Stupid Invaders Dreamcast
"Working with Titanium Studios was just a dream. We asked them to achieve things that most would have said impossible, especially regarding the deadline. And they've done it! They've done even more, more than we expected. When possible, they managed to enhance what we asked, finding not enough with the features of the PC game, but doing better on the Dreamcast version. If the Dreamcast version of Stupid Invaders is any good at all, it is definitely because of the great work of Titanium."
- Sebastien Hamon, Game Producer, Xilam
Stupid Invaders was an unusual project, a 2D game in a time when nobody made 2D games any more, in the style of the classic LucasArts adventure games but able to take advantage of newer technologies. The quality of the content by the talented folks at Xilam was so high that it is still excellent by today's standards. We jumped at the opportunity to port such an interesting and challenging title.
Being a unique title, Stupid Invaders made use of a number of novel streaming and compression strategies. We needed to rework all of these techniques for the Dreamcast version to meet the console capabilities. We were also required to fit the game on half as many disks. The original developers had planned on quartering resolution for the Dreamcast version but we were able to retain the original detail.
One challenge on this project was the massive amount of content: over 10,000 runtime assets and millions of source and intermediate files to manage. We built several automated tools to process and manage this data. One, which analyzed all of the AI scrips for asset usage was also used to optimize disk layout. This yielded Dreamcast optical disk load times that outperformed the PC version on hard disk.