Elegant Chaos

When I first heard about Black & White, I idly mentioned to David Stephen at Feral that it would be great if we could get the contract to port it.

To his eternal credit, he didn't say "Peter Molyneaux, no chance", he just went off and sorted it!

So in early 2001, after recovering from the exhaustion of the Theme Park World port, and after a brief delay to update Championship Manager and build european distributions of Oni for Feral, I embarked on the whole shebang once more, this time with Lionhead's source code to wade through.

To be honest, by this time I was fairly knackered! The TPW port had been very tiring, and I had learnt some hard lessons from that project which I was determined not to repeat (lesson #1: don't let the publisher ship it before it's ready!).

I started the project in a more methodical fashion than I had done with TPW. I was also conscious that I needed to consolidate and expand the tools that I had built for the TPW port, so that I could gain the benefit of my earlier work when doing further ports (at this time I thought I'd probably be doing more after B&W).

To this end, I did quite a bit of work on my DirectX and Win32 compatability libraries (known as IndirectX and Windoze), and also on my own utility library (imaginatively named Sams Utilities).

I also started building some porting tools to do some of the grunt work for me, and allow me to produce some better estimates of how long the project would take.

The result of all this was that David and I realised that I probably needed some help if we were to get the project finished in time for a Christmas release.

Luckily, Dair & Ian at Zonic had just contacted Feral to see if they needed any more developers. We had a meeting, got on well, and so decided to split the project up between us. I still wanted to be nominally in charge (and save some of the fun stuff for myself), but there was plenty of work to go round so we just divvied up the modules and started getting on with it.

It was all going nicely, but then everything went slightly pear-shaped, as I got made an offer that I couldn't refuse by Sports Interactive!

I had been camping out in their office for some time, and they invited me along to play with them in a football tournament up in Leeds. During this period, Ov Collyer announced that he was leaving the company to have a break and do some travelling. They needed someone to replace him, and asked me, to which I really had to say yes please!

It was a bit difficult to have to break the news to David, but he took it very well, I agreed to stay on the B&W project part time for a fair while, and we both knew that Zonic were more than capable of doing the job, so it all worked out quite nicely in the end.

Zonic did all the cool stuff, and deserve all the credit, whilst I got to do most of the boring preliminary work on the source code! On the other hand, I got a job at Sports Interactive so I can hardly complain.