Archive:Dear Alf 02/q6

Q: How many employees at Oddworld Inhabitants sold their soul to the devil in exchange for this beauty?

Alf: We've had a full team of programmers working on this engine for a long time. It started with a tremendous amount of time being spent designing it on paper and working with the game design team to make sure we were building something truly special. We've also been working with an out of house team of programmers that build core technology (not a game company). When the game is fully running we'll be talking more about this other team, but not before.

The images that you see are really a result of an extremely talented real time art team that is here at Oddworld. The databases that they've built have, in many ways, driven part of what the technological performances of the engine need to be. Always, the balance between art and programming is critical. The best engine in the world can easily look lousy if there are not creative artists building databases for it and constantly trying to push the image quality.

The technology development for Munch's Oddysee is the backbone for many games that Oddworld will build over the next several years. Squeek's Oddysee will also benefit from this technology.