Star Trek is ColorDMD's 66th supported title! Thought to do something different with this release and share a little of the backstory. Hope it'sworth the read! -Randy
Captain'sLog: Stardate2015.003
I fear the crew is preparing mutiny. Despite overcoming many challenges during this five year mission, this may be the the first timewe find ourselves wholly unprepared. In our attempt to adhere to the prime directive, we have been unable to harness the energy of the red star. We have sent mission after mission, after mission, after (listen... there's really far too many damned missionshere) mission. Our best crew. Smart, brave crew. Anyone we can ask... I've asked all of them. It's too daunting. We are overcome. <End Transmission>
Flash back a little more than two years ago and that's what the situation regarding ST looked like. I had foolishly said at the beginning of 2015... hey, we plan on working on Star Trek this year. There were several other games mentioned too, all of whichprogressed as expected. But the technical challenges in Star Trek turned out to be a surprise. And now I was on the hook.
To be fair, a lot of the fundamental elements needed to tackle Star Trek had already been developed... but we had no formal editor for the new advanced processing features. A lot of this was still being done with pen, paper, and hex editors. Furthermore,the sequences themselves were wholly uncooperative. Very little in the game could simply be colorized offline because the animations were responsive to what was happening beneath the glass on the playfield... That’s pinball!
Factor into that 3-D rendered spaceships and explosions, 18 different gameplay modes, 3 different wizard modes, Vengeance fights, warps, spins, galactic away teams, and on and on. Without realizing the difficulties, I asked Dave Timmer, an experienced ColorDMDdeveloper, to take it on and he was excited to get going. By the middle of the year, after running into endless obstacles with the tools, Dave had managed to color all he could do. We did the only thing we could at the time... take a break and regroup.
The theory was that if tackled games with smaller incremental challenges, in the end that would probably help toward completing Star Trek. Dave (and the rest of the development team) moved on to a number of games that provided new challenges, and I triedto keep up. Over the next two years, we would complete many titles and the coloring engine evolve significantly to the point we thought we could take another stab at Star Trek.
Captain'sLog: Stardate2015.003I fear the crew is preparing mutiny. Despite overcoming many challenges during this five year mission, this may be the the first timewe find ourselves wholly unprepared. In our attempt to adhere to the prime directive, we have been unable to harness the energy of the red star. We have sent mission after mission, after mission, after (listen... there's really far too many damned missionshere) mission. Our best crew. Smart, brave crew. Anyone we can ask... I've asked all of them. It's too daunting. We are overcome. <End Transmission>
Flash back a little more than two years ago and that's what the situation regarding ST looked like. I had foolishly said at the beginning of 2015... hey, we plan on working on Star Trek this year. There were several other games mentioned too, all of whichprogressed as expected. But the technical challenges in Star Trek turned out to be a surprise. And now I was on the hook.
To be fair, a lot of the fundamental elements needed to tackle Star Trek had already been developed... but we had no formal editor for the new advanced processing features. A lot of this was still being done with pen, paper, and hex editors. Furthermore,the sequences themselves were wholly uncooperative. Very little in the game could simply be colorized offline because the animations were responsive to what was happening beneath the glass on the playfield... That’s pinball!
Factor into that 3-D rendered spaceships and explosions, 18 different gameplay modes, 3 different wizard modes, Vengeance fights, warps, spins, galactic away teams, and on and on. Without realizing the difficulties, I asked Dave Timmer, an experienced ColorDMDdeveloper, to take it on and he was excited to get going. By the middle of the year, after running into endless obstacles with the tools, Dave had managed to color all he could do. We did the only thing we could at the time... take a break and regroup.
The theory was that if tackled games with smaller incremental challenges, in the end that would probably help toward completing Star Trek. Dave (and the rest of the development team) moved on to a number of games that provided new challenges, and I triedto keep up. Over the next two years, we would complete many titles and the coloring engine evolve significantly to the point we thought we could take another stab at Star Trek.
