At the beginning...

Absolute Blue is a typical horizontal Shoot'em'Up-Game. Anybody who is crazy about games like Apydia, Katakis, Pulstar or R-Type knows what this new 2D-Shooter from Intermediaware is all about. At the first the project looked quite different. Jochen and Emmanuel, the two developers of the game, originally wanted to create a mixture between Space Taxi and R-Type. The player should transport people between various ports, but the way between these ports would be very much like in traditional shooters like R-Type. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Well, altough it sound very innovative the first prototype showed the developers that it doesn't make any fun, so Jochen and Emmanuel decided to change the direction toward the classical horizontal shooter genre.

Anyway, some elements of the original game found it's way into the final game. For example the ports, that are now checkpoints and energy refill points. Or for example the change of the scrolling direction in Level 6 - so there are at least a few elements that will give the whole shooter genre a slight new twist.

Problems and solutions...

When the game was nearly finished in April 2005,  Absolute Blue consisted of around 60'000 lines of code. Programmer Jochen typed in code night by night and while drinking one cup of coffee after the other he implemented new enemies, was on the search for bugs and  optimized the source a thousand times at least. One year ago, when the first saving, loading and graphic routines were ready he started very early with an level editor tool. Thats was probably a mistake, because it caused a lot of problems as development continued. "The editor we used to build and design the levels was programmed in only a few days. But when we decided to change the direction from a Space Taxi-Game to a R-Type game I decided not to code the editor from scratch, but to use as much as possible from the already finished editor to minimize development time. But there were so much changes, mainly in the structure of the level data, that after all it would have been faster to completely start a new editor. But that's the way it goes all the time, You live, You learn as they say...", said Jochen with a sigh.

Anyway, as he's  a big shoot'em'up fan himself, most of the time during development Jochen had a lot of fun and he really enjoyed it to work on a shooter game.

Diversity of species

Emmanuel, Art Director at Intermediaware and responsible for all the graphic stuff in Absolute Blue, has explained some of the development steps involved creating the artwork. At first, he will show us how the first boss of the game was developed. "As always at first I started with some loose scibbles. Jochen told me he wanted some very disgusting and slimy creature for the first Boss and it should be as big as the whole screen. After I had finished some scribbles I got an idea on how it could look and I worked on a more detailed coloured sketch or mood, that looked like the picture on the left side. Usally, when I have done that I wait one or two days to let it sink in and get some distance to my work but at this special enemy I was very sure to be on the right track and so I modelled it the same day in Lightwave.

Afterwards the scribble of the enemy will be modeled and animated.

The final cut

"After finishing the animation of the enemy I'm loading each frame into my paint package and put in some details and do further adjustments." On the right side you can see how the enemy will look in the final game, after Jochen has implemented it. During this step, he must define the properties of this enemy, tell the enemy how its interacting with the game environment, how strong it is, when it has to shoot at the player and so on.

More scribbles

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