Wasted Dreams - a little more history of one forgotten game

A few weeks ago, on Habré, one very good, but unfairly forgotten game was lit - Wasted Dreams. For those who are not familiar with it, I strongly recommend that you first read its review and description of the beginning of these historical excavations, and then try to set up the emulator and play it yourself . If you are not indifferent to the games of the beginning-mid-1990s, appreciate the beautiful pixel graphics and style of games such as Another World and Flashback - then there is a chance that you would like Wasted Dreams.

In our historical research, we settled on the fact that we found out that WD was developed by only two people - programmer Thomas Cvijanovic and artist Raymond Cindric. Weilard managed to find Raymond and make a short interview with him, and I tried to fill the gap - to find the second hero of this story and conduct an interview with the programmer of this wonderful team.

The conversation turned out to be somewhat more than planned. We talked about the past, the present and the future. We found out (spoiler!) That from now on Wasted Dreams can be distributed freely and without restrictions. Restored some of the pieces missed in this story. So, if there is a desire - I suggest ...
')
Meet this hero of our story today, Thomas:

GC: Immediately ask one burning question on which we could not reach agreement: how is your name read correctly? In our community, the majority seems to agree that it reads something like “Zvi-I-no-hich” [IPA: tsvʲɪˈjanɔʋitɕ], with an emphasis on “me”. Guess what?
TC: Yes, it looks like it. If you want to hear the pronunciation, then the best thing I could achieve is a pronunciation from Google Translate (listen, of course, in Croatian).

GC: Tell me a little bit about yourself: where are you from, where do you live now?
TC: Just like Raymond, I come from Pula, Croatia (former Yugoslavia). Now I live in Zagreb, Croatia.

GC: When and how did you become a programmer? Where did the interest in game development come from?
TC: Well, I, it seems, was born a programmer :) It all started when I was just a child, 5-6 years old. I remember how I helped my older brother enter some code in the ZX81 . We reprinted a program from some British magazine line by line, which took us several hours, but at the end it was so cool to see the result! It was a simple game, but it helped me understand how great it can be with computers. So it can be said that I adore games from my childhood and I had no choice but to start making them myself.

GC: Where did the idea for your own game come from?
TC: I think it all started with the fact that I really wanted to do some things better than they were in existing games. For example, after I saw the Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga and its most famous parallax scrolling, I thought what I could do even better.



I started the experiments - I made more layers of scrolling, used more colors, made a better overlay, added animated backgrounds, etc. Somewhere at the same time I met Raymond in parallel, and since I didn’t have any drawing abilities, and he was great at drawing - I asked him to draw a couple of pictures for me. Just a couple of days, we were already partners and seriously discussed how we will make the game out of what we do. My original idea was to make a port with a Commodore 64 on the Amiga of an old game called BC's Quest for Tires .



We got to work, but Raymond literally could not stop: he painted a lot of different backgrounds - trees, forests, mountains, clouds, stones, skeletons, even some futuristic ships and other technogenics. I barely kept up with him and programmed logic for weapons, missiles, pick up objects, enemies, obstacles, etc. In the end, we got a pretty decent looking game. It was not at all like the original, but for those times it was quite worthy. But something was wrong: there was no satisfaction, in the end we just made another unremarkable shooter with horizontal scrolling.

Our main character was a man who was flying on some kind of futuristic jet motorbike - so I suggested adding a highlight, diversifying the gameplay: after each level, the main character had to peel off his bike and go through some kind of adventure-like part. Raymond agreed and I sat down to write the engine for isometric levels. As a result, the levels with parallax scrolling and shooting, we just threw out - and from the isometric it turned out Wasted Dreams.

GC: How do you rate Wasted Dreams? It was a good project, did he bring the desired satisfaction?
TC: Looking back now, I am very proud of what we eventually achieved with Wasted Dreams. In the end, it was a very exhausting project that took several years of life - mainly because of my obstinacy in paying attention to the little things and the subprojects that we opened, which we did during the development of the game. But in the end I am very pleased with the result.

GC: Is there something that I would like to do differently? Or, on the contrary, is there something that you are proud of and what has been done correctly?
TC: In general, now, from the height of today's experience, you realize that a lot of things had to be done quite differently - not in the game itself, of course, but in the formulation of the development process. For example, Raymond drew a lot of cool graphics then, but I didn’t like everything and I forced him to redraw it again and again. The result was a lot of very different versions (often even in meaning - the characters changed, the environment changed, etc.) and in the final version of the game only some of them were used. This, of course, greatly delayed the development. By and large, we could do two or three games on the material that he drew.

From the point of view of the programmer - of course, the game has something to be proud of. There are a lot of things that I did not see in other games of that time and did it first - these are fully animated backgrounds, this is smooth multi-layer scrolling, etc. technological things.

GC: ... well, what could be improved?
TC: Yes, all sorts of things — for example, the script itself, voice acting, music and sound effects — but in the end, everyone did just two people with virtually no budget at all.

GC: What were you inspired by inventing Wasted Dreams? Raymond has already confirmed our thoughts about “Another World” and “Flashback” - what do you think of them? Or are there any other games that influenced you as a developer?
TC: Oh, there are plenty of them. Of course, I love Another World, but not as much as Raymond :) At that time, I was a fan of games like Chaos Engine , Flashback, Syndicate , The Secret of Monkey Island, and lots of others. I especially liked the style of games from Bitmap Brothers , Psygnosis, and some other companies that I don’t remember now.

Chaos Engine - a certain effect of gameplay and artwork can be seen with the naked eye


And that was how Syndicate looked on Amiga - by the way, it is quite different from the DOS version with 16-color VGA graphics, which many people most likely saw here


GC: How did the name "Wasted Dreams" appear? Incidentally, is it in any way connected with the song Wumpscut (1999) or the album Secret Discovery (1994)?
TC: I will be forced to disappoint, but no. We had several working names for the game during development, but as the storyline developed, Wasted Dreams remained. I think to some extent this was influenced by how little support we received from our families and friends in our endeavors. Everyone told us that we were just “wasting our time” [“waste” = “waste” - approx. lane] , engaging in games. They often really thought we were going to play games, not to do them :)

GC: How much time did you end up spending? How much did the development take from the first concept to the final version?
TC: If you count from the moment when we decided to start making a game before publishing - about five years. But, as I said, we were simultaneously doing another game (which, as a result, remained unpublished) and some other projects. If we consider the working time allocated specifically for WD, then I would rate it in the region of two years.

GC: What difficulties have you encountered in the process?
TC: We were young and did not know anything at all about the game development process and the entire business component, therefore, consider that we stuffed all the bumps we could. Almost everything you can imagine - it happened to us :)

GC: What tools did you use in development?
TC: Personally, I then used only Devpac assembler - the whole game plus all development tools like a map editor and several useful utilities were written in pure MC68000 assembler. All graphics are drawn entirely by Raymond using Deluxe Paint , except for the first and last screensavers that were rendered in Lightwave .

The assembler mentioned by Thomas, Devpac looked somehow like that and at that time represented a fairly powerful integrated development environment with an editor, the assembler itself, a linker, a debugger, and a bunch of useful tools.


GC: And what did you like most about the development?
TC: Yes, almost everything was great at all - the process itself, learning new things, solving problems, feeling that you are creating something new and unusual.

GC: But still, what was the most difficult and terrible?
TC: For me, perhaps, as for any developer, the most unpleasant thing is to detect another bug. I think you can guess how severe it was to debug a clean assembler code without some high-level tools. But, in the end, the game seems to be quite stable - I think, I did cope with this task and there are not so many bugs left :)

GC: Why was Amiga chosen?
TC: I have been in love with Amiga since the very first release of this platform. Unfortunately, in the end, it did not develop fast enough to successfully look at the background of its competitors, but at that time it was definitely the best machine possible. [approx. per. - I think Thomas speaks about 1993-1994, because at the time of the end of the game development in 1998, Amiga had already gone bankrupt twice, and the last model A4000T was released in 1995 and with a processor of 50 MHz, 16 MB of memory and 640 × 480 I could compete with the average Pentium II (233-450 MHz, 128-256 MB of memory and a resolution of 1024 × 768, not to mention the fashionable 3D accelerators) of the 1998 era.]

The coolest version of the Amiga - A4000T - in its full glory. Interested in learning more about this car, forwarding to a wonderful review of RC / GrabBag


GC: However, Wasted Dreams was exclusive to Amiga? You did not think about porting it to other platforms of that time (DOS, Windows, consoles)?
TC: No, we didn’t particularly think that our financial resources were very limited, and the costs of porting would be very high. Since everything was written in a platform-dependent assembler, porting would consist essentially of completely rewriting everything from scratch.

GC: In general, what platforms did you go through?
TC: I only wrote games for Amiga, PC and now for phones and tablets.

GC: Can you tell us a little more about your Digital Dreams Entertainment team?
TC: DDE is just Raymond and me. Later, I tried to use more people and make it more like a real studio, but in such a small country like ours, it’s quite difficult to find qualified staff to develop games.

GC: Did you only do all this together? Maybe something to outsource?
TC: No, so far I have not attracted outsourcers to gaming, but we used them in developing business applications. I definitely plan to use outsourcing extensively when I return to the game building :), or at least have a distributed team that is not geographically connected.

GC: Wasted Dreams - did you do everything just together, or did you attract some external resources?
TC: Wasted Dreams were developed by Raymond and me. At the end of the development process, our publisher conducted a revision of the texts and recorded voiceovers. I think I still need to thank Darryl Sloan (Darryl Sloan) for writing music and making sound effects in record time. And, of course, it is worthwhile to thank the actors :) who participated in the shooting of animations for the characters (although in the end it cost Raymond many days of work).

GC: Judging by your current social media profile, you somewhat distanced yourself from the game building in 2008, after your last game, Yoochi. Why did something happen?
TC: Well, actually, for good I stopped making games much earlier, somewhere around 2002. Yoochi is a simple educational game for preschoolers that I made for my nephews during my free time.

After we finished doing the Codename Hell Squad, we definitely needed to rest and switch to something else. Raymond went abroad, and together with another friend of mine, we founded a web hosting company. But this work did not bring proper satisfaction, so when the owner of the largest software development company in Croatia offered me to work with them, I jumped at the offer and moved to Zagreb. Such an offer was then difficult to refuse. Over the next few years, I learned a lot from working in a large organization — first and foremost the management of teams of people. But as I climbed the career ladder, I realized that this is not what I strive for and once again decided to start everything from scratch.

I made a business plan for a new gaming studio, assembled three real game-building veterans from Croatia and we started developing a new game. So King Game Studios was formed. Unfortunately, our plans were strongly confused by the global financial crisis of 2008 - the studio had to be closed, and we were looking for new investors. In the end, investors found, made a new studio, hired people, but I didn’t like the way they had proposed. As a result, I have not joined the new studio.

The last game of Thomas - Yoochi - was already done without Raymond, which can be seen at a glance on the schedule.


GC: What are you doing now? Have a desire to return to game development sometime?
TC: Well, apart from my main job as a software development consultant, I am working on a single application for Facebook and are planning my return to game development :) So it is very likely that you will still have the opportunity to play my games.

GC: If you started developing a new game right now, under which platform and with what framework would you use it?
TC: It depends on what game to do, what size of the team, how roles are distributed - well, and on the budget, of course. With a small team I would start on PC and mobile platforms, with a large one - on consoles and on mobile ones. Tools and frameworks are highly dependent on the budget, but if it were possible, I would have licensed the game engine from Crytek or Vision ... although now there are so many cool engines, so you need to look at what you plan to develop.

GC: If you could go back to 1997-1998, what would you do differently than it actually happened?
TC: Well, I would buy Apple stock in a couple of years :)

GC: I would too;) What about game development?
TC: Regarding Wasted Dreams - I would do some things faster and try to get out much earlier so that you can focus on WD2 or some other game.

GC: In general, do you miss the “good old days” or, on the contrary, do you think that now the progress of the game is much more impressive than in 1997-1998?
TC: I miss the “good old” only because I was younger then :) The evolution of IT in general and the gaming industry is truly extraordinary. We live in a very interesting time - the games that will be released tomorrow will be even better than those that are coming out today. Some are concerned that the industry is driven only by the idea of ​​“how to earn more,” so a lot of new games are not really new, but only repainted old ones. To some extent this is the case; everything is really very much dependent on marketing now and this is clearly seen from the dominance of franchises. However, progress is relentless - from time to time something new comes out anyway and makes everyone take a new step in the game.

GC: How do you feel about the open source movement?
TC: My brother is a big fan of the concept and member of the community, and I myself am neutral. On the one hand, I think that this is correct when all the software used is free, free and open source, but on the other hand, single authors who invest their time and knowledge in the product should get something for it is in return. In the end, everyone wants to eat :)

GC: Ok, let's not go deep into the religious dispute "how to make money (and whether you can make it) on open source", I asked it with a slightly different background :) You did not think about resurrecting Wasted Dreams, for example, by publishing source codes ( and, possibly, game resources) under an open source license - like some other companies do with their old games (for example, the same id software, Mojang, Epic, 3D Realms, Raven, etc.)? There is clearly a small but stable community around WD that could help with porting to modern platforms. There are already quite precedents when quest-like games were ported to the ScummVM platform . Can we hope so?
TC: A few years ago, an Amiga magazine asked me if I could give Wasted Dreams for free distribution. And then I answered - yes, if you can find a working copy and you have a place to lay it out - lay it out - which they did. Wasted Dreams , — , . , ( ) , community, . Amiga - , - , , . , — , MC68000 - . , Wasted Dreams, - Amiga.

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