NEED FOR SPEED: PORSCHE UNLEASHED GBA

Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed for Game Boy Advance was the first ever published outing for our proprietary 3D engine.  The Game Boy Advance was not designed for 3D games, so the gaming public viewed the engine with some interest.  The engine was actually a portal engine, designed with 3D shooter games in mind.  So a driving game was a fairly unexpected use for the technology.  We acquired the Porsche Unleashed contract after the CEO of Destination Software Inc. spotted one of the 3D demos we were publicising.

The development of this game was quite a bumpy ride itself.  Destination Games did not provide us with any source material to work with (art, code or audio) so we had to be resourceful.  We were able to extract some data from the PC product, but much of it had to be originated.  Creating the cars involved a lot of research, as I had to build them all from scratch.  By the end of the project, I knew every Porsche that ever existed in some detail!  It’s a good job I’m a petrol-head.

The tracks themselves were built using our in-house editor, which was tied very closely with the game engine.  I worked primarily on textures and models.  The cars were literally just a handful of polygons, so all the details had to be drawn into the texture.

The tracks were built by the programmer (Mat Hopwood) and two external guys called Alex Gingell and Dan Haigh.  Allister Brimble provided the music.