Feature: Tracking Down The Details Of Colony Wars' Development

Author: by Staff

In a new Gamasutra feature today, contributor Isaiah Taylor describes tracking down the creators of Psygnosis' Colony Wars, a game that was a key part to his childhood. Taylor first found ex-Psygnosis lead designer Nick Burcombe, who pointed him to Colony Wars composer Tim Wright. Wright described to Taylor how he wanted to the game's soundtrack to capture the game's science fiction drama and political intrigue. "The real guide there was that I should seek inspiration from films such as Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica," he said. "Big space opera-style tracks with character-based themes, modified and intertwined for use in various situations and locations." Taylor also tracked down Colony Wars writer and lead designer Mike Ellis, who said it was difficult pitching a PC-style space shooter on a console dominated by racing and fighting games. He said the team tried to make something a little more intense than the "flight sims set in space" he saw on the PC. "I believed that most [PC space shooters] felt a little slow and ponderous," he said. "[They] didn't capture the fantasy of the high speed, intense dog fights seen in movies such as Star Wars and even Top Gun. Delivering the essence of that fantasy was to be our number one goal." From there, Taylor moved on to talk to Colony Wars lead programmer Chris Roberts, who highlighted how different the process of programming 3D graphics was in the original PlayStation era. "The first and foremost challenge on PS1 was contending with the relative lack of features in the poly rasteriser that we take for granted today, namely perspective correction, clipping and depth buffering," Roberts said. "This meant that large polygons would warp and vanish when they got too close to the camera, and triangles tended to sort badly because of the very coarse depth ordering mechanism. The only practical solution was to detect large polygons and subdivide them when they get too close, but this can have a drastic effect on performance," he continued. The full feature includes additional details on the cult classic's development, and a discussion of the game's prospects for a revival or re-release on the PlayStation Network.