RVG Interviews Duranik

[zapiy]

Here is our interview with Duranik, huge thanks to Roland. Enjoy

TL

I loved the demo cartridge you did for the Lynx it had some amazing looking stuff on it, have you ever considered turning any of those demos into full games.

Roland / Duranik

Not really. We enjoyed working on the Lynx, it was a lot of fun. But if you work now with it, the screen is just a pain to work, for theeyes unfortunately. So unless someone creates a Lynx remake with a modern LCD, i don't think we will work on another Lynx project.

TL

Alpine Games is widely regarded as being the best looking game on the Lynx, are you proud of just how great that game actually is?

Roland / Duranik

We were pleased with the end result, but of course you could always improve things, for example looking back, I think the bobsleigh event is pretty boring and should have been replaced with something else, a simple ice hockey for example

TL

Pretty much every Jaguar CD owner has the Native demo and is amazed by it, did you ever work on any more levels for the game or anything else for the Jaguar.

Roland / Duranik

We had some more stuff as I recall, but its been a long time ago, so its hard to tell what exactly. Looking back we should have at least added some Sound FX to the game, which would have been easy enough.

AmigaJay

How long has the Sturmwind taken from start to finish, obviously the game was started on the Atari Jaguar, also how many people have contributed in making the game?

Roland / Duranik

Sturmwind took probably around 5-6 years. It should have been possible to finish it much faster but we did lots of levels and other stuff that didn't make it into the finished game. If we would have started with a more focused approach we would have been able to do it in probably 3 years. That's all part time as we have full regular jobs.

AmigaJay

Do you feel like you have pushed the Dreamcast to the limits hardware wise with this game?

Roland / Duranik

Well there is lots of different areas a hardware can be pushed, for example how many pixel do you draw, or how many polygons are you drawing and calculating, if you push one part of the hardware it doesn't necessary mean you push the other parts as well. In our case we use a lot of the Power VR and are drawing a lot of alpha blended pixels, so we pushing this part of the hardware really hard, but we do not need that many polygons per screen.

AmigaJay

Do you worry piracy will take away from your profits and would you consider making more games on the result of poor sales?

Roland / Duranik

The community decides if they want to see more projects, it's simple. Of course nobody will start any new complex project if there is no possibility to sell more than a hand full of pieces.

DreamcastRIP

What's your favourite shmup?

Roland / Duranik

I am an old school guy, so I like the old ST/Amiga stuff like Blood Money, Wings of Death, RType etc. For the newer stuff I would go with Ikaruga and Under Defeat.

DreamcastRIP

What were the main challenges in making Sturmwind?

Roland / Duranik

Probably trying to justify and defend ourselves from our family and friends why the hell we are spending so much time on an 10 year old machine.

DreamcastRIP
Will Sturmwind ever make it to PSN or XBLA?

Roland / Duranik

Very unlikely. Perhaps we would try to get it to the Vita if there would be a possibility but thats also highly unlikely.

zapiy

Not being a huge scene user, can you tell us a bit about how Duranik came about?

Roland / Duranik

We are just 2 brothers who enjoyed making games on the old Atari Systems. We started with the ST, later moved to the Falcon. We were also always interested in the video game consoles like Mega Drive and SNES and of course the Lynx and the Jaguar.

Jag_Salve

What software did you use to create the animations in Native?

Roland / Duranik

We are using Newtek Lightwave, this was used for Native and also for Sturmwind, of course Native used a many years older version, but it's still basically the same program. We also used stuff like Photoshop and lots of others programs.

[TL]

Another great interview, cool bunch of guys 

[DreamcastRIP]

Another cool interview on RVG. Great stuff!

[zapiy]

Yeah I love it.

Put these on Facebook as I think they deserve a bigger audience and we may gain a member or two from it.