Интервью с Дэйвом Фоллером, автором игры Wrath of Earth

Dave, we know that you took part in a few game projects in the 90-s, however in this interview today, we would like to talk about only one game – Wrath of Earth. This game was one of the revolutionary 3D-shooters based on Wolfenstein-like graphical engine, but this shooter was published a bit late - in the middle of the 90s. We've got many questions, and so we should begin this interview…

Q1.

WERTA: What literary works, films or games inspired you to create such a wonderful game? Could it be that had your own story?

DF: Personally, I was inspired by "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Ultimate Underworld" and wanted something that had elements of both those games. The artist on the project ("Flez") was a big fan of HR Giger which did influence some of the creature designs.

Q2.

WERTA: Why haven't you used the promising Build-engine in your project, which appeared around that time? Was it that Build required any extra financial expenses or legal agreements?

DF: As a very small indie developer, we just didn't have the finances to license 3rd party games. Also, we'd been working on the game for nearly two years and it would have been too complex to switch to something like the Build engine. Also, it wasn't as easy as it is now to find out about products like the Build engine (the internet was still a few years away).

Q3.

WERTA: Why have you also decided not to use Doom engine for creation of WoE?

DF: Like the Build engine, the Doom engine wasn't available at the time we started development. We did see an early engine demo of Doom when we started working on WoE but didn't have the resources / finance to rebuild our engine.

Q4.

WERTA: What was the reasoning behind the choice of Wolfenstein-like graphical engine for WoE? It wasn't current at all at that time.

DF: We'd spent a lot of time getting the engine working (I reverse-engineered the Wolfenstein3D code) and adding the dynamic lighting and other effects before we saw anything else that was being developed (i.e. the Doom demo). As I said above, we just didn't have the finances to start from scratch on the rendering engine.

Q5.

WERTA: There are quite a lot of new features in your game. For a first time, there were a lot of interactive environmental factors, such as sunlight, temperature, radioactivity and so on. Have you advertised this as the most unique feature of the game?

DF: The lack of success for the game was, in part, due to the lack of advertising. This was the publisher's first attempt at publishing a game and as a result, didn't really have the experience or resources to really push the game or get it into the shops. The publisher (Transend) was originally a shareware distributor and did many of the cover-mounted disks that were common on many PC magazines. That business didn't last long when the CDs became common and internet began to take off.

Q6.

WERTA: Many note a very difficult playthrough, which takes a lot of time. Weren't you afraid, that it could scare off a part of gamers? Has the game been tested at all?

DF: To be honest, we never really considered how gamers would react to the game, we were just making something that we would like to play. We didn't really have a QA department (as I said above, we were a small indie outfit). The testing was done by the team (about 5 of us in total) throughout the development of the game.

Q7

WERTA: Regarding some unrealized stuff. Initially, it was planned to have a four-man team and the two separate engines for rendering open and closed spaces, but because of some problems during the development, these features didn't make it to the final release. What can you tell us about that?

DF: The very first concept for the game did indeed feature a four man team and two rendering engines. However, the exterior engine didn't look very good and getting the team of four characters to move across the exterior landscape proved to be very tricky thing to do.

Q8

WERTA: How those two graphical engines should've been different?

DF: The interior first person engine is what ended up in the final game. I've attached a mock up of the exterior view which was a third person view.

Q9

WERTA: There known an unsuccessful example of Rebel Moon Revolution, a game which needed an advanced AI for the similar team of four marines. It was canceled in 1999. Have you planned introducing of such an AI for the initial form of a game? Wasn't that reason behind the cancellation of all planned squad-based features in WoE?

DF: I haven't heard of Rebel Moon Revolution, but the AI for the team was certainly a major factor in the decision to drop the exterior engine and concentrate on the interior one.

Q10

WERTA: Many reviewers made a note that the choice between male or female character doesn't make any difference during the game. Then what was the distinction between two?

DF: There are differences between the two characters, but it was a bit subtle: the female character was quicker but took more damage when hit. It wasn't a huge difference but it was there.

Q11.

WERTA: It seems that your game (especially, in a planned four characters mode) had affected the minds of creators of another great 3D-shooter, Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri. Is there any connection between the two? I'm not so sure regarding Terra Nova developers. What was the source of their inspiration if not your game?

DF: There were no connections at all between out team and the developers of TN. We were UK based and the developer of TN appear to be USA based. If TN did draw inspiration from us then I'm suitably humbled to have been a source of inspiration for Looking Glass (who did the Ultimate Underworld games which I really enjoyed and were an inspiration to us).

Q12.

WERTA: Despite all the seriousness of WoE, it also has some humorous bits. For example, the locker room for human and aliens on one of the levels (the door to left for humans, and for… OMG! to the right). Wasn't that the source of WC-themed humor in 3D-Shooters? What do you think about humor in legendary 3D-Shooter hits of mid-90s?

DF: Yes, we did put in the occasional joke into the game, if only to help keep us sane during the development. Of all the 90s based shooters, the only one that I can think of that had a great deal of humour was "Duke Nukem 3D", but that appeared after our game.

Q13.

WERTA: It's hard to imagine that all the game code was written in assembler language. Was that your credo in those years or was that an influence of some technical difficulties?

DF: Yes, the game code was entirely in assembler! Also, the rendering engine created a lot of the drawing code at start up. Again, as stated before, we didn't really have the finance to buy a good C compiler at that time. There was also a scripting language in the engine to implement all the level logic. I have since lost all the source code to the game and tried to reverse engineer the executable to rebuild the source code. Needless to say it's quite a big task and I don't have enough free time to do it. I have managed to decode quite a lot of the data formats the game used. One problem gamers usually have when running WoE is the EMS/XMS memory set up, at the time we had no documentation of EMS/XMS so we bypassed those and wrote our own extended memory system which used an undocumented feature of the 386 memory system.

Q14.

WERTA: Your game shows a remarkable quality in many aspects. WoE has a great art design, well-defined textures in various styles, nice animated intro, sound, music, animation for NPCs and etc. It's difficult to believe that all this was done a very small collective. Who else was in your team besides you?

DF: The core team were: Myself (code, level design, testing), Mark Spink (code, left half way through), "Flez" (aka Ian Brindle, art, level design and testing), Andrew Amess and Chris Nurse (level design, testing). The music, speech and sounds were outsourced to Allister Brimble (who'd done a lot of work for Team17 and others). The FMV sequences were outsourced to Animax Studios.

Q15.

WERTA: There's unconfirmed information about the planned sequel to the game. Can you explain this in more details?

DF: I don't recall there being any serious talk of a sequel to the game, but I believe there was a mention of a sequel when you finished the game. The team disbanded shortly after the game was completed and no work on a sequel was ever done as far as I'm aware.

Q16

WERTA: In you opinion, what was the major reason behind the failure of the game to become popular with 3D-Shooter fans in those years?

DF: In my opinion, the main failure was primarily down to a serious lack of marketing - no one knew the game existed!

Q17

WERTA: What do you think about potential translation of your game by the fans of old games from Russia?

DF: I have no problem about localising the game into Russian although you'd have a few technical issues with the way the text and the fonts were stored. If I ever had the time and the finance, re-imaging the game using modern rendering engines is something I'd really like to do. But don't hold your breath!

Q18

WERTA: What are your feelings regarding the distribution of the old games from 1990s for free?

DF: I personally don't have a problem with this but other individuals and companies may see things differently. In terms of income, I never received any royalties from this game - it just didn't sell! See Q16. It did, however, give me a stepping stone to other projects. If any fan of the game does bump into me, I do like a pint of "Old Thumper".

Q19

WERTA: How do you rate the meaningfulness of the modern "masterpieces" with uberadvanced 3D-graphics? Why, in your opinion, old games were better and much more interesting?

DF: I don't play enough modern games to really comment on this, although I do think the game mechanics for the 3D shooters hasn't really changed much over the years. I think Half Life was the last 3D shooter I really played to completion. I think these days it's much easier for developers to push the boundaries of the rendering of the environments than it is for them to develop the mechanics of the gameplay. I think that in the early 90s the limited rendering capabilities of the systems meant that more effort had to be put into the mechanics of the game to engage players with the world the designers were creating.

WERTA: And as a closing word, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for making such a cool game back in 1995. Actually, it's even a good thing that you decided to use Wolfenstein-like engine. You've shown to everybody all that possible and impossible that could be squeezed out of a such engine. Wrath of Earth is a champion by the amount of new features, and also is a great and striking final chord, which signed the end of the epochal period of Wolfenstein type of graphics!

DF: Thanks for being so flattering about WoE. It's nice to know there are people out there who have enjoyed the game.

Great thanks for this interview and best regards for you.