Company
Congratulations are in order to Krome Studios for making it to the top 100 developers list in the "Develop 100" charts for 2006. So what exactly is Develop 100?
Develop 100 ranks the world's games development studios based on the revenues their products made at UK retail in 2006.
Krome Studios, the only studio from Australia to make the list, is at #94 and is close behind some notable companies such as Polyphony Digital, Microsoft Game Studios, and Valve. Krome released The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning in 2006. Congratulations, Krome!
Lets not forget the intercontinental companies shall we?
#28 Pandemic Studios
#37 Creative Assembly
Those were the US and UK studios. The Aussie studios weren't on the list.
Congrats to the Kromans!
Hah to anyone who thinks the Aussie games industry is not doing well.
"Those were the US and UK studios. The Aussie studios weren't on the list."
What a stupid, waste of time to bring up such a childish point. Krome have made some great titles and they look like they are going well, but top 100 charts should be reserved for magazines targeted at 12-year-old girls.
'What a stupid, waste of time to bring up such a childish point. Krome have made some great titles and they look like they are going well, but top 100 charts should be reserved for magazines targeted at 12-year-old girls.'
Almost as stupid as getting emotional about a simple factual observation.
COMEBACK OF THE CENTURY!
pure pwnage right there...
Krome is an awesome company, for god's sakes they are making a STAR WARS Title
There have been a lot, and I mean A LOT of crap Star Wars titles. The only ones that I have liked are the KOTOR series.
They Rule!
The Rest Suck :P
The bonuses the Krome staff are making must be really good now considering the average salaries the company offers. Going on what some bonuses are in the industry the staff must be raking it in.
Actually the "Pandemic Studios" on the list does include the Australian studio - the flag is just saying the country of origin. Destroy All Humans 2 was their biggest release in 2006, and that was developed by the Brisbane studio.
Is Krome doing a Star Wars title? Is there a link anywhere or is it just gossip?
Go to LucasArtrs website - they seem to think Krome is doing a Star Wars title.
Found it.
lucasarts/games/theforceunleashed/
According to this link, Krome are doing the PS2 & PSP skews of The Force Unleashed.
Doing 2 skews for someone elses title, I would think, would not be the same as "doing a title."
Just my opinion...
Following the link, the game seems very promising. At least as a concept. Nice to have a Star Wars game that is all about being the Sith bad guy rather than a sissy Jedi wank :).
Probably worth playing even if it turns out to be as bad as most of the other SW games.
I'd have to disagree with post 14. Krome are doing PS2 and PSP skus of a next gen (current gen?) title. They are either being supplied with next gen code and art assets and crunching them down to work on last gen platforms or they are building the last gen SKUs from scratch. They are probably responsible for redesigning the gameplay to work on these platforms. Either way, there is a massive amount of work involved and they wil have their studio hands full. Crunching PS2 assets to get them working on PSP is a pain in the freckle so I can only imagine that getting PS3 stuff working on PSP would be some orders of magnitude worse (sorry, I sould say more challenging). That's leaving aside memory allocation challenges,TRC, and finding anywhere near enough processing power to cram all of those lovely physics and effects into a usable frame rate.
Just remember, anyone who says 'it's just a port' probably has no appreciation of how difficult porting can be, even within the one generation. Cross generational porting even more so.
Good luck to the Kromans I say.
I totally agree with Simon. In my experience (as an artist) porting is generally equally challenging to creating a title from scratch. Although the work on the art side is more technical and less creative, the effort required is the same. Of course it all depends on the platform you're porting from and to. I also feel for the programmers who have to get the code and content across platforms. It's hard to appreciate until you've done it and I probably would have thought less of the work involved in porting a few years ago myself. Simon's post gives a good insight into it though.
Never the less, Lucasarts will be calling all of the shots. Sure there is a lot of technical work going into it... but someone else is dictating to you the game, you're just translating it to another platform.
Anyway, this game is sounding pretty good. Looking forward to hearing more about it.
LucasArts would be calling the shots anyway. LucasArts are probably one of the most demanding game studios out there, and are extremely tough with being in canon with the starwars universe.