Team17 - Alien Breed Evolution

[Flype]

Hi,

Years ago, my favorite game was Alien Breed on Amiga and today Team17 published on his facebook page the first 3 screenshots of the sequal.

I let you show the pics yourself here :
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=1 ... 063&ref=mf

[DarkDragon]

Looks great!

[PB]

Looks good. I loved all the Alien Breeds (except TKG) on the Amiga.

[Joakim Christiansen]

Nice, they just released Worms for iPhone and iPod Touch btw

[luis]

I don't know Alien Breed on Amiga, but from the screenshots it seem similar to Shadowgrounds.

Does the comparison make sense ?

http://shadowgroundsgame.com/

[vanbeck]

Makes perfect sense Luis, the games look very similar, maybe they even use the same engine, like some sort of UT3 engine plugin.

Both games look cool regardless, these top down, violent shooters are having a bit of a renaissance recently, lots of XNA projects and indi projects like that too. Personally I think it's a case of smaller companies getting sick of having to compete on the same levels as big companies, otherwise their games get slated. Like in a FPS game everything has to look great, high detail, normal mapping, shaders etc etc - but if you can't quite stretch that far, I think they're looking at ways to get good visuals without all the expense, and taking a step back in resolution and detail is a good way to do it. The media in one scene in either of those games probably takes 1/5th the time to prepare as it would to do it in a FPS like UT3 with all the detail. It's a good thing though at the end of the day, we get fast gameplay, and artists are more likely to freehand details than to model them, so it looks amazing where it needs to.

These games are always good in co-op mode too, like that old chestnut, Gauntlet - just seems to improve things when either player can't wander off on their own, forgetting about their buddies. I guess there will be a 360 version, so if there is we might even get a lot more players - maybe 2 players on each team/xbox, with 8 teams that would be pretty cool.

[Flype]

Hi

I didn't know about Shadowgrounds but it looks like indeed...

Offline/Online co-op mode is planned.

Team17 said this game is built using 'Unreal Engine 3'.

[blueznl]

Ah yes! I still play Alien Breed now and again, using an emulator. I hope they allow me some top view as well in addition to the isometric point of view...

[Fred]

Good to hear some news from my favorite game company team ever !

[Flype]

I just had a pleasant (retro)time reading a free questions/answers on this topic (Ask Team17) :

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6 ... topic=7779

For example :

@ Paul (1) - Sony is doing things their own way, Microsoft hit the market earlier and made connections earlier. We have a very good relationship with the Sony folks and I wouldn't be surprised if we did some stuff with them too. It usually depends on their portfolio of games and where they want to place games and such, it's probably nothing like as black and white as perhaps you imagine it to be.

@ Christian (1) - We finished that some time back (its been delayed due to a publisher change). We spent a fair period of time working on other people's properties/IP including Lemmings and lately Larry. It was a big challenge and by far our biggest project, working with hollywood scriptwriters etc - we'd have been silly to turn the work approach down. It may come as surprise, but 3rd party work like that helps to pay the rather large costs involved in running a modern development studio of 85 or so people.

@ Paul (2) - Yes and no. Apart from myself, we still use Rico (art) occasionally although he relocated back to his adopted land of Sweden 2-3 yrs ago (after 15 years with us). Andreas (who along with Rico and myself worked on the early titles) left to go home (to Sweden) about 5yrs ago but we're still very much close friends after all this time. Quite a few of the Team17 people have 12-15yrs with the company, but the first bunch were the demo guys - it was a very long time ago... 20+yrs.

@ Christiann (2) - Actually when we founded Team17 it was mostly in response to the god-awful ports the Amiga was getting of the ST games in that period. We'd no intention of sullying our games on Atari's machine, we were all Amiga maniacs.

and the war continue...

We knew all about the ST, we just didn't like it )

[vanbeck]

Hehe, the ST wasn't short of haters back in it's day, especially in the Amiga demo scene. Even Tony Crowther, the guy who made Captive hated the ST, and that's IMO the best ST game out there.

I loved my horizontally scrolling cripple of an ST .

[luis]

Changed the name to Alien Breed Impact

FYI now available on steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/22610/

[ar-s]

Good to hear some news from my favorite game company team ever !

+1 Project X, worms, super frog ! yeahh

(..and Psygnosis was so great too)

[SFSxOI]

Reminds me of a futuristic space age Warcraft for some reason.

[mannybass]

FYI, here is a great Alien Breed remake: http://www.alienbreed.co.uk/