| Submitted by , posted on 23 April 2003 |

Image Description, by This is a shot of Moonpod's first game, titled Starscape. Moonpod consists of three ex-mainstream game developers that wanted to go out on their own and do a game that was fun, reasonably priced and, for the sake of our own burnt out psyches, fairly quick to produce. We think we've achieved all three goals, although it did take a little longer than originally anticipated. And while it may not sport per-pixel lighting and stencil shadows, it's still very nice to look at (in our opinion :), and, most importantly, fun to play. Something of a return to the "good old days" of gaming we hope.
As for the technical details, we knew from the outset that we wanted to support Windows and OSX, and we also wanted to use a lot of sprites and other non-sprite 2d elements and effects, but still run well on older computers. This lead us to the obvious choice of OpenGL. As it stands, Starscape gets away with running on bare OpenGL 1.1, but will make use of some extensions for performance, and in one case slightly nicer looking effects. The game is perfectly playable on hardware as old as a Voodoo3, although it suffers a little slowdown during the main warp in/out effect due to fillrate requirements.
For the other subsystems in the game we are using DirectX 5 on PC, for maximum compatibility, and making use of SDL on OSX for a far simpler porting experience ;)
The Windows version is finished and the demo is available from our website. The OSX version is lagging a little due to us having a background in PC titles, but it's coming along nicely and hopefully should be available within a couple of weeks.
You can check out our website, have a look at some more screenshots and download the demo at http://www.moonpod.com
Darren Griffiths

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