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Title James Pond
Game Type Platform
Players 1
Compatibility All
Submission Isaac Abraham

Review
James Pond is a platform game in the Mario Bros mould. Well, not really,
but at least I think that`s how it was marketed when it came out. Most
mags gave it quite reasonable ratings, saying it wasn`t bad at all, quite
good in fact, but just lacked that something to make it special. I`d
pretty much stand by that now.
The gameplay is especially simplistic. You are James Pond, a fish. Your
task is to stop the bad people of the world polluting the seas, by killing
the bad guys on the level, and more importantly, rescuing the baby things
that have been trapped in cages (I think that`s what it was, I haven`t
played the game for yonks). The control system is quite intuititive, like
with most platform games, and the graphics are quite bubbly, especially
considering the games` age. The difficulty level, too, is set quite
nicely, and practice will soon see you progressing on to later levels.
Unfortunately, the proverbial fly in the ointment is the gameplay itself
: It just doesn`t really seem worth it. You swim about here and there, you
kill a few bad guys, rescue the other ones, yeah yeah yeah. But what`s
left? Nothing much, really. I`m not against simple games, IMHO they`ve
always been the classics, Asteroids, Space Invaders, I`ve whiled away
hours with those games trying to improve my high scores. Unfortunately,
this game just doesn`t have anything that grips you, the player, and makes
sure you hold on to it. It`s not as if there`s any glaring faults, it`s
all very polished, it`s just that it`s just a bit boring, really. A bit
like JP2, from what I`ve heard.
Anyway, I suppose if you`re a real sucker for platform games, it might be
worth a whirl, but I suspect not, and besides, there are many, many,
better platform games out on the market, like, well, Flashback maybe, or
Rainbow Islands - now that was a classic.... I would write a review of it,
but I only had it on my C64 =))) Angus!!!

I was pretty sure the game was running in dual playfield mode when I first saw the mission intro screen, but it's far too colourful to be restricted to 8 colours in each playfield! Is it basically 4 bitplanes (16 colours) + a 5th plane for the vertical parallax (presumably left off the ST version?) + attached sprite for James + another sprite for his bubble?

You got it exactly... So the trick is that the 32 colour palette has the same 16 colours in each half and then the 5th plane can move totally independently. As you say, this makes it very simple to port to the ST - you just lose the parallax (and accept that the scrolling is going to look horrible :)

Use of sprites was very fixed in this one. I must confess, coming from a C64 background I was always somewhat disappointed with Amiga sprites. I did a little more with them on JP2...

There appears to be a neat parallax trick with bitplane 5 where it's just a single colour used for a background effect but if you travel up 2 pixels it scrolls just 1 vertically giving the distance parallax illusion. If that's correct, it's very cunning as presumably you just had to increment/decrement that 5th plane address by a line each time!

That's right. I always wanted to include horizontal parallax too but this technique didn't really fit and I didn't have the time to figure out something that could work.

The colourful mission intro screen appears to be changing into 64 colour mode (half-brite) to scroll the text up which looks very slick! It temporarily disables the parallax bitplane (mentioned above) until you have seen the text. How did you come up with these neat effects?

Yes, it switches to half-brite mode for the text-scroll. Having been mired in ST land for so long I really wanted to try out any and every Amiga capability that I had the time to! The great thing about the Pond world - and general tone of the game - was that it was very easy to justify and plug in just about any colourful, cutesy effect I could think of. Being able to control both graphics and code really allowed me to try things out and experiment.

How did the poor Atari ST emulate those effects without the Amiga hardware? (I can't find a youtube video of the ST version to compare). If I recall correctly, Steve Bak did the ST version.

It was very much 'path of least resistance' since we had accepted that the Amiga version was the lead sku (finally! hooray!). Yes, Steve did the ST version and he certainly knew as much as just about anyone about how to get the best from that system (excepting a few demo crews that hit upon specific tricks).

As part of the cheatmode, you can press F10 and the overscan parts of the screen flash various colours, I'm assuming some kind of DMA timing debugging so you could tell how long each part is taking to run. Is that correct? If so, can you remember what any of the colours mean? :)

You certainly know more about my game than I can remember :) ...Yes, the colour 'bars' represent timing - this was a common trick used by 16 bit developers. I don't remember any colours specifically, but almost certainly the largest one will be character draw time. Scrolling was actually cheap on this one (see below).

Are you using the copper-wrap method for drawing the screen?

No - in JP1 the scrolling system is actually fairly low tech - I just allocated enough screen memory to contain the entire play area. That's why some levels are wide but shallow and others are less wide but deeper (and most levels use multiple 'pages'). JP2 had a much more sophisticated system (that I imagine we'll cover when we get to JP2!).

Can you tell me a little about the controversy over the MGM intro screen spoof. What happened in the end? I'm surprised a big corporate would even know about the game.

Obviously we were all pretty naive about copyright issues back then, so spoofing the MGM lion-roar intro was done without a second thought for how it might be infringing anyone's copyright! As I understand it, a little while after the game launched, Millennium were contacted by MGM lawyers. I don't really know the details or how it was resolved, but suffice to say we were all a lot more careful about such matters in our later work... I'm sure the fact I directly sampled their intro can't have helped. Ooops.

How was your time split on programming the game vs doing the gfx?

It was a very loose split - I pretty much did whatever I felt like doing, or needed to do on the day. I was still living at home for this project, so I would quite often spend more of my work hours doing coding and then come home and do graphics work in the evenings.

What development system did you use for coding the game?

It was pretty horrible... It was a combination of the Devpac 68k assembler and for debugging - almost nothing! Until partway through development we picked up a first generation Action Replay cartridge. That proved invaluable, although was still a poor substitute for an actual debugger!

We had 1040 STs cross compiling under Devpac and downloading via serial cable to the Amiga. I have to say even though I was never a big fan of the ST, it did have a great monochrome, high-refresh rate, high-res (and very affordable) monitor that actually made it better for staring at code than an Amiga would have been.

What mapping tool did you use to create all the levels?

There was a built in tile editor (same for JP2 as well, although that one dealt in pre-defined 'objects' rather than individual tiles).

James Pond features missions including dumping radioactive waste, leaking ACME oil tankers, destruction of rainforest to grow burgers, and saving cute seals from evil eskimo dwarves! Are you a bit of a greenie or were evil corporations the easiest to create interesting missions for?

The foremost reason was that this made for interesting missions, but as a secondary thing I guess I probably do have a little bit of a green streak :)

The game features almost anything in the water - bulldogs, sharks with boeties, some kind of monkeys! Talk about letting imagination run wild! Was it literally anything you could draw cute was fair game to be included?

What do you mean!? It all makes perfect sense! You're seeing dogfish, old-men-of-the-sea and erm, sharks with bow-ties. It was great to have such creative freedom. Most elements are grounded in something slightly logical, but I sure loved any opportunity to be silly. The vampire fish almost got to star in their own game - James Pond 4 was going to be subtitled 'The Curse of Count Piracula' before the 16 bit console market died...

Which part of the game was the most fun to write?

The whole thing was fun - that was one of the great things about development back then: you had an idea, you tried it out, you expanded it. Very few team inter dependencies, no studio bureaucracy, and for JP1 at least, no pressure or expectations - the game was whatever we wanted it to be. As for specifics, I always liked the attention to detail stuff like changing Pond's expression according to his health level (or number of lives), or letting him pick up and wear silly items like the helmet or shades.

And the most difficult?

I don't remember anything being a big problem on this one - oh, except stopping those stupid bouncing star-fish from getting stuck in the walls inside the bonus rooms. I never did get that fixed :)

Are there any technical tricks that you are especially proud of?

Apart from the fact the game ran at a reasonably solid 50 frames per second, I don't think so. JP1 actually only made relatively simple use of the hardware both because I was still getting to grips with it, and because being our first Amiga led project (and still having to think about ST), we didn't want to go crazy.

Richard Joseph's music thoroughly suits the game, and adds greatly to the atmosphere. Was he given a general brief such as "watery bubbly fun" and he just ran with it, or did he came up with everything himself?

Absolutely. Richard did an amazing job! At the point he joined the project, I think I had already hooked up a kind of soundscape of my own (choose SFX only and you can hear it), but obviously we felt we needed title music and the option of in-game music too. He immediately latched onto the Bond spoof principle and delivered an excellent pastiche of the Bond theme (and a bunch more sound effects). For in-game he carried across a lot of the same instrumentation adding in the kind of upbeat bounce that perfectly complimented the game's cutesy vibe.

Did you have to get Richard to change any parts of the music/sfx?

I don't think so. Having visited us once, he did all of his work from his home and just sent files through as they were ready. I recall everything sounding spot on the first time the files came through.

I'm still impressed by how slick this game is!

Thank you! Like I say, development of this was so much fun and I was so fired up to make it that all the little details went in very easily. Looking back, it's funny to see how all the ridiculous pickups and bonus items reflect things about the early nineties or about my own take on life.

Thanks for giving me a reason to find a YouTube playthrough of the game to remind myself about it. There are so many little things I'd forgotten ever doing - its actually given me some inspiration for my current project :)