Dave Mirra GBA Q&A

The Game Boy Advance is quickly turning into a platform where developers can showcase their coding skills. With the latest batch of home consoles offering developers a great deal of freedom in terms of what they can accomplish in a game, impressive graphics are becoming a bit easier to come by. Portable consoles, on the other hand, have always presented developers with a challenge, due to their limitations. While the GBA certainly has its limits, developers seem to be coaxing some truly impressive things out of the tiny system. One of the upcoming games for the system, Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2, looks to be wringing quite a bit of performance out of the GBA. We were able to touch base with Paul Adams, managing director of Full-Fat, the developer of Dave Mirra 2, and find out about the game and what developing on the GBA is like.

Tiny but powerful, just like the GBA.

GameSpot: How has it been developing on the Game Boy Advance? Have you discovered anything cool about the hardware?

Paul Adams: The GBA is an extremely nice piece of hardware and has a huge amount of potential. What you can achieve is down to tight code and cunning techniques for making the most of the available video and work RAM. Having tight hardware constraints always makes you try and squeeze every last cycle out of the machine. For us, we think the pure flexibility of the hardware is its coolest asset. There is so much you can make it do that it isn't exactly designed for. It comes down to persuading the hardware to do what you want it to, such as Mode-7 for instance.

GS: How long has the game been in development?

PA: We started the design for the game in January 2001 and began full development around mid-February. We finally got approval from Nintendo round about mid-October. So from start to end about nine months--a good gestation period!

GS: What's the size of the team working on the game?

PA: In the height of development there was a team of nine development staff working on the project, including 3D animators, bitmap artists, and programmers, plus all the support staff back in the States--producers, bug testers, etc.

Polygons plus sprites equal good.

GS: How do you approach bringing a game like Dave Mirra to the GBA?

PA: Good question. The simple answer is good solid research. We spent a great deal of time playing Mirra on PS1 and Game Boy Color, as well as Tony Hawk on the PS1. We went to live shows to watch the pros in action (which was cool!). There was also a lot of time spent online, checking out the BMX sites and generally gaining an understanding of the sport. From this research we then got a real flavor of what we intended to do in the game itself. There was a push from Acclaim US too, with some of the guys over in the States having a keen interest in the sport, which is very helpful when you don't know what some of the tricks are. We then had to take into account what the GBA was capable of. Being a new platform it was pretty tricky (no pun intended) to determine exactly what it could do. That's where the coders come into their own. From here on in it's then a case of taking all the ideas and creating a design doc and then developing the thing.

From a technical point of view you have to look at the existing games and consider what is possible from the hardware you are developing for. In the case of Mirra PS1 we obviously couldn't create that sort of polygon-rich environment on the GBA, and similarly we knew we could do a great deal better than the GBC version. So we ended up with a compromise between the two, with highly detailed static backgrounds and a fluid polygon rider.