At first everything went fine, they got pretty far in the planning stage, made some new graphics and the head programmer played with the code, but soon they noticed the difficulties of the process - only one programmer who had enough knowledge of the Jaguar and on the top of that he was also very busy with other things. Also, many team members, as had been feared, lost interest in the project after they realized how much time it would take to finish Native. So in the end it was pretty much Ville, the main coder and a couple of other guys. They also noticed upon closer investigation that Native was in a lot earlier stage than they had thought, and soon realized they had to give up the project because of the lack of people interested in helping out, lack of time and lack of knowledge. Ville had in mind some thoughts of recreating the game for Lynx or GameBoy Color (he stated that the GBC is a lot easier platform to develop on than the Jaguar), but it would have been pointless. Native may yet get another chance: Carl Forhan has expressed some interest in looking at Native.
(From email conversation with Ville Järvi)
This demo does not contain sounds, level bosses, and
the Native extra weapon system due the low amount of available work RAM. Remember: It is
not possible to reload data with the current version of the Jag-Server software, therefore
we have to store all the compressed Native data in memory. We have to divide the memory
into 1 MB work RAM and 1 MB compressed data. It was simply not possible to include more
data like all the sounds and the 2 level bosses. Sorry.
Native is a horizontal 2D shoot'em up. Press the A, B, or C button to get started.
Extra Weapons (not included in the demo!) Native does contain two combined extra weapon
systems. Some of the destroyed enemies leave a coin or a star. Collect the money to buy
extra weapons in the shop in the middle of each level. You can buy for example a
satellite, lives, energy etc... The star is something different. It contains a letter like
for example a "O" or "X". Every letter picked up will transform your
ship completely. There exist five different classes of ships. If you pick up the same
letter again you will power up the shot power of your ship (again 5 different power
classes for each ship).
Some Technical Details: 60 FPS (50 Hz PAL is not supported in the demo), 16 Bit CrY mode,
Up to 4 layers of parallax scrolling, Transparency and lighting effects, Up to 120 sprites
(OP-Objects) on-screen, Scaling effects (OP), Real time data decrunch (DSP), Game engine
running completely on the GPU, Rotation effects (not included in demo - not enough work
RAM).
Roland Graf - Coding, Johannes Graf - All graphics - Level design, Gordon Gibson - ICE
decrunch routine
We don't have a publisher for Native yet. If we don't find a solution in the next 4 weeks
we will stop any work on this game. As you can see on the demo size it is not possible to
make a 16 MBit (2 MByte) cartridge out of this game. The complete level with the 2 bosses
and FX samples will take about 1.6 MByte (and still does not contain any music). We are
using a good compression algorithm but 2D graphics do need a lot of memory. The only
solution is a CD version but we don't have a CD-devkit.
Release date: Oct 24 1997
(JEO 2/1)
Q: As far as I understand, your primary problem is that you
didn't have (or couldn't get) a CD-DevKit - right??
A: Right, that was our problem. In the meantime we could probably get one, however we want
possibly to do something quite different which has nothing to do with the Jaguar anymore.
If that works, we would have no more time to finish Native for the Jaguar.
Q: Or do you need financial support? (for what?)
A: No.
(JEO 2/1)
Related links:
http://members.aol.com/duranik/index.htm
http://personal.inet.fi/cool/villepiia/native/
(video of actual game, CyRo)