SuperSet

From AboveTheGarage

It's hard to believe but once upon a time nearly every game was hand crafted from scratch (perhaps by grabbing some useful routines from a previous game).

David Perry brought a Sega Genesis game engine with him when he came to Virgin. He had been evolving it from a Z-80 version. The first Genesis version was used on The Terminator for Sega Genesis. That game was pretty limited but one thing Dave did when he showed up at Virgin was grab some art and plug it into the Terminator Game. I can't remember if it was Spot running around in a Terminator world or what but the speed that he got art into the game was amazing!

I can't stress how important this is: if you want a motivated art and design staff then they need to see their work running on the target system as quickly and easily as possible.

Today, everyone has at least a passing familiarity with the concept of a game engine (thanks primarily to Unreal Tournament).

When I headed out on my own after Virgin Interactive I designed my own 3D game engine so that I could get art and motion up in the game engine as easily as possible.

In many ways I was ahead of my time. The game engine and the game editor were the same thing. At any time in the middle of the game I could grab an object and relocate it. This was huge! And this was in 1996. When it came time to name my engine I called it "SuperSet" because you could right click on just about anything and change it. w00t.

Sigh... the game was written using MFC and Windows. I'd never worked on a Windows game before and I thought "I can write to Windows directly or I can use MFC which at least comes with some tools." Well, MFC is kind of ... ugh ... Oh well, live and learn.

My kids want me to rewrite the engine so we can make games in it. I hope to do that someday. And I'm pretty sure it will be a much cleaner implementation after another 14 years of game development experience.