Old school shooter with a twist

• Game- & Level Design
• Involvement: ♥ ♥ • • •
• Release: 2007

• Old school shooter with a twist
• Game- & level design
• Sony submission & Enemy waves

Xyanide Resurrection, successor to Xyanide, a retro inspired old school shooter with a twist first released for the original Xbox. During my graduation internship at Playlogic I was asked to step in during a critical reevaluation phase where we desperately needed to get the game through Sony’s second submission concept approval, after our first attempt failed and we were told to get back to the drawing board.

When we eventually succeeded in convincing Sony about our plans to create an old school shooter but with graphics that would far exceed any expectations on the then state-of-the-art PlayStation Portable I helped the team with boss battle designs, enemy waves and the addition of a 2 player versus mode.

Next to my own contributions I remember Xyanide Resurrection’s 360 video backdrops that were way ahead of its time and helped to create a unique high quality look. The 360 videos created an immersive feeling and allowed our artist to go completely nuts and create the most stunning fully animated backdrops. The level of detail was unprecedented for a game running on PlayStation Portable.

One of the coolest bits of tech-wizardry is the fact that bullets fired by the player actually collided with the pre-rendered objects in the video, in a convincing manner. A grey-scale depth mask video which synced with the main video, but as the main video was streamed directly from the UMD disc, there was no room to stream an additional video. We used the disc’s audio channel, not to store audio -which was preloaded into memory-, but to store our additional video track.

These kinds of crazy out of the box solutions is what makes me in love with game development. Pushing, twisting and manipulating the hardware to do things that look impossible.