Cortex Command

My name is Dan “Data” Tabar, and I’m the development director and general evil mastermind of Data Realms. I did all the programming on Cortex Command, save for the GUI library and Mac porting, which were done by Jason Boettcher and Chris Kruger, respectively. I coordinate the different team members who are all spread out over the world, from Sweden to the USA to Argentina. None of the almost dozen team members have ever met in real life - except for myself and the musician Danny Baranowsky, who happens to live in the same city (Phoenix, AZ)

Playing Commodore 64, Amiga 500, and PC games while growing up in the 90ies. Games gave me some of the most joyful experiences of my childhood. The anticipation to play, and then the immersion into the little worlds that games create gave me delirious bouts of enjoyment as a kid. That sense of wonder over being able to create a small world and everything in it, even its own laws of nature, led me to learn programming and game development on my own. I ordered books from Amazon.com and read what I needed to learn in order to finish the small projects I set out to finish.

Cortex Command started as one of those self-learning projects which I vowed to myself to finish someday. That was about eight years ago, and the game is still being made! The concept of disembodied brains in bunkers stems from my long obsession with cybernetics and where it will take us. Gameplay and perspective-wise, Liero, an old real-time clone of Worms, was the initial inspiration. Graphically, it was Metal Slug.

Doing a physics simulation where every pixel in the terrain had its own material properties and acted accordingly, and having larger rigid bodies fly around and sink into the terrain was by far the hardest technical challenge to overcome. Since most physics sims are polygon-based, and Cortex Command required everything to be pixel-based, there wasn’t much previous work to refer to when I was programming the engine. I had to use what general info I could find and figure out the rest on my own. Also, every character’s footsteps are simulated as physical objects pushing against the ground and therefore generating the forces to move the character forward. Getting this to move smoothly enough to not be very frustrating for the player has been an ongoing challenge as well.

Building all this was a super learning experience with many frustrating times of getting things to behave properly. For these reasons, I’m glad I spent the years making the custom physics engine, but I probably don’t want to make another one in my life!

Not taking so damn long to make this? It has been a learning project though, growing organically and sometimes being on the backburner as I had other full time jobs in the “big” (non-indie) game industry.

The project was started over eight years ago, and has been worked on full time and put the back burner on and off. The last two years it has been a full-time occupation for me though. It has at least another year to go before we have the full campaign and all that content in there. The current version is available to download and play from our website though!

Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 to .net 2009 for the programming, Photoshop and Graphics Gale for graphics. A bunch of in-house tool pipeline apps to process the sprites.

The extremely detailed physics simulation adds so much more fun and possibilities than we as designers can deliberately build in or even predict. Even when a player fails to land his drop ship in the game, for example, it usually fails in such a spectacular and fun way that it’s rewarding in itself.

Don’t ever give up on a project you’re passionate about. Just keep at it and it will see the light of day sometime.

More games, of course!