Along with the cheesy title came a cheesy game..
‘SkavengerZ’ was my very first commercial video game project as a fledgling games developer. It was so long ago in fact that John Carmack hadn’t yet managed to release his first polygon-based game ‘Quake’, which would hit the shelves during the SkavengerZ development cycle (I remember this distinctly because I bought it as soon as it hit and went into work that weekend.. to play Quake, research of course 😀 ).
On the basis that the mighty Carmack hadn’t yet cracked the polygon puzzle, Skavengerz would utilise the pseudo 3D Doom styled engine technology that had been written in house by John Mullins for a previous title ‘Mortal Coil’.
The game itself was basically a 3d Mech shooter. The player would choose a giant Mech from 4 variants and go forth into the badlands to gather salvage found scattered around the environment, whilst gunning down everything in sight, pretty simple stuff really.
We had a fairly short time-scale in which to get the game done so it was all kept fairly straight forward. Along with my own mech I was also tasked with rigging and animating ground troops in the form of a variety of armed soldiers.
The animation was created using 3D Sudio V4 and a little bit of the newly released 3D Studio MAX version 1; Some of the visual effects were created using Wavefronts Dynamation after a colleague found an SGI workstation along with boxed copies of all of Wavefront’s software suite in a back cupboard gathering dust 😀
The pipeline involved the usual polygon 3d character front-end but then the characters were rendered out as 8 degrees of freedom sprites using a turntable rig to give us the pseudo 3D look within the Doom styled engine. We then passed the sprite images through Autodesk Animator Pro to palletise them before they went to the game.
The brief for the mechs was to just make them big, interesting and individual..  so I decided to avoid the stereo-typical, clichéd design cues and opt for something a bit unusual; We also had to have these things designed and built in pretty short order so there wasn’t time to sit looking at designs as you would normally, so everyone simply dived in.
As a consequence, my mech turned out somewhat.. unconventional 🙂 with a very organic look to the cockpit and strange mechanical tusks, but with relatively conventional mechanical legs, albiet certainly not mechanically viable, but this was a game and my mech used alien technology 😉 ; Had it been built for real the thing would have simply fallen over 😀
Unfortunately I have no in-game footage from Skavengerz and only a single short video of my own monstrosity walking and falling over 😀
Here she is ladies and gentlemen, Behold 😀
As far as I’m aware the game was originally intended to be bundled with the latest 3DFX graphics card at the time; I’m unsure if this ever happened or if the game was released under a different name, or at all.