When
is this Game going to be Finished?
-or-
The Secret Story Behind the Development
of CIND-E 1.4
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May 6, 2000 - When is this game going to be finished? Probably never. I started working on this game in 1994. When I left Virgin Interactive I decided to produce a game on my own. I had a severance package ($250,000.00 after taxes) that would let me live for a couple of years and buy equipment. Later on, New Line Cinema funded an additional $284,000.00 in game development. New Line later decided not to continue with the project. It's likely that over the years more like $600,000.00 has been spent on C.I.N.D.-E 1.4, but that doesn't roll off the tongue as well as $500,000.00, hence the picture above. After New Line bailed, I shopped the game around to a bunch of publishers. A few were kind in their rejections but most just blew it off. This is what inspired the slogan "Get Lost in the Caverns of Nebulon", because most of the publishers told me to get lost. If memory serves me (and it rarely does), my money was spent from 1994 to 1995, and the New Line Cinema money was spent in 1996. I was actually worse off than when I started, in spite of the seemingly large amount of money that passed through my coffers, because once I had ramped up development assuming the rest of the budget would arrive and then it didn't, I had a lot of bills to pay and no money to pay them. (The total budget, not counting my contribution, was $750,000.00, and with my contribution it would have been a cool $1 million), which was a lot of money in 1994. I eventually dug myself out of the hole I was in by starting up a contracting business under the Above the Garage Productions name. I would still work on the game engine between contracting jobs. I also used the game engine to deliver some solutions to a couple of my clients that needed something done fast. Finally, I made CyberDome using the engine in about nine weeks. More recently, my SGI machine, which originally cost about $90,000.00 (and currently worth about $1.29), had a hard disk crash. This bothered me quite a bit. One reason was that SGI hard drives are very expensive (way more expensive than PC drives). The thought of all of my data (caverns, animations, particle effects, etc.) disappearing into thin air because my one and only SGI machine was dead was rather disturbing. I bought a new "system" hard drive (the data was on another drive, thank goodness, since the DAT backups aren't too reliable) and then spent many evenings backing up everything into a Windows-compatible format. This would include exporting PowerAnimator files as .obj files, converting Alias Pix files to Windows BMP format, and such like that. Then I would pack the files into a TAR image and FTP the TAR file from the SGI machine to a Windows machine and burn a CD-ROM. This took a couple of months as I shifted through 1.5 gigs of "stuff". One benefit was that, as I dug through all these files and converted them into a format that I could use outside of an SGI Irix machine, I realized just how much work I had put into the game. Although I make the joke that for $500,000.00, all I have to show is one screenshot, in fact, there is lots of other stuff like concept art, music, animations, particle effects, R&D, and so on, that just isn't visible to the outside world. Ah, the joy of game development. |