User:Khanassassin/Sandbox: BASS

Development
While working at Activision, Revolution co-founder and CEO Charles Cecil got the idea of working with Dave Gibbons, artist and co-creator of comic book Watchmen, being a fan of the comic book himself. He approached Gibbons, but shortly after, the old Activision broke down. They maintained a friendship, and Cecil would later contact Gibbons to consider working on Revolution's second game. Seeing his son play video games, Gibbons became interested and realized that his skills in drawing, writing and conceptualizing could be useful in the gaming. Joining the team just before the release Lure of the Temptress, Gibbons was sent a rudimentary outline of what could happen in the game, and wrote a longer story with new characters and scenarios, and then Revolution added further to it. Originally the game was named Underworld, a title proposed by Gibbons, but was renamed due to the release of Ultima Underworld. The team working on the game had grown into eleven members by the end of 1993.

The production values became much higher for Beneath a Steel Sky than for Lure of the Temptress, resulting in a game six times larger. The game was created in sections, which allowed the team to ensure that each part was "perfected" before moving on. Its 2-year development cost £40,000, a large amount of money for the company at the time.

Creative and technical design
As Gibbons would have to travel between London and Hull, they could use fax to send the artwork backwards and forwards. He drew the backgrounds in pencil, starting with roughs, which were sent to Revolution to see if they were technically feasible, and once agreed, he would make the final sketch. The pencil sketches were then colored, mainly by Les Pace. The backgrounds were scanned on a Macintosh as 24 bits, 1000x1000 pixels images with 25 million colors, and then transformed to 320x200 with 256 colors for the PC version. The backgrounds were designed in view of the sprites so the sprites would appear clear on the screen and wouldn't mix with the backgrounds. Gibbons created the sprites using DPaint. Steve Ince, who joined the team on February 1993, created number of sprite animations and he painted some backgrounds based on Gibbons's sketches.10 The designers' goal was to create a visual bridge between comic and video game graphics. Gibbons also designed the characters. It was a challenge for him to get a character's personality and expression in a face that was around seven pixels wide and nine pixels high in a limited palette. Gibbons would have liked to design a character as in Prince of Persia or Flashback, but Revolution wanted something more detailed, so the result became compromise. All character sprites are smoothly animated with around 20 positions each. According to Gibbons, about 75% of the backgrounds and characters were used in the game.

Dave Cummins wrote the dialogue for the game. The tone of Revolution's early games was born from a tension between Cummins and Cecil. Cummins wanted to be more flippant with dialogue, while Cecil wanted to be more serious. Their goal was to make something "in-between" find the middle ground between Sierra's "ridiculously earnest" stories and the slapstick comedy of LucasArts games. For the voice acting, which is only included in the CD-ROM version, Revolution used actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Over two days were spent recording over five thousands lines of dialogue. Not pleased with the results, Revolution decided on a lengthy re-recording, and realized that voice actors should be used, rather than stage actors. The speech doesn't always match the on-screen text, with English terms being Americanized. Cummins was also responsible for the score of the game; there is a specific tune for each of the main locations.

Beneath a Steel Sky became the second game to use Revolution's Virtual Theatre engine, after Lure of the Temptress. According to Cecil, the original version of the engine seemed less applicable in Beneath a Steel Sky, as the ability to issue commands conflicted with the gameplay they intended to create. Lure of the Temptress had one story that was moved forward by a key event, whereas Beneath a Steel Sky had multiple threads. In one way that presented them with "exciting gameplay opportunities, but in others it cordoned off more ambitious ideas in terms of multilinearity." As a consequence some of the engine's features were scaled back. Warriner and David Sykes, also a Revolution co-founder and programmer, had to update the engine, which was also part of the new deal with Virgin. Warriner gave in an interview an example of a change in the updated engine, Virtual Theatre 2.0; in Lure of the Temptress, the system controlled everything, for instance specific routines to a door. So if there was a door on-screen, then the door-routine was called up to handle it. The consequence was that every door looked the same and acted the same, for if a door was somewhat different from the last one, it caused a problem. This was changed in the new system, as it was object oriented and no distinction was made between a proper object like a door of key.

Release
Beneath a Steel Sky was presented at the European Computer Trade Show in the London Business Design Centre in April 1993 and at Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June 1993. According to French magazine Génération 4, the game was supposed to be released by the end of October 1993. Various playable demos of the game were made; one of the demos was added to the first issue of PC Gamer, and Amiga demos were added as cover disks to several Amiga magazines.

Beneath a Steel Sky was published in March 1994 by Virgin Interactive on floppy disks and CD-ROM. It came on 15 floppy disks, as opposed to Lure of the The Temptresss, which came on four. Because of the Amiga restrictions, they had to leave out a few animations, as not all Amiga owners had a hard drive. Each conversion of the images to the Amiga resulted in a loss of detail because of the Amiga's limited palette and resolution. According to Revolution in-house artist Adam Tween, it took up a couple of days to "touch up" the screens. A comic book created by Gibbons, which was translated into the introduction sequence of the game, came as part of the game package.

Freeware release, enhanced soundtrack and Remastered version
Freeware and enhanced soundtrack In August 2003, the game was released as freeware and support for it was added to the ScummVM, allowing it to be played on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows CE and other compatible operating systems and platforms. in the October 2004 issue of Retro Gamer, a DVD box containing a collection of games, including ' (issue 6, October 2004 included a DVD box labeled as a Beneath a Steel Sky re-release, and contained a collection of games, including Beneath a Steel Sky, was labeled as Beneath a Steel Sky re-release. In November 2011, James Woodcock released an enhanced soundtrack of the game for ScummVM.

Reception
Beneath a Steel Sky was critically acclaimed. PC Gamer awarded it the "Best Dialogue" award, and it won the "Best Adventure" award at the Golden Joystick Awards 1995. It was also a commercial success, topping the GALLUP charts. It is often referred to as one of the "top" adventure games of all-time.

CU Amiga gave the game a score of 95%, with a summary: "One of the greatest adventures ever". The magazine praised the game's controls, saying: "The control method in Steel Sky is so simple that Revolution can finally lay claim to having created the ultimate in intuitive control methods", and also praised its "logical but not too obvious" puzzles, characters, "adult content", art direction and "addictive" gameplay. Amiga Format gave the game a score of 94% and praised its story, graphics, characters, puzzles and gameplay, saying: "Beneath A Steel Sky is a massive, intense and atmospheric adventure which will keep you on tenterhooks right until its final startling conclusion. Utterly brilliant." However, the magazine criticized "a few minor glitches" and stated that "another annoying factor is that it is incredibly easy to die."

PC Gamer US gave the game a core of 91%, calling it "one of the most playable adventures of all time [...] A slick, funny, and absorbing adventure that will appeal to a wide variety of gamers--two thumbs up!". However, the magazine stated that "the difficulty of the puzzles in the final third of the game is disproportionately high." Amiga Power gave the game a score of 86%, saying: "With as much care and attention taken on the storyline as the graphics, Steel Sky is an example of what an adventure game should be like – funny, enthralling and convincing. There are not any jumps in logic in the story line, or stupid coincidences that propel you through the story. Read as little about this game as possible and you will genuinely be surprised as the story unfolds."

Adventure Gamers gave the game 4 out of 5 stars, saying: "Overall, Beneath a Steel Sky is an engaging adventure classic, which fuses an intelligent, thought-provoking storyline with light-hearted humour, to create a thoroughly enjoyable playing experience. Revolution succeeds in creating a 1984 for the computer game generation. Not even the dubious LINC-space sequences can mar the payoff at the game’s completion." Lemon Amiga gave the game a 9 out of 10, praising its story, graphics, music and controls, and said: "Beneath a Steel Sky has it all, and in spades - a challenging absorbing game with lots to see and do, and wonderful graphics and sound to boot. A Masterpiece!"

Sequel
In the comic book the tribe leader gives him his name while he is holding a can of “Lager Beer”, which brand is changed into “Foster Beer” (a brand: "Foster's, Australian for Beer") in the CD-Rom intro of the game, and in the Australian version it is changed into "SS IPM (RAW)," a phrase that is better readable when it is spelled backwards. According to Warriner, Foster's lawyers made them change it, simply because it was their trademark being used, despite Revolution feeling that they were only promoting the brand.36 While Lure of the Temptress is set in the medieval town of Turnvale, Beneath a Steel Sky is set in the futuristic city state Union City, set in future Australia.45 Union City offers a vast game world.

The announcements of a sequel started early. Already by the end of 1994, a magazine reported that Steel Sky would get a sequel, even with a new game engine with a radical new 3D approach.69

About ten years later, in the same month that Cecil stated that they were going "Back to the basics,"70 it was discovered that Revolution had registered the url www.steel-sky2.com (On March 4, 2004). Though Revolution hadn't planned to make announcement about the title at that time, Cecil had to admit that they were working on the title: "Beneath a Steel Sky is a game that is still widely respected and we are regularly asked when we will write the sequel," Cecil told us. "Beneath A Steel Sky 2 is a project Revolution has been considering for a while, and has stated to move forward on, but we are unable to comment beyond this."71

In August 2005 Revolution announced Broken Sword 4 though, and in September 2005 Tony Warriner stated on Revolution's forum that the game wasn't canceled, and that he wouldn't lose hope that there would be a Steel Sky 2 in the future. The new domain was abandoned.

Asked about a revival of Steel Sky in August 2006, Cecil said that if they would do it, it would have to be either an episodic game, or some other way of getting it to market in a new and interesting way. But it was something very much on the horizon.72

In Retro Gamer (October 2008) Cecil said that a sequel would have to be really special, and that it would have to be equal or even better than the original. Gibbons would have to be involved, and it would be ideal when the original core members of the original team could be involved again. Options for a sequel, according to Gibbons, were to go back to Robert Foster's origins, finding out what happened to form that enclosed city, and perhaps to set it in Tasmania where the free people live.73

In the next years now and then new statements appeared on the sequel. For example, Cecil, in an 2009 interview with Gibbons and himself, hinted at a sequel for the iPhone, but also said: "Well the drawing board is full of ideas right now, some of those include Beneath A Steal Sky 2 and some don't. There's certainly more that could be done with those characters."74


 * http://www.amigareviews.leveluphost.com/beneatha.htm
 * http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/03/20-free-pc-games-you-must-play/2/
 * http://www.curlysworldoffreeware.com/reviews/view/21
 * http://www.lemonamiga.com/reviews/view.php?id=392
 * http://web.archive.org/web/20000311190200/www.pcgamer.com/reviews/178.html
 * Adventure Gamers /and/or/ Adventure Classic Gaming

>>Remastered<<


 * http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/iphone-games-holiday-buyers-guide

BS Add-up:
 * http://www.mazenville.com/video-games-corner/best-adventure-games-of-all-time.html
 * http://web.archive.org/web/20040701110810/http://www.revolution.co.uk/
 * http://www.pcworld.com/article/193353/25_best_ipad_games.html


 * http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/top-30-best-free-games-you-should-play-today-695473
 * http://www.nowgamer.com/features/1008447/greatest_pointandclick_games_not_by_lucasarts.html