This, and the whole Shovelware Mine series, is a repost from cohost

If you haven’t read the other parts where I talk about my time working for Data Design Interactive, you can find part 1 here and part 2 here.

Backtracking from part 2 a bit, about a month after I started, before the office got partitioned, Stewart called me over to his desk out of the blue. He didn’t say why he wanted me to scoot my chair 15 feet over to him, so of course my mind started calculating the worst case scenario. Was I about to get chewed out and potentially fired?

“Have you ever played the Spyro games?” he asked. I had to take a second to think because it was such an incredibly unexpected question.

“Yeah. I rented Spyro 2 a few times.” I said, desperately trying not to look utterly confused.

On his computer was a Visual Studio window with a bunch of code visible. He hit the “Run” button and a few second later a window popped up with the standard DDI and GODS intro splash screens. After that though, it jumped straight into a map with, you guessed it, the silly little dragon, Spyro, at the center of the screen. He grabbed his xbox controller and started running and jumping around, and it looked believably like a Spyro game. The level was quite simple without any enemies, but there was some platforming elements that showed off the rather faithful movement and animations.

He went on to explain that a few years back they had put together a tech demo in order to pitch developing a Spyro game to Activision, and that they made this demo in only a week. Only a week for such an important demo seems insane, but showcasing their speed was a major goal. By this point I was very aware of the company’s history and reputation and the idea of a Spyro game developed by DDI fascinated me immensely. Of course Activision didn’t go for their pitch, but even this little demo was one of my most memorable moments at DDI. It's something only a few people have ever seen and I’m still kicking myself for not grabbing the files for it from the version control server before I quit.

Moving forward again: after the batch of changes to Kidz Sports Soccer, my next project was Kidz Sports Crazy Mini Golf. It’s a fairly generic minigolf game that uses the wiimote to simulate swinging a golf club. My task was to get it ready to release on PC. Honestly, I don’t remember all that this entailed, but it included significant UI changes, adding mouse support for putting, and tweaks to the physics.

I don’t know how, but the physics ended up being subtly different from the Wii version, despite running the same code. This made a few of the later levels basically impossible. Thankfully it was a simple fix to go into the editor and adjust the levels… is what I had hoped would be the case. I’m not sure if it was because Stewart wanted parity in level data, or he lost the relevant editor files, but I didn’t actually have access to the editor and couldn't change anything in the levels. Unsurprisingly, this was a shitshow that took more than a week of tweaking and playing through each level.

Minigolf was also the start of the online connectivity saga. Stewart’s vision was for players to have a DDI account that they would log into in-game. The exact details of what this account would do for the player wasn’t clear at this point, but I had to setup the connectivity with a framework for logging in and loading and saving their NuYus (more on those next time) and high scores. The GODS engine had almost no support for network communication, since it was meant for single player console games, so I had the fun task of implementing most of this low level stuff. I probably shouldn’t have been implementing this kind of stuff as a junior programmer fresh out of college (keep this in mind for later), but I eventually managed to get something cobbled together.

In the next part I’ll finally delve into My Personal Golf Trainer, the game I spent the most time with, and all of the madness that came with it.