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 PART 1 
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An entry from the system designer's diary dating back to the very first
day of this ambitious project.

In case you haven't heard, Revolution Studios is currently hard at work
bringing its classic PC adventure game Broken Sword, which has already
appeared on the PlayStation, to the Game Boy Advance. When we first
heard about the project we couldn't decide whether it was genius,
feasible, or just plain silly. In an attempt to find out we've procured
a diary written by Tony Warriner, system designer at Revolution Studios,
detailing his innermost thoughts as Broken Sword for the GBA made the
arduous journey from office joke to 'seriously cool' pocket-sized
adventure.

"Today is the first day of the project! Before we can do anything else
we need to find all the graphic files used in the original game. Pretty
soon Steve and I have a huge pile of CDROMS scattered around the floor.
First we look at the CD's then we look at the GBA and its tiny
cartridge. We are trying not to look visibly concerned! People keep
walking past and sniggering! I type random numbers into a calculator and
then use my best 'cautiously optimistic' face.

One of the very first jobs must be to get some Broken Sword screens up
on the GBA to see what they look like. Will they be too dark? Will the
important detail be lost? These are hard questions but, after a few days
of low level hacking from Andy and some frantic Photoshop work from
Steve, the Paris café screen - the first in the game - pops into view.
It's cool! In-fact, its 'officially' better than that as someone is
heard muttering the ultimate honour - 'seriously cool!' We now create a
whole bunch of GBA screens from the original to if they are as good.
After a little brightness tweaking here and there, Broken Sword is
finally reborn!

Soon the team is back to reality however. Never mind all those screens
and the 12,000 lines of speech, just look at all those character
animations! There are thousands of them! Andy reaches for the
compression books while Steve and I reach for the Vodka. Even George
himself has nearly 1MB of standard walking animations on the PC version.
That's a serious chunk of the cartridge and simply wont go. Heads are
scratched, tea is drunk, and midnight oil is burnt. At last our saviour
rides into town bearing the name 'Lempel-Ziv'. We don't know who he is,
but the guy sure knows compression! George Stobbart is alive and
walking!"


Now on the developer diary, Tony Warriner, the lead programmer at
Revolution Studios talks about some of the problems the team faced when
they realised that the Game Boy Advance wasn't a PC and that Nintendo
has no plans to release a mouse peripheral for it.

"As the initial euphoria of seeing George strutting his stuff on the
Game Boy Advance screen wore off, then, as sure as night follows day,
the hangover kicked in. Our next problem was that when George walks
around under player control his size is controlled by an algorithm and
he is scaled in real time according to his position on screen - but if
we do this wrong then George can appear as large as a lamppost or, at
other times, as small as an ant. Moreover, when he interacts with
something on screen, then the scaling is switched off because all the
non-walking animations were hand drawn by the cartoon animators and
these guys drew them at the correct size for the PC screen. There needed
to be a seamless switch from one to the other, of course. Suddenly one
problem turned into two, and the atmosphere, like the coffee, turned
black. So, problem one - adjusting the real time scaling to match the
GBA screen size correctly. Problem two - re-sizing the hand drawn
animations to match the new GBA George. As lead programmer I inmediately
assumed full responsibility and delegated the problem to Steve, the
producer, declaring the issue - 'a low status graphic problem'. This
left me free to think about interesting questions such as 'how do we
compress an 8k save game into 512 bytes' while watching Steve draw
strange diagrams of George with set-squares and a compass. Another
interesting issue quickly came to light too - that of the control
interface. The original Broken Sword games were, of course, mouse driven
point 'n' click in the tried and tested PC adventure tradition. To some
this method of control is sacred and they'll declare anyone insane who
dares to question it. Death threats have been received - no joke - when
the spectre of direct control is mentioned. On the GBA there is, not
surprisingly, no mouse! This gave us a once in a lifetime opportunity to
go back to basics and rethink the adventure game interface and it proved
to be a liberating experience. What we found when we hooked up George to
the GBA directional pad was that as you walked George around you felt
far more connected with the character and the game.

With a mouse you are stood back from the game in a sort of film director
role. But when you directly control George, then you become George. When
you walk up to an object it highlights just as it did with a mouse and
this felt just fine. A new invention called the 'vista menu' allows you
to cycle through all the interactive objects on a screen - this neatly
dispenses with 'mouse-hunting' - the scourge of the adventure game! So,
instead of a half-baked interface that tries to mimic a PC, we have a
brand new way of playing an adventure that maybe, just maybe, is
superior to the original mouse method. At this point,we quickly realised
we had in our hands - quite literally - something pretty radical, a
great looking 2D adventure but with a brand new way of playing.

After building a shrine to the god of Nintendo, and worshiping the king
of all handhelds, we returned to the next task in hand - preparing the
engine for the arrival of 'the level implementers' and a doubling of the
team size. The development sea was calm, but we knew a mighty storm was
brewing.


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 PART 2
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"Having spent a few weeks building a basic engine the time eventually
arrived for the level implementers to make their appearance. These are
the folks who's job it is to actually put the gameplay together. They
use a custom high level programming language to choreograph the
gameplay. This language uses functions provided by the game engine to
drive the game itself. The programmers write the functions and the level
implementers use them to make the game. There is always much fun to be
had debating how these functions are going to work.

However, the screaming and shouting only really begins when we all
discuss together whether or not the functions do actually work as
advertised. For example, when programmers write a function to make
George pick up an object, then we expect that object to be on screen
when the function is called. If the GBA sets on fire because the object
isn't there to be picked up, well, that's hardly our fault is it now? It
is 'misuse' of the function and a pile of burning plastic is only to be
expected.

Lessons must be learnt! And so it was that six weeks into the project
the implementer team - Ross, Dale and Jonathan - were led in and shown
their new domain. After their handcuffs and shackles were undone they
circled the office like lions in a new cage - pawing at the scenery,
looking for weaknesses. Things started badly when, visibly smirking, we
handed them their 'pink' GBA units claiming that the pink ones were best
for development purposes. This proved to be a tactical mistake and they
went straight onto the defensive, becoming quite unreasonably picky and
aggressive. So, for programmers and level implementers, a pretty good
start!

Fairly quickly, the implementer team were up to speed and doing basic
things with George on screen. The guys divided the game sections up
amongst themselves and began to get a feel for the sheer scale of Broken
Sword. This, after all, is a 2 CD game that originally took 25 people
two years to produce. Pretty soon they weren't the only ones looking
pale as their demand lists began to flow into the programming
department. An early emergency involved a dustbin lid. We gathered
around a GBA to see poor George holding a bin lid up in the air - he was
frozen, unable to move. Sadly, there was no way to get George to put the
lid down as we hadn't written a reverse animation function. So, off we
scampered to write the code to make George reverse his animations. Next
up - Nico talks to George with her back to him. Maybe this is right, we
said, she is a bit stern, after all... nevertheless, off I went to write
a command to make people face each other when talking. Such is the life
of a humble adventure game programmer - reading demand lists and hacking
out code at double speed to try and stem the flow. A simple life, yet
rewarding nonetheless.

And then one day up walked Steve, the producer, clutching a dozen
CD-ROMs. "What are those?" I asked. "The music files..." replied
Steve. "I'll get my coat..." I mumbled."

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 PART 3
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Having been reunited with the small print of my employment contract, I
returned to work and carried the music CD's from my desk over to Ben's.
Ben is the Revolution resident music supremo, an all round player of
notes. He seemed shocked and somewhat shaken when the ratio of 250MB
down to 750k was mentioned. I suggested it's a challenge anyone would be
excited by and returned promptly to the safety of the logic
implementation process.

Not so safe as it turned out, for it was time to program Benoir - the
trainee doctor! The Benoir character in Broken Sword 1 is rather unusual
because he gets to follow George around the game. To do this required
some special engine coding so the following aspect could happen
automatically. The trick would be to get this happening without using up
too much processing power. My first plan was to not bother at all, as
only Benoir needs it, and so we could make it happen in a very longhand
kind of way. Unfortunately, that damn Nico woman steps in again. She, it
seems, requires the super smart following logic all through Broken Sword
2 - so I had no real choice but to do it properly. Out foxed once again!
I felt much like George, kept in my place and bossed around by a French
woman!

After a few days of typing and swearing we had our Doctor friend ambling
around the hospital after us, and all was well again. It was now time to
think about game save and restore. A quick look back to the original
game revealed a save game size of around 8 kilobytes per save game.
Perfectly respectable really. Nevertheless, 8k is a lot more than 1k,
which was our target GBA figure. A quick analysis of where that original
8k went pointed immediately to the global game flags. These flags record
all of George's progress through the game. If George asks Nico about the
Templars, then we set a flag so we know it's happened and next time
around George knows to say "Tell me again, about the Templars..." and so
on. The flags are a memory of the player's actions.

In the original Sword games these flags were stored as bytes. However,
the hand of God had been at work, secretly guiding us! We had already
chosen to store these flags in 1 bit of memory this time around. So,
they were 8 times smaller - and the save games would fit. My life was
saved, and in response, I decided to visit church on Sunday in order to
worship the almighty and offer my thanks. But Church, I quickly
discovered, wasn't always the most exciting of places, but was perfect
for getting in a few hours playing time - head bowed, volume down of
course.

Meanwhile, it had been a couple of weeks since the audio CD's were
delivered to music maestro Ben. All that had been heard since then was
the occasional violin note, sounding pure and shrill over the office
din, before breaking up into random white noise. But finally, a
breakthrough, it seemed. The opening theme of Broken Sword erupted in
all its orchestral glory. All of us were transfixed. How could it be -
from a GBA? We all filed out towards the sound - likes rats following
the pied piper.

Modern day pied pipers, however, don't lead developers to rivers - they
lead them into pubs. And it was to a dark and seedy bar that I headed to
meet Mr X - a purveyor of weapons grade compression systems. The music
and graphics had begun to take their toll on the poor GBA cart, which
was now showing signs of strain - indeed, our cart brimmeth over, and
there were still a dozen screens to implement. Something 'special' was
required to save the day - and the lush content that we had laboured
over. As I explained our problem, Mr X nodded knowingly, but displayed
no emotion. I felt drained. What could be done I pleaded? Mr X then
placed onto the table an aluminium briefcase and proceeded to enter a
20-digit security code. Eventually the case sprang open and a single
sheet of A4 paper was removed from it. This was 'the three stage plan'.
Stage 1 - data analysis. Stage 2 - proof of technology
compressor/decompressor. Stage 3 - speed-optimised decompressor. How
much? I asked. Mr X looked around then wrote '30%' on the sheet of
paper. I nodded. Then, without a further word, Mr X burnt the paper in
an ashtray and left, via a side door. This was the dangerous, seedy side
of games development that most people don't even know exists.

A couple of weeks and several unmarked zip disks later, and we had
recovered another megabyte of cart space. Broken Sword once more edged
forward towards eventual completion. As Ross, Dale and Jonathan began to
finish off the last screens, development began to shift towards play
testing. One problem that comes out to bite complex games like Broken
Sword is that of non-linearity of gameplay. When people drive or walk to
work or school, they tend, eventually, to always take the same route
each day - usually the quickest route. The same thing happens when
putting a game together - every time you play, you play it the same way.
But that's not to say that someone else, who picks the game up, will
also take that very same route as you. Chances are, they'll go another
way, especially if they don't actually know the way. Almost everyone
that plays Broken Sword GBA won't have played it before, so they wont
know the way through. Because of this, it was important to get everyone
to swap and play each other's sections - as well as getting in new folk
to play the game in different ways. Meanwhile, Andy and myself wandered
the corridors, feeling slightly sad that the game, and our programming,
was now almost finished.

With testing nearly completed, we headed towards the final beta phase,
but one last thing remained to be done. Broken Sword was to be released
around Easter time, which, as everyone knows, means Easter Eggs - and
Broken Sword GBA had to have one of its own. Much head scratching
ensued. Most ideas centred on bringing back the infamous goat and giving
him a special role to surprise the player. Another idea had George and
Nico performing a karaoke rendition of 'Somewhere over the Rainbow.'
Broken Sword the musical anyone? Another intriguing Easter egg, it was
suggested, might give some sort of clue to what we might expect to see
in the upcoming Broken Sword 3 - the Sleeping Dragon. Of course, I
cannot reveal what or where the Easter egg is, but I hope you all have
fun trying to find it.