to him and wants to sell the game in the USA.
In due course the game is transferred to ROM and released by the American gentleman's company, Human Engineered Software, under the title Aggressor. The llamas, sadly, are removed. The game sells a bit, but doesn't do spectacularly well. Yak is grateful of a bit of income, though, and codes up a few more games. Now Llamasoft can afford larger adverts and are starting to sell more games in the UK. Yak writes one game in only a week - started on a Monday morning, finished by the following Sunday afternoon in time for Yak to relax and watch 'Battlestar Galactica'. The guys down the computer club seem to quite like it. It's a bit like Centipede but more hard-edged. Yak sends it to HES in the US.
It is time for the Yak to be surprised again.
Imagine, if it does not cause you to feel nauseous, a sleeping Yak, twitching gently, perhaps, as REM-sleep brings him fevered visions of uncharacteristically friendly artiodactyls. The phone rings at 4AM and, trailing dissipating visions of camelids, the Yak shambles out to answer the call. He is a little upset, as he's the kind of beast who likes to lleap out of bed at the crack of noon. On the other end, a little blurred by satellite delay, an American voice rants about some game that they've been playing for eight hours solid. The voice informs the Yak that he should expect significant monetary input. Bemused, the Yak makes a few notes on the pad by the phone and returns to his pit. Waking later, at a time closer to his usual emergence, the Yak makes himself a really strong cup of tea and remembers some weird dream, something about the game... goes to the phone, finds the note, and is intrigued.
The game gets to the top of the US software charts. The Yak is surprised. The Yak receives, in due course, significant monetary input. The Yak is taxed heavily by the Inland Revenue. The Yak writes some more games and, knackered, buggers off to Peru to rest and be with llamas.
The Golden Years
The American distribution of Llamasoft games does not last long. A few games are sold and they do quite well (although none so spectacularly as Gridrunner), and then HES decide to change the type of games they sell - they branch out into business and educational software, change their game style, and no longer want the shoot-em-up games produced by the Yak. Unfortunately their new policy does not work out and they file for Chapter 11; Llamasoft lloses its US distribution and the name of Yak is soon forgotten in that country.
Yak, however, doesn't mind. The UK computer market is booming, and Llamasoft are aquiring a reputation for unusual games, always with beastie themes; gameplayers are divided, some of them plain don't like the strange games emerging for the Commodore 64, games with names like Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Sheep in Space. Some players, however, enjoy the games very much, and they form a hardcore band of lloyal Llamasoft gamesplayers. Llamasoft develops a kind of cult following, and Yak is having tremendous fun. He begins to experiment with an idea called the Light Synthesiser and is frequently to be seen at London computer shows, blasting out the Floyd, generating interactive light displays on a giant projection screen, surrounded by eight or nine Commodores, upon which the llatest Llamasoft game sells itself to the converted. It is at this time that Yak starts to produce an occasional newsletter, The Nature of the Beast, in which he informs the Llamasofties of what new games he's making, what cool new games *other* people have made, cool things he's seen and cool albums he's heard, and, well, just rambles on in a vaguely informative way. The climax of that period is when Yak, for the release of a new light synthesiser, hires the London Planetarium for a party. Video and laser graphics are deployed together. The partygoers have an extremely good time, so good, in fact, that the Yak is banned from ever hiring the place again on account of overenthusiastic partygoers smoking bush in the bog. Yak is very happy. Yak goes skiing.
This is, of course, too good to last.
Decline And...
Yak grows complacent, enjoying the success of Llamasoft. The nature of the games market is changing; companies get larger and more serious about the business, seeing that there is money to be made out of videogames. Eventually Llamasoft begin to find it increasingly difficult to get distributed, being unable to match the advertising budget and prolific output of the new software corporations. At first the Yak is not unduly perturbed, as he has made considerable investments during the boom years; he moves to a remote valley in Wales where he lives with two sheep, a short stagger from the local pub, and continues to develop the light synthesiser and write the occasional game for the new Atari ST and Commodore Amiga systems. The games are usually well received at review, but are also increasingly badly distributed.
Llamasoft tries something new: rather than sell the Yak's output directly they sell the games to another firm to market. That firm is Atari UK. Yak does a couple of games for them, but the sales are not enough to prevent the steady erosion of the resources acquired during the Golden Years. The Yak begins to be worried. The Yak is losing it.
Seeking a new direction, and inspired by the success of the new game consoles like the Sega Master System and the NES, the Yak is interested in getting in on the ground floor of a new, state-of-the-art game system. A Welsh company called Konix is developing a new game console, based on a revolutionary design by a bunch of Cambridge designers known as Flare. The Yak develops a game, Attack of the Mutant Camels '89, for the system, investing seven months and five grand. Konix run out of money, and the system crashes and burns before it gets to market.
The Yak is annoyed.
Atari UK announce that they will be producing an advanced game console, named the Panther, based on a revolutionary design by a bunch of Cambridge designers known as Flare ][. The Yak begins to develop a game. After two months something happens inside Atari and the Panther is discontinued.
The Yak is annoyed and skint.
Recovery
Yak realises that Llamasoft is in danger of going out of business. His llatest ST game, Llamatron, is coming along nicely; in fact he feels it is probably one of the best games he's ever produced. Frustrated by the fact that it is seemingly impossible to get a game distributed, however good, without selling one's soul to the majors, Yak decides to try a new and, in the UK at least, relatively untried method of software distribution: shareware. Give the damn game away. Ask for a quarter of the usual price of a game, *and* give away an extra game if anyone bothers to pay.
The Yak is surprised.
The game does extremely well. Atari ST owners pay up in droves, and although the monetary input is insignificant compared to the Vic-20 days, it is sufficient to keep the corporate camelid head of Llamasoft above water, and ensure that Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World does not run short of digestive biscuits. The Yak settles down to write more shareware, drinks a large amount of tea, scratches Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World in exactly the right place, and in due course is approached by Atari, US this time, to develop a game for their new 68030 computer, the Atari Falcon. Llamasoft are allowed to develop an extremely llama-oriented game called Llamazap, full of camels, sheep, cows, goats and - of course - llamas. The Yak enjoys working with Atari, and that they gave him the freedom to write a game in his own style. And then, one day, the Yak hears about a radical new system that Atari are producing, designed by a bunch of Cambridge engineers called Flare ][. Apparently this system is the reason Panther was axed, and it's orders of magnitude better. In due course the Yak is sitting in front of a prototype system in Sunnyvale.
The Yak writes an image warper.
The Yak puts it in a realtime loop, to see how fast it will go.
The Yak is surprised.
The Yak is in *love*.
\
-)/
the year 20XX
Member
Did he really develop for the Konix Slipstream?
Underdog consoles indeed.
Underdog consoles indeed.
jarrod said:
I doubt that it was much of his choice considering Lionhead's involvement. Maybe "mutual agreement" actually meant that he was given an ultimatum and decided to give it up rather than rush the game out in a time frame suitable for the few publishers who may be interested in putting out a GC exclusive.
Mr_Furious
Member
The cancellation obviously means the game wasn't going to make it out in 2k5. While disappointing, I don't find the news surprising.
Agent X
Member
jarrod said:
Most of the retail NUON games were published by VM Labs itself and distributed by a company called DVD International.
Although VM Labs is defunct, the rights to most of the NUON games belong to other entities. In the case of Tempest 3000, Atari owns the rights to it (just as they do with Tempest and Tempest 2000), and they could port it to another system if they wanted. It's unlikely this would happen, since T3K's code was tied pretty tightly to the NUON hardware. You'd probably have a better chance of seeing a NUON emulator running that system's version of T3K than you would of having someone do an accurate conversion of the game to another platform.
jarrod said:
I agree. I was kind of hoping that would happen. I thought I had read somewhere that Nintendo was aware of Unity and seemed to like it.
jarrod said:
Minter's worked on several mainstream platforms over the years, including the Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit computers (400/800/XL/XE), Atari ST, and Commodore Amiga. All of these were very popular throughout the 1980's and 1990's, and Minter was developing games on them at the height of their popularity.
After leaving VM Labs, and before working on Unity, he developed a few freeware/shareware games for IBM PC compatible computers, as well as Pocket PC devices.
fennec fox
ferrets ferrets ferrets ferrets FERRETS!!!
Yeah, but the ST and Amiga never achieved what you'd call popularity in the US. That makes the C64 the last popular machine he worked on from that point of view, and I do remember his name from back at that time, although the whole "game programmer as superstar" thing the Euro mags had going at the time never quite became so big in the US.
Of course, if you'd believe Gamestm and Edge, Minter practically invented computers (and, before that, electricity), so...
Of course, if you'd believe Gamestm and Edge, Minter practically invented computers (and, before that, electricity), so...
SON OF A BITCH 
So not the news I needed to start the day with, but it's not surprising.
GC was always the wrong system for this game - Nbots be damned, it would have been more suited to Xbox - and the Molyneux / Minter love fest was never going to be a "hey let's get this out the door" environment.
One question though - I thought I remembered the original announcement was that Lionhead were going to BE the publisher?
And since I'm at work on a Saturday morning and I can't find the image I have at home of me giving Jeff Minter a hug, here's the control system from his C64 game Iridis Alpha.
So not the news I needed to start the day with, but it's not surprising.
GC was always the wrong system for this game - Nbots be damned, it would have been more suited to Xbox - and the Molyneux / Minter love fest was never going to be a "hey let's get this out the door" environment.
One question though - I thought I remembered the original announcement was that Lionhead were going to BE the publisher?
And since I'm at work on a Saturday morning and I can't find the image I have at home of me giving Jeff Minter a hug, here's the control system from his C64 game Iridis Alpha.
krypt0nian
Banned
Smoke up, Jeff! Its doing wonders for your productivity. :lol
Gahiggidy
My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
OK!!...shit.
---------------------------
Alright, people. I have one important thing to say here:
DO NOT GIVE UP ON UNiTY.
You know what needs to be done... but its got to happen FAST. Now. Pronto. Yesterday.
....I'll check back later tonight. (I need ~3 hours.)
---------------------------
Alright, people. I have one important thing to say here:
DO NOT GIVE UP ON UNiTY.
You know what needs to be done... but its got to happen FAST. Now. Pronto. Yesterday.
....I'll check back later tonight. (I need ~3 hours.)
Vortac said:
You shouldn't wish that on any system!
DavidDayton said:
This is the time where he runs out and tries to start a petition. It's the time when he thinks people give a fuck about that, or that it has any sort of impact whatsoever on what developers release.
But it's Gahiggidy... and I've been told not to take him seriously. So I won't!
There's another comment by him buried on one of the pages:
Yak said:Meh.
Tough couple of days... obviously i have known this was coming a bit in advance, and it's made it all the more difficult being around of late hearing so many comments about how people were looking forward to Unity and knowing myself that it was approaching a stage of, er, Game Over...
We tried, we tried our level best, but in the end it just took too long to be viable on this iteration. Unity needs to be a fusion of many things - light, gameplay, audio - and in the end although it *was* working, it *was* coming together in ways that were pretty much how I hoped they would be, there wasn't *enough* of all those things for it actually to fly, and we ran out of runway... and in the end, better to abort the takeoff rather than go too early and end up crashing and burning.
You can walk away from an abort in one piece and have another try...
It's a really complex process trying to do something like Unity. *Much* of the job is research, but it's research done against the clock... you're not just plugging things in to a formula iterated one more time with better graphics, you're trying out genuinely new stuff. Sometimes you work for a month and you produce something extraordinary. Sometimes you work for a month and then throw it all away because it wasn't leading in the direction you'd hoped. It's hard to do that, and come in on schedule with something that you're happy with inside a commercially viable timeframe.
And in the end if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well; and in the timescale we had I alone couldn't deliver. I'm truly sorry about that and I owe my apologies to everyone who waited for this with such enthusiasm. I'm gutted too, I really *wanted* to make Unity so that I could play the damn thing. I'll still not be satisfied until one day I do.
But it's not been a bad thing. Research is research; I've done a lot in the last couple of years, and I've learned from it; I'm quite happy on whatever graphics hardware falls to hand, after having had time to find out for myself how it all works. I'm comfortable in 3D Smile. If and when there is another attempt, I'll be much better prepared than I was before.
And I'm not the only coder at the barn now. Goat knows I never thought I would ever find anyone I could share the Llamasoft vision with, but hey, it happened. And Giles is way better than maths than me as well as being an all-round ninja coder. And with two beasts to share the load instead of just one, I think things will work out much better in the future. We work pretty well in parallel Smile.
And to be completely honest, I still believe that the best thing to come out of Llamasoft in all the years of its existence isn't Unity or any game at all or even a lightsynth: it's what we have right here, this community that just aggregated around some old coder's site and became something excellent and unexpected, a place that we all somehow call home, something that doesn't "belong" to me or to Llamasoft but something that is shared equally by all of us. This place, and you guys, helped to change my life in enormously positive ways. There is great goodness here, and I am happy and proud to be a part of it.
Many thanks to all of you who have said such kind things despite the disappointment of what happened, and don't worry, I'm not going to give up, and the day I retire is the day they pry the compiler from my cold dead hooves Wink. There's lots more good stuff to come, that I promise you Smile.
Thanks, all, iz all.
\
/
_________________
The thing is, if the game came out on the gamecube, it would be totally ignored. It would be ignored on every freaking console anyways. The cancellation of Unity is quite a demonstration on how shitty and expensive the industry has become this generation
I wish he would release random pieces of stuff he procuded so that we could at least look at it and check it out. All this stuff he did will just end up in a vault, locked forever. This really sucks
I wish he would release random pieces of stuff he procuded so that we could at least look at it and check it out. All this stuff he did will just end up in a vault, locked forever. This really sucks
Drinky Crow
Banned
Sounds like he smoked himself out of a gig.
<Peter> How's Unity comin', Jeff?
<Jeff> [takes a hit]
<Jeff> Oh, I'm feelin' it. Yeah, it's comin' along nicely.
Is it true that he's, y'know, REALLY "into", um, grazing animals? Like PHYSICALLY INTO them? Or is that just mean speculation?
<Peter> How's Unity comin', Jeff?
<Jeff> [takes a hit]
<Jeff> Oh, I'm feelin' it. Yeah, it's comin' along nicely.
Is it true that he's, y'know, REALLY "into", um, grazing animals? Like PHYSICALLY INTO them? Or is that just mean speculation?
iapetus said:
That's a bit harsh, a lot of his C64 stuff was very original - Ancipital, Iridis Alpha ... And even the variants of existing games Sheep In Space (Defender), Gridrunner (Centipede) had a lot of original concepts in there. He's done a bit more than just Robotron and Tempest games.
The thing with Unity just hammers home how much the games industry, and especially the UK games industry, has changed since the early days. When you think about how many small independent developers/bedroom-coders there were around at the time of the Spectrum/C64/Amiga and how many original/offbeat games you were seeing because of that, it is a bit sad to see how spiralling development costs and the buying-up of small developers has killed a lot of that creativity off.
Gahiggidy
My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
Lionhead was simply the wrong choice of publsiher. Heck, they can't even pubslih thier own hit games. (See: Fable.) Jeff should'a got them to sign a contract.
Nintendo should be its publisher. They're gonna want to have something new and exclusive in the twilight year of GameCube (2006).
Nintendo should be its publisher. They're gonna want to have something new and exclusive in the twilight year of GameCube (2006).
Nintendo's Q Fund was the right idea. They should have expanded that worldwide, they have the money and if they are serious about not wanting the industry to stagnate it's the right thing to do with that money.
There's a lot of disgruntled talent in the UK especially that would jump at the chance to do something original. All they need is the backing, freedom and encouragement to do it. And out of that arrangement might come the next GTA or Pokemon, you never know.
There's a lot of disgruntled talent in the UK especially that would jump at the chance to do something original. All they need is the backing, freedom and encouragement to do it. And out of that arrangement might come the next GTA or Pokemon, you never know.