Well, after a day of lurking, I can finally throw my 2 cents into this pile... =-]
First off, who am I?
My name's Dave, and I am the Technical Director at MumboJumbo LA (aquired about 12 months ago, the main MJ is in Dallas). I was also the Lead Programmer on Platypus for the last ~6 weeks of it's life.
A bit of history (from our perspective):
Sooner after the purchase of my previous employer (Zono), one of the projects we were asked to tackle was porting Platypus from IDigicon's PC release to the PSP. We had a number of problems, but probably the most pressing was the original title's language (Blitzmax). I don't myself think Blitzmax is awful, as it clearly can be used to craft vibrant games, and it seems to have a very low barrier to use. However, (and this isn't meant to be a jab at anyone), the Platypus code was very, very hard to read to us. Little formatting, nearly random indenting, no visual sense of function starts/closes, and fairly sparing comments. So, being able to go beyond reverse-engineering the design rules & scoring/damage equations via gameplay, we had a rough time getting those same things from the code directly. In the end we did alright.
For 3-4 months, we had a single programmer working on the port, but this individual was... bad at it... and along the way resulted in a set of C++ code that was fairly hostile to anyone, even experienced programmers... as well as the removal of said individual. Still, we had a design that we wanted to hit, which included Multiplayer... and as bad as the code was, it got worse, in that it wasn't even remotely setup for Multiplayer.
Around Mid-August, a small crew (myself, and 2 other programmers, along with a designer) started in earnest on the title with an eye to finish for late September. We had to recode everything, piecewise 'from scratch', while adding Multiplayer (the PSP side of which was 1 of the programmer's jobs entirely), code new bosses, nail bugs, finish Survival, etc. So... 4 guys, 6 weeks, start-to-finish (with 'start' being a hostile codebase).
We did it. And in that respect, I am very happy. It was a ROUGH 6 weeks. I must have aged in Dog-years over that time... I am sure I lost a solid year in there somewhere.
Regardless, our names aren't in the credits. None of us. It's a company policy. Our initials are in the credits... but hey... why not
The credits that are present were dictated _entirely_ by IDigicon, and we even had to get clearance for formatting changes to some degree. I myself am exeedingly annoyed (I can't feel 'shame'... I didn't have any control over it) that Anthony's name isn't present, _especially_ because his art is used, and that, more than even code, is a great deal of personal effort. We are doing an EFIGS release for Europe soon, and I hope we are able to rectify the omission... I can't see how we wouldn't.
A few other responses to various comments:
Level 2 boss: Yes, we like it too. The designer on the project wanted to add some variety to things as far as our own levels were concerned (we had to add levels in order to get a +30% content boost that Sony requires for competitive Ports), and did a great job.
Level 4 boss: Get to this. I made it.
Designer wanted a 'Snake Boss'. I made a very, very mean thing. It's got a classic shooter pattern, lots of guns, and can be quite a challenge. I'd love to hear what you think of it... it was a solid few nights without sleep.
PSP Hardare: First off, I don't see how the PSP would have 'improved' the look had we done more. There are a few obstacles to sprite-based games on the PSP. In Platypus, we are often dangerously close to just simply drawing too much... the hardware isn't designed for massive overdraw, and we didn't skimp on optimizations (we texture entirely out of VRAM (2MB), we're 8bit, colorkeyed, and 'swizzled' - any of those not done hurt framerate badly). We _might_ have used alpha instead of colorkeys, but that would have severly effected framerates. I honestly feel like we squeezed the PSP for all it could give, and I've been doing graphics coding for nearly a decade now.
Game Balance: Part of what Anthony sees as wrong is the sort of stuff that we saw as important to change. The PSP isn't a PC. The player doesn't have the same control. The game-field is deeper. Plus, we likely didn't have the same intent for each item/weapon as Anthony did. Another part is (again) that we didn't directly get the values from the Blitzmax code... we tried, and did alright, but it wasn't dead-on. Plus, we had to handle multiplayer, and that meant making bullets faster & more powerful, so as to have fewer on the screen able to 'do the same work', as bullets are _definately_ the bandwidth hog, even just passing their birth & death over WiFi. The scoring changes were carried over from what we saw on the PC... though again, we may have lost a bit there as well.
After this thread was brought to our attention, there was 1 very clear statement I heard from everyone... We'd have _loved_ for Anthony to have been in the loop. It would have made design's job so much smoother, made programming & platform-based changes easier to get behind, and yes, maybe we'd have even seen fresh art from the collaboration. But we had no concept of the history of the title, and we certainly didn't reach 'past' IDigicon to speak with other people... they were our designated contact when we needed things, and nobody ever suggested talking to Anthony. I would have pushed for it had I even known. If there's a 2nd version of the title started for PSP, I am sure we'll drop some e-mails or make some calls
Alright... this got long... too long. Thanx for reading.
Cheers,
Dave Eaton
Technical Director
Mumbo Jumbo LA