Lucas Arts Entertainment August 1989 - January 1994 Senior Computer Engineer
FM Towns (Marty) Games
|
|
|
Indiana Jones III The Last Crusade |
The Secret of Monkey
Island |
Zak McKracken |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Indiana Jones IV The Fate of Atlantis |
Monkey Island 2 LeChuck’s Revenge |
Loom |
The neat
thing about developing for this platform was that I was developing more advanced
code for the Japanese market about two years before the American market caught
up. I Converted 'C' and 8086 graphics
blit routines to 386 assembly code, optimized for the 486. Ported the 16bit voice game "Indiana
Jones 4" and the Redbook Audio/iMuse games; "Indiana Jones 3",
"Monkey Island 1 & 2", "Zak McKracken" and
"Loom" to the 32bit "FM Towns" multimedia computer in
Japanese and English for the Japanese Market.
Was project leader of a staff of two, for two of the titles while the
other four were one man projects. Designed various tools and techniques
including fast 256 color graphics decompression, CD handler, and various FM,
PCM and MIDI data handling.
Maniac Mansion (Localization)
|
|
|||
Maniac Mansion (NES) |
Maniac Mansion (PC) |
These
were filler projects between the much bigger FM Towns projects but they were
fun neverless. Converted the Nintendo 8
bit NTSC English game, "Maniac Mansion" to the foreign languages;
French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.
I also localized the IBM version to Italian.
Bad Guys of Strawberry Gulch
This was another filler
story game that I designed but the company was not interested in western style
games at that time.
The
goal of the game is to direct your player “Miner Jim” to find the treasure of
the Sierra Madre. You play along with characters such as the Sheriff “Tin Badge
Pete”, the deputy “Scardy Cat Fred”, the Undertaker “Mr. Overby”, leader of the
Strawberry Gulch Gang “Big Bad Bob”, and a handful of other characters such as
Bad Bob’s mother whom “Momma Bad Bob” whom runs the local strawberry stand and
gives hints when you buy her strawberries.
The
landscape contained as you can see in the map image, hills, a valley, cemetery,
the town “Boom Town” with lots of shops, a waterfall and “Dead Mans Creek”,
along with the “Out’O Luck Mine”, “Dutchman Mine”, and the “Good Luck Mine”
with lots of mine tunnels with secret passage ways interconnecting them. Other
scenic areas such as “Gopher Junction” with talking gophers and the strawberry
fields of Strawberry Gulch!
The
game was meant to be corny and since Adventure games are not really made any
more it might make for a nice private project for me sometime in the future!
I was
laid off after 4 years of porting and localization work at this company but was
hired back part time to finish the last project, “Monkey 2”. It was a great
company to work for. The Christmas
parties are extravaganzas. And working
on the Skywalker Ranch for the first year was great. People try for years and usually don’t succeed in getting hired
and so I feel privileged. I’d sure like
to be able to work for them again as they’re a wonderful company and hard to
beat.
I became
extremely familiar with all the top of the line programming techniques at the
time as well as proper data handling and entry of said foreign language
standards and their formats. This led
to other localization work elsewhere.