Titanium Studios - Projects

Razor Freestyle Scooter Dreamcast & Nintendo 64

“Working with Titanium was an absolute pleasure. Jayeson and his team were absolutely professional and the project surpassed our expectations. The end result was faster and cheaper and better then we had ever expected.”

- Mike Arkin, Executive Producer, Crave Entertainment

Dreamcast

Razor Freestyle Scooter is a mix of skateboard and BMX gameplay targeted at younger children. Built upon a top quality skateboard engine, the gameplay is surprisingly solid.

For this Dreamcast port from Playstation we replaced all texture content at a much higher resolution. A custom pipeline was built to process and manage these new assets. Dissatisfied with the how the original Playstation character models looked on Dreamcast, we created high resolution versions at no additional charge to our client.

“If there's a definite strength of Razor, it's the visuals. ... the game certainly looks a helluva lot better than its PS version. Very clean graphics and a super smooth 60 fps frame rate totally took me off guard and it's nice to see a translation of a game get the full Dreamcast facelift.”

- ign dc review

Nintendo 64

This was one crazy, rewarding project. After shipping Razor on Dreamcast, Crave asked if we could have a Nintendo 64 version approved by Nintendo within 12 weeks. It took 3 weeks to get our first development hardware and 7 weeks after that we submitted to Nintendo. With 2 days to spare, Nintendo approved us on the first submission. It was sold in large numbers in an exclusive deal with Blockbuster.

The Nintendo 64 is an interesting hardware platform and we were glad to have the opportunity to work on it. One of the most rewarding challenges for us was figuring out how to fit a 350MB game onto an 8MB cartridge. Content work included poly-reducing the Dreamcast models, fixing numerous small issues in the environment models, and, converting the uncompressed CD music to MIDI with compressed-samples.

The final two screenshots are from Nintendo 64 and were contributed by GameFAQs reader Tropicon.

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.

Quake on Windows CE for Dreamcast

This test port was a short project to demonstrate our porting capabilities. The Quake engine had recently been open sourced and was very straightforward to work with. The fully functional port was completed in a week and a half with much of the work involving conversion of OpenGL code to Direct3D.

At the time the Quake franchise was probably the hottest gaming news item in the game industry. When word broke of our port we were inundated with press inquiries. For a while there were discussions on releasing it free on a Dreamcast cover disk and ultimately Sega made the modified engine source available to Dreamcast developers.

Defense Commander Dreamcast & PC

"I was very pleased at the opportunity to work with Titanium Studios on Defense Commander. The end product is stellar and to this day remains a show case example of how to develop for Dreamcast."

- John Smith, Windows CE Group, Microsoft

Microsoft asked us if we could quickly create a sample project to showcase how Windows CE for Dreamcast made it easy to cross-develop for both Dreamcast and Windows PC. The mini-game Defense Commander was the result of that work.

Defense Commander accurately represented all of the components used by typical game titles: Direct3D based graphics; DirectSound audio; DirectInput game controller & mouse input; hierarchal AI system; a client-side-predicted, low bandwidth networking solution. In order to provide full detail content at low cost, procedural generation was used extensively for textures and the terrain. No platform specific code was required for either platform.

Microsoft kindly gave us permission to redistribute the Windows PC version and for a number of years Defense Commander was one of the top downloads on many "free Windows PC games" websites.

For a limited time, we are making it available free for download again. Please keep in mind that this game is approximately 10 years old and requires Windows XP or earlier to run.

Download: Defense Commander (6.3 MB)