Interview de Massimiliano di Monda

Puissance-Pocket : Things seem to have changed since the hard times of GB Rally ! Tell us what happened !

Massi : Well, Gb Rally received a lot of good criticisms from various publishers and even developers of CGB games. Nintendo gave us the license as CGB developer after reviewing GB Rally and then GBA official license. In the mean time Crawfish interactive noticed our game and our team, so we reach the actual agreement for developing GBA titles.

Puissance-Pocket : How many people are working on every project ? Can you describe these teams ? How long will last a development process ? When did you start ?

Massi : The whole team is now composed by 3 programmers (Fausto Cardone is lead programmer and co-funder of the company), 3 graphic artists (Francesco Paduano is Technical Artists Supervisor and co-funder), 1 musician (Vanni Miele in charge of Music and SFX and co-funder) and me as designer and PR activities (also co-funder) fully at work, then we've freelance artists and programmers. Basically, we have 2 programmers and 2 artists on each project, plus a designer and a musician. The development process lasts about 6 months, depending on the game. Actually we're developing our own engine and libraries that will allow us to develop every kind of games easily. We started on this in May 2001.

Puissance-Pocket : Did you prepare the game design of all of them ?

Massi : I worked on the design for the GB Rally Advance and Star Giants, but I'm still at work. Every day talking to programmers and Artists, we're getting better results and we want to use 100% of GBA capabilities. We want to provide top quality titles to the gamers.

Puissance-Pocket : Crawfish is your editor for Wings, who will publish Star Giants and GB Rally Advance ?

Massi : Crawfish is not an editor/publisher. We agreed with Crawfish for development of GBA titles, the publisher for Wings will be announced shortly. Star Giants and GB Rally advance have no publisher yet but we're dealing with many and also finding licenses for these games. Sadly the GBA follow the CGB tendence of licensed games that most of times are very ugly!

Puissance-Pocket : Some developers complaint that the GBA has limited multiplayers habilities because of the weak bandwidth of the link-cable. Do you have problems with the multiplayers modes of these GBA games?

Massi : Fausto Cardone our lead programmer could explain to you. We do not face so many problems, as we are not going to exchange so many data in our games. Each agb compute in parallel all the needed calculation, so having a perfect synchronization between AGBs exchange of data is reduced to only few bytes per frame.

Puissance-Pocket : A very popular feature amongst players is the possibility to link a GBA to a Nintendo GameCube. Will you use this feature ? For which game ?

Massi : Actually we do not planned this feature for any of our game.

Puissance-Pocket : What happened to GB Rally finally ?

Massi : It's still here, maybe gamers will find a surprise if we sign for GB Rally advance

Puissance-Pocket : Do you play a lot with your GBA ? Which game is actually your favorite ?

Massi : I do not play so much with GBA, my favourite games??? Wings will be an impressive game! Actually my favourite is F-zero even if it does no add so much to the Snes version...

Puissance-Pocket : You've been at the Games@University conference in Rome, what it the outcome of this conference ? What are you expecting from such an event ? How was it received amongst students ?

Massi : The outcome of he conference is that the italian game industry is still green, but something is moving thanks to company such as Milestone (maybe the most famous in Italy) and now even with the young Raylight Studios. There were so many students and I'm very happy about that as young people starts looking at videogames industry seriously. I hope University will move in our direction preparing students to start working in game development, it's very difficult to find skillful people here !!!