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WISH WE COULD PLAY THEM ON THE JAGUAR
source: Cyberroach.com
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Native later Native Reborn
Developer: Duranik
Publisher: ?
State of completion: One level demo exists (no sound), source code was
available, development halted again.
Genre: Horizontal 2D side-scrolling shooter.
Notes:
Game is not listed in the Atari Dealer Price List Q3/1995.
In early 1999 Ville Järvi wanted to try to bring Duranik's Native back to
life by collecting info on the game, looking for possibilities to get it
finished and gathering a development team. He called this project Native
Reborn. Ville had previous experience in the game development process, as
he had been working with a few other games (none Jag-related) in the past,
but unfortunately none of the team members had previous experience on
Jaguar developing except for the main programmer.
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.
The 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 (Mille) 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... 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.
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