Our new writer Candace has sent in an excellent interview with Chris Ashtear check it out!
In the last week, I was lucky enough to get an interview with Hands on! Tangrams developer Chris Ashtear. I barraged him with questions, and he was nice enough to answer them on his busy schedule.
Candace: How long have you been developing?
Chris: Um, if you count college, since 2006. If you don’t, since 2008 we made finished games in those classes so it SORT of counts by finished i mean REALLY buggy but basically beta)
Candace: What kind of games were they?
Chris: Well the first one i did was called Legend or Legends of Rune, we never could figure out whether to keep or lose that s.
It was kind of interesting… it was a fighting game but instead of using weapons you used magic.
You ran around on 5 platforms and so did your opponent, and you pressed a button to fire at a specific one. Different enemies had different weaknesses to the spells (all elemental spells).
That one actually turned out really good aside from someone who decided his work was to rip Chrono Trigger sprites ;p
Then I did Pandemic which was supposed to be a 2d platform shooter … kind of the control scheme of Halo Zero, where you use WASD to move left right and up, and use the mouse to aim your gun. Except the gun shoots hypodermic needles at people that have a plague. THAT game was a disaster… We had a version of this game engine that didn’t release resources… no matter how much we tried to get it to do so. So the game, which had a 400mb folder, ended up using 2gig of ram.
Then there was Paradise-O, that was the final college game. It was a 3d space shooter like Freespace. This lady is testing a top secret jet plane and hears the voice of her dead brother. So she steals the ship, and the government chases her until she flies it into the sun. That turned out okay although the collision was a little wonky. I was really happy with some of the bosses though. There was a top hat ship that shot this huge beam that wrecked the hell out of everything in its path.
Candace: That’s really cool, what about after college? more »
