Pravin Wagh (interview): Difference between revisions

'''First, can you give a brief history about how you got into the game industry? How did you end up at Sega, and what was your time there like?'''

Disney's Aladdin had come out for multiple game systems and it set a very high standard for game animation. It was a clone of Virgin's earlier game, "Mick and Mac Global Gladiators" but their success at bringing the Disney animation over had created quite a stir. The search for other licensed characters made Garfield a really valuable property, especially in the 90s when Garfield was such a popular comic. Steven was the lead programmer on the Garfield project. I came back from a long Christmas trip abroad and found out that the Garfield project had been completely rebooted. Mike Fernie, was the new lead, and I was his #2. Ala Diaz was our #3. We took the project all the way to completion.

Sega Interactive (our division) had a game engine with various components, so a lot of programmers had a part in making almost any game that we released. Mike would have a better idea of how much of the Garfield code was kept vs. how much we might have scrapped and started fresh with. I was already good friends with most of the artists and I worked with them to help meet their animation goals. This also tied in with the AI and gameplay elements that I worked on. All the Garfield animations came straight from PAWS, but our team worked on everything else. The Genesis was getting to the end of its life, and we had some engine programmers who had mastered a lot of things about it. Kevin Burley was a programmer who worked on some lighting and particle effects and special features, like a game element that involved rotational movement (Egypt level). I took his particle system and found ways to put it to use in multiple levels to create some ambient elements such as floating leaves falling in the jungle environment. I believe Kevin did the PC port some years later, and this would have been easy for him since he had already worked on such low level engine components.

At some point in the life of a console, you get to know so much about it that you can come up with techniques that can squeeze out some really special effects and game features. I already mentioned how we had done particle effects. The whole game was written in assembly language, and many of us were transitioning to C and C++ as we made supporting tools. The 32X was starting to become a product around the same time we were completing Garfield (Steven worked on a launch title for it), and the Saturn was coming out soon as well.

And then you have to throw in that the particular Sega Interaction division was eventually shut down and we may have lost code, graphics, audio, etc. in the process and are relying on any of the team still having some things around on their personal systems.