Gene Turnbow's KRYPTONIANS.NET - Programming Projects, Code for Pay

The "Funpad"
Entertainment Systems Technology LLC

For a time I was an R & D developer for this thing. It was a 486-driven wireless game and web pad intended for use in bars and restaurants. Originally, it was supposed to be a game controller for massively multiplayer games played in movie theaters and projected onto the motion picture screen. I thought it was an amazing idea, which was why I joined up with the company originally. When they failed to meet the technical challenges and missed an opportunity to partner with the companies developing DLP projectors at the time, I realized the product was going nowhere, and I left to go work for Sony Development.

About a year later, I learned that the company had folded.

I wrote several multiplayer demos for this device, and worked on three Flash-based games for it as well. Funpad imagery is all over my web gallery and in my demo reel, as much of my early CG work was done for this company.

Ever wonder what those letters and numbers on the spines of VHS tapes are for?

I know the answer. I made them.

I had been working as a film restoration specialist at Film Tech in Hollywood; Technicolor Videocassette kept bugging me to come back and be a programmer again. I kept saying, no, I have a job and I like it, and they kept raising the ante until I gave in.

One of the things they had me do was write the controller code for a gigantic ink jet printer that sprayed serial numbers and tracking information on the backs of videocassettes they manufactured at their plant in Camarillo. The numbers uniquely identify each cassette and allow them to track them through each step on their way through the production process.

The printer that prints them is a huge beast, about seven feet high, that requires pnuematics, hydraulics and electricity to make it work. If any one of them fails, the thing stops dead. To top it all off, the tapes go through the machine at about a foot per second to get sprayed. The print head stays in one place, and the tapes zip through on a conveyor belt.

I wrote the original version of the program that drives the spray printer in Microsoft C in 1991, and it was in continuous use until the format was discontinued entirely in 2006. And as Technicolor made all of Disney's VHS tapes and tapes for most of the major studios as well, literally millions upon millions of tapes have been sprayed using my program.

So just before you pop that old VHS tape in your VCR, look at the white letters sprayed on the spine and think of me.

Metreon/Mediage
"Quaternia"

Jean Gerraud's "Airtight Garage"
(Sony Development / Hyper Entertainment)

This game was originally created for Sony's "Metreon" in San Francisco. It's a thirty two player "capture the flag" game based on Jean Gerraud's "The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius", and meant as a primary focus for the Airtight Garage attraction at the Metreon.

Sony Development, as Hyper Entertainment was then known, had been consigned to create an updated version of the game for The Mediage, a sort of "sister" entertainment center on the island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. It has movie theaters, restaurants, shops and arcades.

I was hired on as a support programmer, and was interviewed by the lead programmer and the producer. Two weeks later, I had the job, but the lead programmer had quit, leaving no documentation. Four weeks later, the producer quit as well, leaving no documentation.

My first job was to dig through the code and identify what each thing was doing. In the process of writing what was essentially post mortem documentation, I discovered that about forty percent of the code base was dead code (that's code that never executes, for you nonprogrammer types). Once I had a roadmap, it was possible to break down the tasks for the upgrade and assign work to junior programmers we hired to take care of those things.

During the next six months, I was in charge of the team, directing level design, creation of a new sound engine for the game, coordinating with a brilliant programmer named Phil Britt who did all the effects programming and spruced up the engine for us, and the animators, Aaron Estrada, Keith Matz and Gabriella Urbina who rebuilt everything from scratch. The original game avatars were all tossed out and we built new ones based on Keith Matz's amazing designs.

Remarkably, the game shipped to the Odaiba site within three weeks of being on time, and they were quite happy with the results. I understand the game was wildly popular over there.

HyperBowl
Arcade Edition

(Hyper Entertainment)

This is what eventually became of the game "Hyperbowl". Originally developed to be played in high end arcades, and in places such as Jillian's at Universal Studios' City Walk, it featured a real bowling ball floating on a cushion of air as a track ball, and an eight foot high projection screen for the display. It was great fun, and actually fun for the entire family. In my opinion, it was the best game we did at Hyper Entertainment (and yes, there were others).

This version is most like the ones in the arcades, having six levels to choose from. And you know something? They're all fun to play! Despite having to use that awful animation and modeling tool, Mirai, to do the level design, Phil Zucco did a really good job on making this game exciting to play and fun to watch.

You can still buy this from Hyper Entertainment from their Hyperbowl web site. For a full technical rundown on the Hyperbowl game, see the Microsoft Plus Pack information elsewhere on this page.

The game is also available in the iPhone App Store as "Hyperbowl", and was licensed and ported by one of the lead programmers on the project, Phil Chu.

Babylon 5 Arcade Series Entertainment Utility
"Shadow Wars"
(Sound Source Interactive)

I had my fingers all over this one. I wrote the arcade shooter in the product, did all the artwork for it, and provided much of the materials for the box art as well.. It contained sound effects and a screensaver, so you could theme your Windows experience in accordance with the visual and auditory experiences of watching the show.

The arcade shooter was really terribly simple, and I used Fastgraph for it, mainly because I needed something that would work equally well on either Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. Fastgraph fit the bill perfectly, and shortened the development cycle to something I could do in a few short weeks.

This product has the sad distinction of being the only Babylon 5 game ever to actually ship.

J. Michael Straczynski was understandably disappointed in the little shooter, and vowed to more closely monitor game licensing on Babylon 5 in the future. The only other game based on this intellectual property was being developed by Sierra Online at the time, and their game never saw the light of day.

Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP
(Hyper Entertainment)

No, I didn't write the whole thing. The part I worked on was the HyperBowl game demo that shipped with it.

The project was hobbled by Hyper Entertainment's having chosen Mirai for creating levels for "Hyperbowl". In terms of ease of use interoperability, and consistency of behavior between the NT version and the IRIX version, I'd have to give Mirai very low marks. Most of my job on this game was writing huge painful workarounds for Mirai's shortcomings. I'd say over all that this was responsible for about 20% to 30% of the production costs for the game.

I also had to make some rather critical alterations in the engine's collision detection methods. The sound engine also required a rewrite, and I did this as well, though I didn't get it done as fast as I ought to have.

I don't mean to make it sound like I was the only programmer who worked on it; I wasn't. The game had a succession of programmers - it went through five of them during my tenure at Sony Development.

After that, it was all downhill. I spent my last few months doing quality assurance on the version of Hyperbowl we shipped with the Plus! Pack. And it needed it. The game is fun, and runs well, but it was a rocky road getting there.

Lost In Space
Arcade Series
Entertainment Utility
(Sound Source Interactive)

This product wasn't actually a game itself, but it had a game in it. The game was approximately Galaxians, but the imagery and audio were drawn from the television series "Lost In Space". I did the programming for it and virtually all the art and animation for it as well.

Probably the most fun part of this one was recreating the Lost In Space Robot "B-9" in Lightwave for the game's little six-second cut-scene.

The game ran in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

The ABYSS: Incident at Europa
(Sound Source Interactive)

ABYSS was my third adventure game, and the first one with a first person viewpoint. It was presented as the sequel to the original film, and had a rich and complex story line. The engine started out being the Atlantis engine developed by Digital Dialect, which was little more than a spiffy Doom-alike engine. It wasn't until after the engine had been purchased that upper management decided the following:

it should be an adventure game.
it should run well on a 486-66Mhz box, slower than any machine we had in the shop at the time
it would only require one programmer for five months to convert the engine over, write a scripting language, and design the entire game world.

Working within these constraints turned out to be - well, unworkable. We wound up with a team of designers and a team of programmers. I ran the development team, and was liason with the art team.

The original producer left the company, so I stepped in to fill the empty chair for several months. When it became clear that I couldn't direct the team, write the game design, write the game code, toolsmith and produce all at the same time, a replacement producer was promoted up from technical assistant. No, really. He was.

I trained up all the creative talent on what needed to be done to get a game like this put together. With the exception of the programmers and one of the artists, nobody had ever worked on a game before. Jax Carroll, now head of Jax Digital Media , was promoted to art director and was brilliant at it.

The level editor needed help as well. I added real time texture mapping adjustment so the artists could slide textures around on the geometry until it looked right, and I added a line compiled, tokenized scripting language called S.L.A.G. (Scripting Language for Adventure Games). Level designers could build event scripts by selecting commands and inserted them using dropdown listboxes. There was no source code and no discrete compile step. It was pretty slick, really.

For a time, while the level designers were learning to use the level editor, I had an option in it where it would use speech synthesis to tell them what state the editing tools were in. They liked it until they learned the tools, then they turned it off.

The game was developed using FastGraph, a very cool API created and sold by Ted Gruber Software. Diana Gruber worked as one of the animators on the project. (Absolutely brilliant woman, by the way.) As I was leaving the company, new programmers came in and decided I'd been nuts to use it and ripped it out. Naturally, after that everything more or less broke, and it shipped in a somewhat broken state. Fastgraph had been a great deal more stable and efficient than any hand-rolled low level graphics routines would have been, and the new programmers proved it.

HALLS OF THE DEAD - Faery Tale Adventure II
Dreamers Guild

The Game That Almost Wasn't

"Sequel to Microplay´s classic RPG. The three brothers, already known from Faery Tale 1, have been teleported to a foreign country, where they have to save the local people from evil powers spreading in the once peaceful lands. The graphics look strongly alike those in Ultima 8 - Pagan. The gaming world is really huge - be prepared to play this one for several weeks/months!"
-- from the advertising for the game

Two technical directors ran the production of this game during the final months of the Dreamers Guild in 1996 - a man who prefers to call himself Talen to this day, and myself.

Talen (David Joiner) is one of the most inspiring and amazing men I have ever met, and has been a source of great inspiration to me. He had written the original Faery Tale Adventure for the Amiga almost ten years before, and was responsible for most of the engine technology and overarching design of the game. I was in charge of using and extending that engine and its scripting language where necessary, writing tools for the level designers, and overseeing the production of the actual game content. Several level designers worked under me, writing the smaller quests, designing sublevels and scripting everything.

Sadly, the company was crumbling around us as we finished the game. I was let go six months before the game was finished. The dedicated level designers and Talen worked on, long after the money was exhausted, to see our vision come to fruition. Equally sadly, many people who gave their all to get this game finished in a labor of love never got proper recognition for their efforts. The credits seem to have been assembled by somebody who hadn't been anywhere near the project, working from a partial set of old notes.

If not for the unceasing efforts of Ms. Holly Herzel, who negotiated distribution for the game with one publisher after another until she found one that could stay in business long enough to get the game released, it would never have seen the light of day. Ms. Herzel, wherever you are, we all owe you a debt of gratitude we can never repay.

Game and Entertainment Programming

Design and Development

I've done just about every job in game development: game design, technical design, and team management, art and animation, producing, sound design and quality assurance - everything except writing the music. (I've done that, just not for games.)

To the left are product shots of some of the things I've worked on in my game development career. It certainly doesn't scratch the surface of everything I've done, but it's a fair cross-section.

To find out more about a product and my role in its creation, click on its image.