Sega Nerds

Exclusive Interview: Cryptic Allusion reveals its new Dreamcast title

by Graham on April 27th, 2007

So Sega has announced it’s pretty much pulling the plug on all things Dreamcast. No more games (mentioned a few years ago now), GD-Roms or console repairs. But does that stop developers from creating new games for our beloved system? Hell no!

Homebrew developer Cryptic Allusion has recently announced it’s releasing a new Dreamcast title before the year is out, which is sure to get a fair few Dreamcast lovers excited.

Now, you may have heard of Cryptic Allusion, which any self-respecting Sega Nerd very well should. It’s a very small development company considered to be homebrew, but it has, in fact, released a commercial Dreamcast game before called Feet of Fury, which was sold at such great online stores as Lik-Sang.com (RIP) and PlayAsia.com.

Well, the Dreamcast developer has come to once again bless our favourite 128-bit console with the love of a newborn child game called Donk, and we have the first exclusive interview with the two main men behind the company.

And without further ado, I bring you - Dan Potter and Roddy Toomim and our exclusive interview.

Although development on Donk began at the beginning of the year, Cryptic Allusion has ramped up operations since the beginning of April.

(About the company)

Sega Nerds: How did Cryptic Allusion come to be?

Roddy: I think this is something Dan would be better able to answer since he actually started the company as something completely different and I wasn’t involved at the time.

Dan: It was originally started as a way for me to do some web design work on the side, but none of that is terribly important anymore. Its modern genesis was as a way for us to be a little more official for our publication of Feet of Fury. We spend a couple of hours in downtown Austin, Texas and came away with a shiny new LLC in our hands!

Sega Nerds: You are better known for such DC titles as Feet of Fury. How well did Feet of Fury sell?

Roddy: Considering that it was the first, commercially-released, 100-percent homebrew title for a system that was still alive but on its way out we’d say we did alright ^_^ I can’t exactly reveal how many copies we’ve sold, but it’s safe to say that if you haven’t bought one, you should do so very soon! They’re exceedingly inexpensive now, and you’re supporting a good cause I think of it like UNICEF for the games industry, but you get some sweet software in return for your donation.

Sega Nerds: Did the sales meet your team’s expectations?

Roddy: We sold more than 10, so yes. I think we met expectations. Exceeded them in vast numbers is more like it. Dan and I were worried we would only sell about 100 copies, but then Lik-Sang (Rest in Peace!) decided they’d take on a whole bunch, and they carried it all the way up until their untimely demise at the hands of a large, multi-national corporation that shall remain nameless. *cough cough*

Dan: I’m with Roddy on this one, not a whole lot more to say here. We were just happy that people were actually buying it and enjoying it. It’s not a day job but it funded a couple of fun trips to shows.

Sega Nerds: What did you learn or take away from developing Feet of Fury?

Roddy: Ah, a scholastic question! I wish I had a witty South Park quote here about the fact that I learned something today, but I’ll just get on with it: the first thing I learned is that you can’t afford to be without a schedule.

You also have to have a reason (or reasons) to keep that schedule. That’s what we’re doing with our new title, Donk. We’ve got a schedule that has been revised a couple of times, because as we move through it we’ve had to edit deadlines to coincide with what we know to be doable. It’s almost like we’re a real studio! I’ll be honest: having to move a deadline (or a milestone as they’re commonly called in the game industry) is disheartening.

Especially because the milestones we’ve currently got set were done so by us as a group, without any outside intervention. So, our publisher had no say in it, and they’re really flexible. If we release something, it’s great, if not, they’re not going to push us to get it done; which in some ways is great, and some ways not. You have to be very self-disciplined and fairly organized.

On the audio side of things, I’ve learned how to EQ (equalize) and master (run through a series of processes to make the music sound more professional) on a much higher level. I’m about to purchase some new software and move over to a Mac for all audio. Come to think about it, I don’t think I

ve even told that to Dan. Not that he needs to worry about that, as everything should be seamless over here. I’ve probably grown creatively, and I now know that I like recording voiceovers. Whether it’s my own voice and I’m acting, or someone else (usually a friend or my fiancee)  and I’m directing, I just have fun with it. You’ll hopefully get to hear some outtakes and funny business on the disc of Donk when it comes out later this year.

Dan: Panthers and Tigers and Leopards oh my! Roddy’s moving to a Mac? Alright! What I took away from developing Feet of Fury is that no matter how hard people tell you developing a game to completion is (and they will), the reality eclipses it by a long way. I think the most important thing is to have a reliable core set of people who are in it for the long haul (which, in Feet of Fury, was mainly Roddy and myself).

We could’ve used a few more “full timers”, especially in the art department, but I was able to pick up the slack there. Having a solid to-do list with “like to finish by” dates is useful. And be prepared to drop your hat and pick up another at the first sign of trouble. Basically the only way to finish a project like this is to stare it straight in the eyes and know you’re going to finish it.

Cryptic Allusion is hoping to reach close to the more than 100 levels that can be found in the original.

(Upcoming title)

Sega Nerds: You’ve already stated Cryptic Allusion is working on a new Donk game, which is based on a samurai duck. Why and how did you choose this game?

Roddy: That’s easy: we worked on Feet of Fury with an artist from the UK named Craig Howard. He was one of the original members of the team that worked on Donk way back in 1994. We were talking about new projects while we were still working on Feet of Fury, and he brought it up as a possibility since it was never released in the US, but all of the artwork, code and music was already there.

We saw it as a simple port opportunity, but thought better of it and decided to rework almost everything. Originally, we were going to do one of our other projects named Tryptonite (which at some point I hope we still get around to doing) directly after FoF, but Real Life likes to kick you in the nads, and I got a real job where I worked long hours for too little cash. Our drive to complete a project went away, and when I finally left that horrid place known as work, my drive came back like a tornado in a trailer park.

You know, now that I said that’s easy at the beginning of that, and I go back and read through it, it was quite the journey!

Sega Nerds: Why are you continuing to develop for the Dreamcast?

Roddy: Why??!?! How DARE you ask such a blasphemous question?!?! Actually, and I’m sure this is blatantly obvious, we love the Dreamcast. I personally think it died too early a death, and I definitely don’t think Sega should have stopped manufacturing hardware. Our current plans dictate this as our last Dreamcast game. We might return to it at some point, but Cryptic Allusion is a business, and we’re treating it as such so we need to move on.

Dan: I have about five Dreamcasts in my house. One is my wife’s, I have a blue-shelled one which FoF was developed on, a Japanese one I bought used for testing, and two others I got as backups. One of the backups has been disassembled, wires added all over the place, piggyback flash ROM installed (complete with a new custom boot loader), a “remanufactured” modem board that hooks into an external IDE controller I laid out and dipped in etching solution myself … and all of that works if I kick it just right. Our games run on KallistiOS, which was born out of libdream, one of the first homebrew toolkits for the Dreamcast; I had my hand in all of that heavily. I was living, breathing, and dreaming Dreamcast for a couple of years.

A better question would be, “Why would Cryptic Allusion not be developing for the Dreamcast?” I think Roddy’s answered that pretty well. Sadly we don’t see a lot of business opportunities left in it, and it’s tough to continue justifying as a hobby since I’ve gotten what I wanted out of the experience, and I have other hobbies that keep my interest more nowadays.

Sega Nerds: Recently, Sega said they will cease production of GD-Roms and hardware repair for the Dreamcast. How will this impact your team’s current future development for the Dreamcast?

Roddy: I don’t like the fact that GD-ROMs will no longer be produced, because that means no new Japanese imports. However, it doesn’t affect Cryptic Allusion directly because we only use MIL-CD. I’ll let Dan talk about that.

Dan: It really doesn’t affect us at all, except as Roddy said, it’s a market indicator. We have never relied on GD-ROMs, and in fact no non-official software has ever relied on them, insinuations by certain groups (which shall remain nameless) notwithstanding. My understanding is that the real losers in this will be people still using Naomi arcade boards.

Sega Nerds: Because of this, will the game be printed on GD-Roms or CD-Roms?

Roddy: Donk will be produced on a pressed MIL-CD, just like Feet of Fury was. These are self-bootable on probably 95 percent or more of all Dreamcast systems.

Sega Nerds: Did you have to obtain rights from the previous developer, Supervision Entertainment and Craig Howard to develop the remake?

Roddy: We’re still working on all the contract details, but effectively the answer to your question is yes.

Sega Nerds: If so, have you tried to get any feedback from Mr. Howard or any of the Supervision Entertainment team?

Roddy: Absolutely! Craig is on our development list, but he’s a busy guy working in the game industry in the UK. He’s at a very well-established dev house making one of my favorite driving games. I don’t know how much he wants me to reveal about his job, so I’ll leave out the details.

Sega Nerds: What are you hoping to accomplish with the Donk remake?

Roddy: First and foremost, I want to prove it to all the little guys that it’s possible to be a Cinderella story: you can be a nothing and take a little experience plus a ton of hard work, and make it somewhere in the business of the game industry. We’re doing a lot of work, and I’ve been personally putting in probably 50-60 hour weeks since I put the pedal to the metal, taking care of audio, PR, advertising, organization, directing, production, etc. We all wear quite a few hats because we’re such a small group. I wouldn’t be able to stand working so hard to see this just all fall apart, so I’m going to work my ass off to make sure it doesn’t. Hopefully it’s obvious that I want Cryptic Allusion to be a full-time job, and a fully-funded studio.

Secondarily, but also exceedingly important, we’ve got interns. That might not sound very important as a single, but you can think of these new guys as if they’re Cryptic Allusion’s kids. I want them to succeed, so we’re doing our best to drive them in the right direction. When they get into the industry full-time, they should see the experiences they gained in their short time with C.A. as positively affecting their working habits and abilities. It’s tough for them, since they’re working remotely, and it requires that they develop some serious self-discipline (if they don’t have it already).

Third: PROFIT! (see episode 217 of South Park)

Dan: We also want to have one more bang for the Dreamcast, especially after the fizzle of the Tryptonite project. Cryptic Allusion became known for Dreamcast indie quality with Feet of Fury, which pretty much blew away everything else at the time with its production quality. Some great productions have come out since then, but we’re hoping to raise the bar a notch or two once again with Donk.

The original Donk! Samurai Duck! was published on the Amiga in 1994 by Supervision Entertainment Limited.

Sega Nerds: Can you explain the premise of the game for those who never played it previously on the Amiga?

Roddy: You’re a duck. A Samurai duck. Named Donk. It’s an action/platformer. I don’t know that it needs much more of an intro than that. You either love platformers or you don’t. ^_^

Dan: Yep — collect gems, bonk bad guys on the head, beat the clock to get to the next level. Like Roddy said, you love it or you don’t!

Sega Nerds: In the original, there were more than 100 levels. Can we expect a similar level count in the remake?

Roddy: We’re hoping to get everything in the original into the new release. The final count won’t be determined for a little while still.

Sega Nerds: How many people are currently developing the game?

Roddy: There are currently five people working Donk, and we’re adding at least one more for code work; possibly two.

Sega Nerds: What plans do you have after Donk?

Roddy: That’s a funny question because it has a funny answer: Donk. And it’s a nice segue to!

Sega Nerds: Has there been any talk for Cryptic Allusions to move development to another console?

Roddy: Yes! But I can’t talk about that just yet, as nothing has been discussed outside of internal speculation, and the outside parties that were being discussed haven’t been notified that they’re in cahoots with us yet. They are, they just don’t know it.

Dan: I should also say, our toolkit we use as a basis now (which is once again free software/open source) is ported to platforms like Windows and OSX. We actually made a short segue into that area with Marbol. I have a Windows and OSX port of Feet of Fury laying around here too. So it’s possible more would happen on that front as well.

Sega Nerds: In the past some Dreamcast homebrew developers have released early version of games for gamers to try, Alice into Dreams springs to mind. Before you come to release the final version of Donk, will there be a chance of seeing a one or two level demo/ teaser available for download, to help encourage a final purchase of the game?

Roddy: We might do this after the release, since our schedule really isn’t
going to permit us time to get a demo put together.

(General/Random questions)

Sega Nerds: Earlier you mentioned Lik-sang. It seemed to me (at least) that companies such as Lik-Sang and Play-Asia were the big driving force in sales of ‘Feet of Fury’, advertising and showing a lot of support for the game. With that in respect, what are your views, as a games developer, on the sudden demise of Lik-Sang? And do you feel that Sony were justified in their actions?

Roddy: Just a quick FYI here: the answer I’m giving is a personal view, and doesn’t have any bearing on the decisions that Cryptic Allusion might make in the future. Having said that, yes, Lik-Sang was a huge supporter of Feet of Fury, and I was looking forward to the same level of support when we released another game. Obviously that isn’t going to happen now, and I’m severely disappointed because of it. Having an international shipper with reasonable rates was a real boon to our business.

I don’t have any personal knowledge about what happened between Lik-Sang and Sony, but I wouldn’t put it past them to sue a smaller company out of business. The thing that gets me, is if any of what Lik-Sang posted on their site after they went down is true it makes Sony seem even more evil than I had imagined. For some reason, they didn’t see Lik-Sang as a small company driving Sony’s business, but as a threat to their copyrights. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Something else had to have happened that wasn’t made public.

Dan: I was disappointed by the whole Lik Sang debacle as well, as they have always treated us well, and generally seemed like nice people. I have some hopes this time around, though, that we may see some slightly wider distribution. There’s nothing confirmed yet, but I have seen some other “non-official” Dreamcast titles being picked up by other big-name online shops lately.

Although Cryptic Allusion’s Donk looks pretty close to the original (pictured), the team is hard at work at revamping the graphics, and it should look much better when it’s completed.

Sega Nerds: For any budding developers out there, how long does a game take to develop? - Example; How long did it take you to develop Feet of Fury, and how long is Donk expected to take?

Roddy: Feet of Fury was a ground-up title. Meaning we started with nothing except for an idea. That took about 10 months to develop, and it was a relatively simple game. Dan would be better able to elaborate on the development cycle, since he was the driving force behind us at that time. We make a pretty good team that way when one is on the other is off, and vice versa. That way we don’t butt heads and go totally nuts.

Dan: Feet of Fury actually started out as a joke, so it’s hard to say exactly when we started on it. But that’ll teach you to make jokes around your friends. It’s like Tolkien said in Lord of the Rings, you put your foot on the road and you never know when you’ll stop. Its first “public” release was for the IGDA’s Indie Games Festival, in 2002. We had only the vaguest idea of where we wanted it to go at that point.

Development of major game play ideas (and pretty much everything else) continued all the way up until about a month before the final release, which was in June 2003. I was fixing bugs and running the game in demo mode all night long a couple of nights before we released the CD master. Towards the end of the development cycle I was working 6 hours a day at my day job and 6+ hours in the evenings on Feet of Fury. I’m hoping Donk doesn’t turn into that since we have a lot more help and a lot less to do, but we’re hoping for next-quarter release.

Sega Nerds: What is your favourite Sega game?

Roddy: Wow, that’s a tough one. In fact, out of all the questions I’ve answered so far, that’s probably the most difficult. Let’s see, I love all of the old Sonic games, as well as Streets of Rage 2. Chu Chu Rocket is hard to ignore. Skies of Arcadia was pretty nice.

Okay, I’m going to have to break down and say Sonic CD. I loved the music on it; I was totally obsessed with the music (on the US version) when it came out, actually. I remember going through the trouble of borrowing my step-brother’s copy of the game so I could record one track in particular to an audio tape. Yes, I’m just that old. Not even a year ago, I found a copy of the game at a garage sale. It’s not in the best condition, but it had the original box and the instruction manual, and that audio track still plays just fine. I don’t have a Sega CD, but that’s why emulators are awesome! I played through most of the game and relived just a little of my youth because of that. For those of you wondering which track I’m talking about and have a copy of the game, it’s audio track #2. First music you hear in-game, IIRC.

Which brings me to my next point: why the HELL hasn’t a good Sonic game been made lately? Skip the 3D and bring it back to old school platforming! That’s my opinion anyway.

Dan: That is a tough one. I’m gonna have to go with Jet Set Radio Future. I don’t feel quite so blasphemous for naming a non-Dreamcast game since that one started out on the DC (heh). The game was so hip it hurt, and I loved basically every single thing about it. I made myself an unofficial soundtrack by sampling the songs in the jukebox mode, and still listen to it today. Close runners up would have to include Evolution (for, weirdly, inspiring me in my quest to write Dreamcast homebrew originally) and Phantasy Star Online (for all the good times we had on that in its heyday).

Sega Nerds: The Dreamcast does seem to be your platform of choice to develop on, is this because it is (meant to be) so easy to make games for? Or do you have a soft spot for the console?

Roddy: It’s primarily because it is easy to develop for, and because Dan was responsible in large part for the reverse engineering of the DC hardware. I’m just the audio guy, so I go where the action is. I’m portable ^_^. 5 years ago, the action was on the Dreamcast.

Dan: “Large part” might be an overstatement. Mainly I took what others did and repackaged it to be easy to use and provide a rich programming environment, though I did help with a few breakthroughs (like the initial proof of concept for 3D acceleration). I do have a soft spot for the console, but it remains to this day the only widely released game console where any random indie developer can pick up a set of tools, write/port a game easily, and press it on CDs with an expectation that 95% of the console owners can use it out of the box.

Sega Nerds: What is your favourite platform (of all time)? And why?

Roddy: Favorite platform? As far as the quality of games released and the type of games that I enjoy, I’m going to have to say the Neo Geo. Lucky for me, there were quite a few MVS/AES re-releases on the Dreamcast (and PS2)! Of course, I also own a two-slot MVS board, and I have a few games and a super gun. I love 2D fighting games like nobody’s business, and really wish I had an opportunity to work on the system.

And I can’t forget the Nintendo DS. It’s already one of the greatest portables of all time. I liked it when they released the original “fatty” design, but I have nothing but love for the DS Lite. It’s perfect (except for those damn tinny speakers!) from an ingenuity standpoint, and has really turned the industry (*cough* Sony *cough*) on its ear.

Dan: The Dreamcast was probably my favorite for a number of reasons… I mentioned some above, and it also had some great, genre-busting and just weird games (like Seaman, JSR, Crazy Taxi, etc). Close runner up is probably the PS2, because hey, you sit on your mountain of gold that long and there’s not much choice but that a few good games come out for your console! It’s mostly become a Katamari and Harmonix (Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero) game player for me at this point. TI-99/4As inhabit a soft spot in my heart because I grew up with one (it’s how I learned to code) but it’s no where near the greatest console ever.

Sega Nerds: Well I think that is about it from us here. Thank you so much guys for doing this interview with us, we really appreciate it. And good luck with DONK and any future projects you have.

Thanks.

Roddy: Thanks for the questions! I hope I didn’t write too much and your readers actually get something out of it or at least enjoy it.

Dan: Thanks for having us!

There you have it, folks. A pretty interesting read, if I do say so myself. I’m looking forward to the final release of the game and should be picking up a copy. The game hasn’t been given an official release date as of yet, but we’ll stay in contact with Cryptic Allusion and will bring you any updates of the game’s progress as soon as it is announced.

If anyone is interested in the game or in Cryptic Allusion in general, visit their Web site here and check out their forums for information on other games and even chat with the developers. Or for a chance to meet the guys in person, they should be attending this year’s NWCGE in Portland, Oregon this September.

Tags: Dreamcast, Exclusive, Fan Stuff, Sega Nerds

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