He'd burned the ISO to a CD-R and tried to play the ROMhack in his modded PSX. Two days later, Artemio had some bad news. I'd take two weeks, and THEN talk about the end. In all honesty, I had become a bit stubborn about working on Policenauts, so maybe he was right. Marc had another suggestion: Take two weeks off. We'd put our due diligence in, and it was time to really discuss an end to the project. I told Marc that I was really unhappy with doing ten more changes out of nowhere, and that we'd fixed so many things. Death March: This is when the developers realize that, oh no, there really is no good ending in sight: These changes are going to come endlessly until the thing is cancelled or we're all laid off and they outsource the rest. Marc and Artemio had been working on Policenauts for years. ![]() ![]() That's overstating things a bit for the ROMhack, but it is really disheartening to have your feature list get into single digits, have the end in sight, and then have the goalposts moved out from under you. Development Hell: When your developers are working ceaselessly to change features back and forth. If that sounds paranoid, I'd seen it before and it's way, way too common in business projects as well. I was now getting worried: Marc and Artemio could flounder with changes constantly, if they wanted to. There was no deadline, and no clear end goal. In terms of software development, we were doing what's called an "ad-hoc" management process. He wanted me to modify the Engrishy T-Gear99 sequence, in Act 2, when the computer wants to authenticate you (crests puzzle).Įxcept that was actually TEN graphics, since that was a whole sequence. Graphics were a pain in the ass, because I had to manually set breakpoints, grab the original out of VRAM, modify in GIMP, recompress with LZO, overwrite the data in DATA.DPK, etc. He wanted me to change a graphic, he said. So we kept our mouths shut nearing the end of beta, with the plan to just release one day with little to no fanfare.īut when we got near there, with my list of features dropped to zero, Marc asked me for one last change. And though they're within their right, for S-E to send them a C&D, one month out from release? C'mon. Now, you can imagine that I'm not chomping at the bit for "Chrono Trigger 2: As Written By Some Dude" but I can certainly appreciate the amount of work put into it, and apparently, the fan project was actually turning out quite good. Apparently, the team put two years of work into it and one month before release, Square-Enix sent them a cease-and-desist. In fact, during this time, I was hanging out on RHDN and saw a Chrono Trigger fan sequel nearing completion. I was happy and wanted to tell everyone.īut Artemio and Marc vetoed it, and they were right to do so. When we got the list close to zero, months later and with tons of decompressor tricks, modifications, etc. The only things that stuck out to me that I said no to were the video compression, writing a new separate installer for the patch, and ultimately, I had to give up on fixing the end credits for pSX - it would've required me redoing it in assembly from scratch, and it would've taken months. To be fair, I didn't lump anything together (the telops comprised a good 20-30 goals, individually), but I'd say near the end, we had translated or fixed nearly one hundred things. You've been reading about them in the course of the thread. I knocked some down, and Marc put some up. ![]() I didn't count one-offs like the motorcycle scene or the shooting trainer.īut when we were done with "alpha", I comprised a list of milestones to get to before we could call beta. It meant the gameplay scripts, the VOX, and the movies were in English. For Policenauts, I defined alpha as "playable in English". all the bells and whistles and extra features you want are in place, if not completely bug-free), well, "alpha" is a little more nebulous. While "beta" is a useful software designation, insofar as you are "feature complete" (i.e. I've previously talked about this in the thread, and since we never figured out what it was, I won't dwell on it, save that it was a frustrating footnote in the "alpha" stage of the game. It turns out that pSX - my emulator of choice at the time - hard crashed in the end credits of Policenauts. You know that sound Windows Vista makes when something crashes? He gave me the Act 7 script, I incorporated the VOX and the movie files, completed the game and - BONK. "Want to become the first person to finish Policenauts in English?"Īnd that's how it went. "Well," Marc asked me one night in November. Part 48: Tales of ROMhacking: Part 7 Tales of ROMhacking
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