Modern games tend to follow a rigorous top-down design approach, where a lead designer comes up with the core elements of the game, and is in charge of validating how these are actually implemented.

At Adeline, the process was a lot more organic, and a lot of things happened just because somebody thought about it, which resulted in games having many easter eggs, weird references, insider jokes, etc...


So let see what was in Time Commando, that you may not have noticed.

The intro sequence

Most of the game was done on PC Computers, with the exception of the intro sequence and intermediate cut scenes, which were all made on a Silicon Graphics¹ machine using Softimage 3D.

Intro Sequence: Historical Tactical Center

Our hero Stanley, the famous "Yellow Spandex" guy, has slightly more polygons in these sequences than it has in the game.

Actually, he probably has more polygons than the entire geometry displayed during the game sequences!

Voice over

In the European version of the game, the intro sequence does not have any voice over explaining what happened.

The American version has one, which was added on request of the publisher.

Personally I liked the silent version. It made the music much more dramatic and left a lot to the imagination, but why not :)

Time Planning

When Stanley looks on his tablet for what was planned for him, you can see additional names.

Tactac, Ben, Jiji, Xav and PH

These are the nicknames of some of the other members of the devteam.

• "Tactac" is Frédéric Taquet (who made the intro video)
  
• "Ben" is Benoit Boucher
• "Jiji" is Jean-Jacques Poncet
• "Xav" is Xavier Wibaut
• "PH" is Paul-Henri Michaud

Playing with himself

After seing that he has nothing planned, Stanley relaxes... by playing himself in Time Commando.

Self referencing

That obviously imply that we had some gameplay videos of the game recorded, so they could be used in the video sequence, but in any case, that's quite meta!

Flying cases

We teased Tactac a lot for it, but he answered that it was "future tech" so that was just fine...

House of the flying suitcase

...anyway, if you look, when Stanley runs toward the exit, the suitcase actually jumps into his hand :)

Alternative styles

Before settling on the final character set for the game title and menu, there was a number of alternative designs.

Alternate game fonts

Obviously these days you can just go on one of the many font design sites², but in 1996 we still barely had one single PC with an analog modem and a CompuServe³ email address, and most of the work was done in Deluxe Paint.

What do you think of this version of the title picture?

Alternate title picture

I'm personally glad we used the hand made illustration instead!

PC vs PSX

If we had done things properly, the PC and PSX versions of the games would have been sharing most of the code, with specific modules to address the specificities of each platform.

H4x0r l337 Coders

Unfortunately, back in the days the members of the PlayStation team (Olivier and myself) were kind of "elitists pompous coder heroes"⁴ who after looking at the PC code, decided to write their own version of basically the same thing.

If instead we had came up with an arrangement where we would have been allowed to modify and optimize the PC code, instead of doing a rewrite, the game would have been finished earlier, and the time spent instead on making it a better game.

Attract mode

After starting the game, if you let it on the menu, after a while the game will switch to "Attract Mode", something commonly found on Arcade machines to show prospective players what the game looked like.

Prehistory, level 1

What you may not know, is that this game session is actually scripted to behave like if a player was controlling Stanley, but the rest of the game just runs normally, which means that depending on the state of the random generator, the sequence will not always result in the same outcome.

Sometime Stanley will reach up to the first memory chip disposal point, but sometimes he will just fail to even pass the first caveman!

Beardy Man

If you look closely at Stanley face during the game, you will notice that he gets more and more facial hair :)

Need a shave?

It's not a huge change, but that brings some interesting metaphysical questions regarding how long Stanley has been fighting is way out of the simulation.

Obviously it only takes a few minutes to travel through each period, but who knows how long he stays in these tunnels?

Side Rooms

When we developed the game, we did not have a clear list of all the features we could implement, which explains why the Prehistoric level is so linear: When it was designed we did not plan for the extra "side rooms" we could later add to the video stream.

World War One - side rooms

At the opposite side of the spectrum, we have the first world war level which has plenty of them, including the two levels barn on the left, and the inside of the truck.

Team visages

You probably have all seen these photos of the development team, they are even displayed in the game at the end of the credits sequence.

The Time Commando dev team

But did you know that some of the characters in the games are actually using visage textures made from modified scans of id pictures of the team members?

Character face textures

Try to find who's who!

Game Overs

Depending of the context, one of the multiple game over sequences will be played.

Game Over: Particle explosion

I can't say I remember which played in which context, but I believe it at least depends if you died or ran out of time.

Game Over: Time bubble explosion

Game Over: Lost in space

Game Over: Bad headache?

Hopefully you learnt something new⁵ :)

I still have some stuff to share, so stay tuned.

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