Greetings

Krokus · Feb 19, 2008 5:17 PM

Hi. New user here. smile

The moderator contacted me regarding Spyro-y questions about the GBA Spyro games.

Although I haven't worked on a Spyro game for quite some time now, I did work on Season of Ice, Season of Flame and Attack of The Rhynocs/Spyro Adventure as a programmer and technical designer.

Some basic info about the games can be found here (if you scroll down a bit): http://www.user.dccnet.com/dschebek/projects.htm

I thoroughly enjoyed working on all three of them. smile

Spyro · Feb 19, 2008 10:28 PM

Hello, Mr. Schebek!

I couldn't have imagined you'd join my forum! What an honor!

Well, of course there's all sorts of things I'd like to ask but I'm sure none of them are "allowable". Ever since I heard that you had three concepts rejected for a fourth GBA Spyro, I have wondered what those concepts entailed. Why did Sierra reject them? Especially when what got created in its place (Cortex Conspiracy) was inferior to any of the work Digtial Eclipse had done. After Cortex Conspiracy were you (or the Spyro team) ever approached again to make another Spyro GBA game or no? Were there any levels or characters designed that got cut out (I know you mentioned wanting to include Elora) but was there anything else? Have you kept up with Spyro since then? Seen how they rebooted the series and are starting over? The most recent Spyro GBA game...Eternal Night...was actually one of the most highly critically acclaimed Spyro games since Digtial Eclipse left. Have you seen it/played it?

That's all for now...I'm happy you joined our Spyro community here and look forward to your input on what you did with Spyro.

-Neal Patten

Krokus · Feb 20, 2008 4:21 AM

Although I do know we pitched at least one concept, that's all it was: a concept and not a full game design, else I would have been privy to it. I suppose they were rejected because Sierra wanted to do something different. As I recall, we were leaning towards something more RPG-like.

We never did a fourth Spyro game. Attack of the Rhynocs was the last one we did. What I think happened was Universal bought Radical Entertainment and then handed the fourth GBA Spyro game to them. I think Radical may even have, in turn, tried to sub-contract the game to us, which I find rather amusing. smile

Ultimately, Radical got Vicarious Visions to make the game. I suspect the game design was either Radical's or VV's making.

As to whether anything got cut out, I think just about every game has stuff cut out of it. You always try to "over-design" the game, in that you add elements to the design even though you know in advance that there likely won't be enough time to implement them all. As time runs down and deadlines approach, decisions are inevitably made to cut this or that aspect of the game.

As an example, look at Attack of the Rhynocs. You may have noticed that, in the journal, Sparx's description of one of the items tells you that it was given to you by a character named "Momkey". This is a bug (that still irritates me). Initially, that item was acquired by playing a Tapper-like mini-game in which you serve soup to tables of monkey workers. The mini-game, along with certain other elements of the original game design, got cut to meet deadlines. The original text string for the Journal description unfortunately found a way to remain in the game.

I haven't kept up with the Spyro games since Orange and Purple came out (I wanted to see how VV's game scored versus ours big_smile ).

Trainer_Spyro · Feb 20, 2008 5:25 PM

No offense but I didn't like Season of Ice all that much. But I have to admit it was more entertaining than "VV's" GBA games. Not to mention the design was better.
Vivendi's games are way too easy. There's no challenge.
Only one of the many aspects that Spyro games have lost over the years. sad

Krokus · Feb 21, 2008 9:03 AM

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

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. smile

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.

Razz · Feb 21, 2008 11:38 PM

Welcome to Spyroforum, Mr. Schebek/Krokus! smile

Wow, I'm learning more about the Spyro GBA titles than I ever would have thought (I can't play hand held systems, so I've missed out on those titles).

I'm a big Elora fan and it's always seemed a bit sad that she hasn't been seen since YotD. I read on your site that you had wanted to put Elora into AotR but were unable to. Can you tell us any of the plans you had for her that didn't come to fruition? Are you hoping she'll show up in any future titles?

Krokus · Feb 22, 2008 4:59 PM

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.

cynderfan · Feb 27, 2008 8:13 AM

What a honor, welcome!

Spyrojoe19 · Feb 28, 2008 2:19 AM

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!!!!

Krokus · Feb 28, 2008 10:16 AM

Thanks, I had fun working on them. smile

TrueSpyroFAN · Mar 20, 2008 4:48 PM

Hi Krokus! smile

Nice to see you are new here! big_smile

Want to be friends?

ratchet · Mar 20, 2008 10:06 PM

Hello Mr. Schebek, I Found SOF Awesome, SOI was alright and AOTR is good to. My only complains are really the fact that if you fall in the water once, you die, would've there been a way where you could jump out if you want like the swamp in Spyro 1 or acid in Spyro 3 or is it too hard to program. I find it interesting that Radical were going to get in on the act because I find the later crash games very disappointing and Orange was disappointing itself, i wonder what would of happened if Radical Did Orange.

Krokus · Mar 22, 2008 7:47 AM

I also rather liked how SOF turned out. We basically took everything we could think of that was wrong with SOI and did our best to fix it. smile

Game mechanics change rather a lot depending on whether Spyro can swim. For example, what then is the point of being able to freeze water so you can walk across it? You'd have to modify the level design and mechanics so Spyro could not walk up on shore from in the water, but could still jump up on shore when standing on frozen ice.

Swimming was, in fact, originally planned for SOF but there were technical aspects to consider. For one, we'd have needed two sets of animations for every action Spyro would be able to perform in the water (an "above water" half of Spyro and a "below water" half), rendered in 9 directions - Spyro has 16 directions but we only need to draw him in 9 and use horizontal flipping to get the other 7. So multiple idle animations, swimming, etc rapidly start eating up cartridge space and artist's time.

At the outset, we made the decision to axe swimming due to the time cost and amount of cartridge space required, though the idea remained on the table for a little while after. Unfortunately, there was never any time during the development of the project to go back and give it serious consideration.

As to whether it is hard to program [swimming], it's not. Every area of map that Spyro can move onto is marked as being a certain type of surface (e.g., ground, lava, water, freezable water, ice, etc). The programming side of adding swimming is reasonably negligible. The artists' time and cartridge space were the real issues with it.

Spyro · Mar 22, 2008 4:29 PM

If you were given the chance to do another Spyro game, would you do it even now, five years later?

I heard that when a company gets an idea from a fan, they can't even hear of it/read it due to legal restrictions. Is this true? Many years ago when I was naive and young I emailed Digital Eclipse my idea for a fourth Spyro GBA game called "Spyro: Revenge of the Riptocs". The title was supposed to be similar to "Attack of the Rynocs" and be a direct sequel to it. I realize how silly I was to think it might actually be read!

Do you know if there was concept art and/or models created that were never released to the public?

You said ideas like Elora were just ideas of a team member or two, not the company. Besides Elora and Momkey, do you recall anything else that was cut out - minigame concepts, characters (and their names), levels, etc. Would you be able to describe other aspects that were cut out?

Finally, can a game only be made by the publisher coming to the developer, or could Digital Eclipse actually go and request to make another Spyro game?

ratchet · Mar 23, 2008 1:02 AM

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...

Krokus · Mar 23, 2008 7:57 AM

Sorry about the length... tongue

I think it would be fun to do another Spyro game. As for the rest of my reply, I should point out that the following is all my own personal opinion. I may in fact be wrong on many details. This is my take...

I don't know about the legalities of what happens to ideas submitted to a publisher. In my personal opinion, though, ideas are a dime a dozen. If I write a letter to an author and give him my idea for a great book to write, and he goes ahead and writes a book based on that story, do I have any legal right to any of the profits earned from the sales of that book? The author did all the research, months and months (possibly even years) of painstaking work, developing all the characters and situations, and fleshing out that idea into a full-blown novel. The author did all the work; all I did was think of a nifty idea for a story. With regard to writing a book, coming up with an idea is the easiest thing in the whole process. In fact, as a rule of thumb, if you think of an idea, chances are at least ten other people have already thought of it. Usually more. Writing a book involves coming up with thousands of ideas and making them all fit together into a coherent whole.

The same goes for video games. Creating a PC, console or handheld video game, especially these days, is a massive and expensive undertaking, requiring a sizable team of people putting in long hours for months or even years. The "idea" for the game is not merely a few sentences or paragraphs - it is a document containing hundreds of pages describing every aspect of the game in as much detail as possible (the good ones have lots of diagrams and storyboards, too). Everything has to be carefully thought out; all the art has to be created in a certain decided-upon style, which usually requires several revisions until it is green-lit. So it goes with audio, game mechanics, how the front end screens work, etc.

I personally don't think it's possible for someone on a fan web site to state "they should have [name of character] as a playable character in the next game" and then be able to legally claim that the company stole their idea when the next game does in fact include that playable character. Now, if someone submitted a full 300-page design document for a game to a company, and that company developed that game with no credit or recompense to that person, then I think he/she would have grounds for legal action. But you should never do something like that without getting a signed non-disclosure agreement from the company first.

Chances are, someone at Digital Eclipse read your email. However, Digital Eclipse does not develop in-house games. We always develop games for publishers, although if we come up with an in-house design for a game, we may find a publisher who will pay us to develop it for them. While we may own the license, the publisher owns the game itself (they paid for it, after all.) So, there's not much we can do when someone sends us a design for a new Spyro game. We were the developer chosen by Universal to make the first three Spyro games on the GBA. After that, they changed developers because, I suppose, they didn't like our ideas for a fourth Spyro GBA game. Since we don't own the Spyro license, we couldn't make the game even if we wanted to. Your best bet would have been to send the idea to Universal, since they own and control the Spyro license. Now, that's not to say that we wouldn't be able to come up with a design for a brand new Spyro game and pitch it to Universal, but as I said, Universal controls the Spyro License; they likely already have plans for where they want to take the license with subsequent Spyro games. They therefore shop around for developers to make the game for them. It's terribly rare for a publisher to act on a game design submitted to them out of the blue for one of their own licenses.

When a publisher does shop around, what they are generally looking for is a developer that can get what *they* want done in the amount of time *they* would like it to take, for what *they* consider a reasonable amount of money (of course, almost all of them are open to different ideas and changes). And that's the trick to running a successful development studio: you need good management to negotiate a deal that appeals to the publisher without consequently destroying the lives of your employees. Sometimes, however, the potential for creating many more future games for a publisher (if you do a good job on this one) leads to some ground being surrendered by the developer in order to get the contract. This usually means long hours for the employees to get everything done in what may turn out to be not enough time. The more difficult the development process is made for the employees, the greater the chance of the game not turning out well. The developer will negotiate two primary assets: time and money, and when you are competing with potentially many, many other developers, the negotiation process can take on a "Name That Tune" angle. If the developer is not savvy enough to know when to back out of the negotiation, they may end up signing a contract with time constraints that doom everyone involved to months and months of very long work hours. Unless everyone on the team is absolutely devoted to the game 100% (and are good at their jobs), this situation does not bode well for the final product. With so much competition between so many developers, you can see why so many bad games get released. The best developers are the ones who have a good game engine and all the right tools and people to get a project done in less time.

With regard to other things that were cut out of the Spyro GBA games, I can't recall anything else specifically. Usually, the culling process involves removing things from the game that will actually save us time with a minimum of fuss. For example, deciding to cut say, ice breath from the game would be bad because while it would save some programming and art time, the people designing all the levels now have to go back and rework all the levels that require ice breath. More often, culling starts with removing one or more entire levels of the game, since it saves a great deal of time and adds little to no additional work for anybody. Another popular item sometimes dropped to save time is network play. That type of culling is performed during development when progress falls too far behind schedule. Sometimes ideas are dropped simply because they just don't fit with the game design. Most games are over-designed to begin with, so cutting features is a very common practice. Most of the over-design is cut out once the game and technical designs have been completed and tasks are assigned to everyone. The stuff that gets cut at the beginning is the stuff for which nobody on the team has any room on their plate.

Ratchet: Oh, I thought you meant swimming. smile I suppose that being able to quickly jump back out of the water would have been greatly preferable to falling in and instantly dying (makes more sense, too.) While I can't say for certain (I didn't work on the Spyro control mechanics), the reason why he is not able to jump back out of the water may be as simple as nobody involved thought of it. Or, there may have been technical considerations that prevented us from doing that. I honestly cannot say.

ratchet · Mar 23, 2008 9:06 AM

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.

Reivan · Mar 23, 2008 9:33 AM

Ratchet being confusing is one of your many traits. People just get used to it

ratchet · Mar 23, 2008 10:58 AM

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

ice_missle · May 15, 2008 4:21 PM

Hi and welcome to the forum. And I agree with Reivan. ratchet you can be a little confusing at times. But you always have some interesting points.

ratchet · Jun 15, 2008 1:48 AM

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!

Spyro the wise · Jun 15, 2008 11:44 PM

Hello I'm new,Glad to be here

Cynder794 · Jun 16, 2008 12:08 AM

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

Dragonz · Jun 16, 2008 12:10 AM

Hi there! I am new to Spyroforum(Only been here a few days! lol) Thanks for the information!

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