Well, we all do our best with what we have and the time made available to us.

Personally, Season of Ice is my least favourite of the three, undoubtedly because it was our first GBA game at the time and a lot of processes and tools just didn't exist, which meant much of the work was done manually. Still, I think it was comparable to similar types of games at the time, though perhaps I may have an understandably skewed perspective on that.

With Season of Flame, our primary goal was to make everything about the game better than Season of Ice, and we took a lot of feedback from various forums into account as well. Season of Flame had a re-designed and rewritten engine, particle systems, proportional text display, etc.

Attack of the Rhynocs was again the same deal. We wanted to out-do Season of Flame. I even spent some time with the audio engineer imposing certain technical restrictions on his song tempos because I wanted to be able to animate objects or change colours in sync with the music. The journal was rather more complicated to write compared to the Atlases in the previous games.

When you take into account that each successive Spyro game had to be created in less time than the previous one (and with fewer programmers each time), you generally don't bother with such details unless you're really determined to make a better game.

Determining how difficult to make a game is harder than one might think. Individual members of the team itself have differing opinions on whether some part of the game is too easy or too hard. Ultimately, it's the publisher's decision to establish how difficult the game is going to be. I thought the nine-square puzzles in AotR were ridiculously easy. Originally they were much more difficult. We were told to make them easy - say, two or three moves away from solved - and so that's what we did. An individual may know just how difficult a game should be for their own self, but when it comes to pleasing the masses, it requires a very good feel for the target audience as a whole. It's often decided by play-testers selected from the target audience, but not always.

The decision to put Elora in the game was not actually a company decision as much as the idea of one or two people on the team, as a lot of such ideas were (and still are). The "official" design for the AotR journal said nothing about anything animating in sync with the music - that was something I wanted to do because I thought it was neat and would be fun to write.

Adding Elora to the game was one of our initial goals simply because people on the forums were asking for Elora and, as you said, she hasn't been seen very much. As with the soup kitchen mini-game, however, it was just one of many such ideas that were cut to fit the time schedule. Sometimes, it helps if you can present the design team with a convincing means of implementing a particular feature. Often, though, everybody's plate is already rather full of other things that require more attention.

Putting Elora in the game was a very early idea and as such, it did not get fully fleshed out. If implemented, Elora could have been anything from a fully playable character to simply one of the NPCs you talk to somewhere in the game.

Hey, Mr.Schebek or Krokus, whichever you perfer.  Welcome to the board!  Thanks for your part in the making of the Spyro GBA games.  They were very enjoyable!!!!

Hi Krokus! 

Nice to see you are new here! 

Want to be friends?

Thanks, Krokus, that was very informative. However, I was actually asking about the fact that you just die as soon as you enter the water, instead of how like the artisan waterfall in Spyro 1 - how you could quickly jump out, much like the lava levels in SoF. Sorry, if I am a bit confusing...

Heh, I don't mind the length, I find  your comments very interesting. Well, it's sad that you didn't put that in because I found that the only annoying part out of SoI, SoF and AotR - other than that, the game was awesome.

I don't realize that I'm confusing until I re-read my posts, heh, I'm like that. I am still 13 and human remember! lol

Wow thanx, I guess its just my english >_<.

Yeah, i guess the main things i didn;t like about the GBA games were:
1.Repetative landscape
2.Cant bounce out of water

But, they were fun!

Hello, I'm Cynder794! I support SpyroXCynder!!!