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jocelynsachs wrote:This is fantastic I can only apologise for the level designs; I had no idea what I was doing at the time. Looking forward to playing this tonight and finding out what you've done to the old girl.
Ok, that's how i call a BIG surprise
It's interesting to see one of the original devs here
Last edited by Rayman The Hedgehog on Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yeah, I did all the coding, pretty much all the level design, even a little bit of the art. Team17 was really busy on other things at the time so there wasn't a 'team' as such. A lot of the rest was done by a couple of friends I was living with at Uni.
TDG wrote:Sounds almost like the original Alien Breed 3D was done by an outside team.
Pretty much. I was in the last term of my second year at Uni when I contacted T17 and told them I had a demo to show them. They invited me in, looked at it, and hired me - but I stayed at Uni while I worked on it. One of my friends helped with part of the level editor (the bit that let us build the 3D robot and other 3D shapes), and another drew a lot of the monster art (apart from the red alien you meet first). T17 were focused on Worms games at the time so we were left more or less to our own devices. None of us had ever made a game before.
Well this is just simply delicious! Eheheh... Anyway good to know you worked on the development of Alien Breed 3D. You guys really did your best to make the finest FPS game for Amiga and all. The resolution of the original game still makes me nervous. But thanks to ZDoom modding, it's now super-playable! It gives the game a lot of spotlight it needed.
Now i'm wondering, what do you think of today's Team 17? I'm sure it was the tiny company back then. I remember them still rehashing Worms series over and over again, but now check out their recently published game, Blasphemous!
Last edited by Captain J on Wed Mar 18, 2020 9:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Captain J wrote:Well this is just simply delicious! Eheheh... Anyway good to know you worked on the development of Alien Breed 3D. You guys really did your best to make the best FPS game for Amiga and all. The resolution of the original game still makes me nervous. But thanks to ZDoom modding, it's now super-playable! It gives the game a lot of spotlight it needed.
Now i'm wondering, what do you think of today's Team 17? I'm sure it was the tiny company back then. I remember them still rehashing Worms series over and over again, but now check out their recently published game, Blasphemous!
I worked there for over seventeen years, actually; it was a good place to be. A few close calls during the big upheavals of the late 90's/early 00s, but we scraped by.
Latterly it changed; became more of a corporate entity rather than the family it had been, and that's when I decided to move on. These days the internal devs are mostly tasked with bringing externally signed projects to market, which is, y'know, a living and all but not what I went into games to do.
jocelynsachs wrote:
One of my friends helped with part of the level editor (the bit that let us build the 3D robot and other 3D shapes).
I wonder how was those tools?
The source code of The Killing Grounds doesn't have it after checking thousands of times
Also, how different is the map format used in the demo and the final thing? (It's curious because i tried to convert it to a Quake map for ArcturusDeluxe and just crashed, nearly yeeted UAE4Arm after that)
Very cool to "meet" someone from those classic gaming years. Team17 is one of the names that I remember fondly from those "heady days" of 90s gaming when new and cool games seemed to be coming out every week and so many of them (or at least demos or shareware versions) could be picked up from a magazine cover disk. I was always more of a PC gamer, but I loved my Amiga too. They were fantastic machines for the time and had some great titles.
jocelynsachs wrote:
One of my friends helped with part of the level editor (the bit that let us build the 3D robot and other 3D shapes).
I wonder how was those tools?
The source code of The Killing Grounds doesn't have it after checking thousands of times
Also, how different is the map format used in the demo and the final thing? (It's curious because i tried to convert it to a Quake map for ArcturusDeluxe and just crashed, nearly yeeted UAE4Arm after that)
I distinctly remember that AB3D II: TKG came with a 3d model editor, I believe it was even advertised in the manual or somewhere else as a map editor; I remember starting it once and drawing some triangles which never fit together the way I wanted them, so I gave up after about five minutes. Now that I think about it, that must havev been the very first time I did 3d modeling in my life
I did not have an Amiga but I often read various computer games magazines including Amiga ones and I noticed how often the name Team 17 came up in reviews and charts including in the first magazine I ever bought; Computer & Video Games.
The game reviewed in that was the original Alien Breed.
Much more innocent days.
So I assume on what you wrote you are still into game design these days?
Have you been able to play Osiris by now? And looking back, what would you have changed about the level design with the experience from now?
It would be interesting to see if you had the time for it what kind of map pack you would make for Osiris.
Woah I leave the thread for a couple of days and this happens.
jocelynsachs wrote:This is fantastic I can only apologise for the level designs; I had no idea what I was doing at the time. Looking forward to playing this tonight and finding out what you've done to the old girl.
So wait, based on what else you said, are you Andrew Clitheroe? That's awesome! Damn, I feel a bit anxious now. Hope you like my conversion, any feedback or insights you might have would be extremely appreciated!
Progress update! I've got some screenshots of the demo maps that I'm porting over. The current plan is to make a mini two-level bonus episode, one map being from the playable Amiga Format 71 demo and the other being the Amiga Action 68 rolling demo. In the absense of any QBreed map rips to reference from I'm porting them over by eye, just with an emulator matching up the sizes of rooms using the texture maps (which thankfully seem to be a consistent size) as reference. It's tricky and not fully accurate, but I've made decent progress.
AF71 demo:
SCREENSHOTS
Spoiler:
I've got the basic geometry and texturing for this map done, and I'm currently in the process of polishing and making it playable. I've taken some artistic liberties with the textures, as some of the texture choices of the original seem a bit arbitary in places. So I've cleaned things up and made things hopefully a bit more coherent looking. Some textures I've redrawn completely, as they looked a bit messy or odd, or were placeholder textures pinched from Doom, for which I've edited some FreeDoom textures. I put together a new skybox using Mechadon's Box o Skies to remake the space sky with the planet and starbase buildings, which you'll see some of in the first shot. The outdoor area is a bit too dark at the moment but if you played this demo you might notice I've added some height and structures to add more of a sense of place to the area. Inside I've added some dynamic lights, the demo didn't seem to have the lighting effects of the full game, so I made the sectors darker and used dynamic lights to contrast and convey where to go and add some atmosphere. I do plan to add some extra areas as well to this map as it is currently very quick to complete once you get a handle on the layout.
Also this map had invincible walking 3D robots, similar to the boss fight in MAP08, but just wandering about in the levels. They look a little different to the final one, perhaps a bit better actually, they seem to have more detail. I think I'm going to retexture and use a smaller version of the model I made for boss fight in the main game. I will probably make them killable as well.
AA68 demo:
SCREENSHOTS
Spoiler:
For those who don't know this one, here's a Youtube clip of the original demo:
Spoiler:
So yeah this demo just plays by itself, like the demo playback in Doom, and combined with the framerate it makes it much trickier to reference the map to port it over, so it's still very much a work in progress. It seems like the original map isn't finished, since the player in the demo seems to wander around aimlessly, so I'm probably going to add a lot of my own areas to it and adapt it to make it a complete map. There are unique, unused monsters in this map, but unfortunately I probably won't be porting those, as they literally only have one frame to them and it will be a silly amount of work to flesh them out just for a bonus thing. They seem to be roughly equivalent to monsters in the main game anyway.
This particular demo is actually a huuuge nostalgia trip for me - it's the first time I saw the game (or any FPS game really, maybe the Gloom demo was earlier? I forget) in action. Seeing the 3D world was a thing of wonder to little kid me, and the fact that I couldn't play it myself actually made me more curious as to what was around all those corners I couldn't get to. Really flares up the imagination! So it's cool to interpret this map myself now and fill in the gaps.
Sorry for rambling on a bit there! Hopefully will be back with further updates soon.
Artman2004 wrote:I wonder why the final AB3D didn't have those Xenomorphs.
iirc (and it may be inaccurate as it was 20-odd years ago) but I think they were dropped due to copyright concerns. Too close to the ones that Fox owns.
jocelynsachs wrote:Yeah, I did all the coding, pretty much all the level design, even a little bit of the art. Team17 was really busy on other things at the time so there wasn't a 'team' as such. A lot of the rest was done by a couple of friends I was living with at Uni.
Really neat seeing a former team member making the cut here Welcome!
I should probably list some stuff where Alien Breed has been featured - Alien Breed 3D2 is possible to run on CD32. in its low detail mode. A history is here.
AlienBreed3D2 level editor is here.
And a search of all Alien Breed related files on Aminet, here.
Knowing Amiga's shooter history quite well, allow me to compliment you on the work done on the AB3D and (possibly?) 3D2 engines. For the hardware they ran on, they were and are supremely impressive. I sadly never got to play these games in my day (The household was not an Amiga place!) but having seen it in action, its impressive stuff. Thank you for all this.
I can only apologise for the level designs; I had no idea what I was doing at the time. Looking forward to playing this tonight and finding out what you've done to the old girl.
