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Interview  Iridion 3D - Page 1 || Page 2
- By Mike Schneider, 5.01.01


NShooters: In earlier screenshots, it appears that the ships are rendered sprites. Has anything been done since then to spruce up the look of them even further, to compliment the wonderful environment textures?

Manfred: For instance the main ship is indeed rendered. It has more then 230 animation frames to give you the impression of real 3d movements. Most enemies are constructed of multiple sprites which are rendered and hand drawn to give the best possible results. There are even multiplexed sprites that are bigger then the actual screen.

NShooters: How long of an adventure do you expect this to be for the average gamer to complete, and is there anything added in to increase the replay value of the game?

Manfred: None of our game testers finished the game in less than 6 hours. The average gamer may take 6 to 10 hours to finished the game. After the game has ended there will be another challenge to play the game again. I won't tell more here :)

Iridion is a challenging game. To avoid any frustration a password after every level which contains all your game progress. So unlike other action games, you don't have to play from start again and again.

Although Iridion is really an Action game you need a lot of strategy. If you play without any strategy you won't get over level 3. There are a lot of tricks how to obtain special points and extra lives. You also have find out which levels plays best according to the extra weapons you collect. Also for the boss enemies you need some good strategy and the right weapon collection.

One thing we are most proud of is the fairness of the game. Most games are just unfair and you die more or less at the same places as you really can't get through without losing energy or a life.

Iridion can be completed without losing any life if you have the real strategy and experience.


NShooters: What have been the best and worst aspects of developing for the GBA?

Manfred: We didn't experience anything bad during our game development. In our opinion the GBA is the most pleasant console to develop for. If you use the hardware in a proper way and not like a PC with DirectX and a 500 - USD grafix card you get great results without too much problems.

Most challenging part in development was surely the GAX soundengine, but finally we are really satisfied how it turned out.

We think you will notice that most other launch AGB games can't nearly compare with the audio used in Iridion.

At least some other AGB launch games are also using the GAX soundengine. I guess you won't have any problems to spot them out by just hearing the music ;)


NShooters: Does Shin'en have any plans for future games yet?

Manfred: We are currently developing the prototype of our next game. Different to Iridion it will this time be an action adventure. It will have much more gaming depth though; the action itself is the key part.

Even at this early stage of the new game I think I can tell that we will easily go beyond the standard we reached with Iridion. As Iridion was our first AGB project we had to learn the hardware. Now we know much better what is really possible.


A hardy thanks to Manfred Linzer and the crew at Shin'en for allowing this interview to take place!