Gambys video game history. Learn more about this video game design story.

More than fifteen years have gone by, and technology has evolved beyond a point we could only dreamed about back then when we did this first video game.
Now we can get amazing 3D Rendering packages for free like Blender to create computer video games. Back then we had to stick to buy 3D Studio in DOS (yes, we did bought that software).

Before the game begun its programming stage, i did dozens and dozens of sketches, not only to create the Gamby characters but also to imagine their world.
All those images, like the one on the right side, got lost over the years and so, nowadays there isn´t much to show of this previous illustration work created in color pencils and sweat.

Now there are tons of animation packages to choose from like the simple and excelent freeware Pencil, or the amazing and more complex Toonboom, but back then I had to draw all the hundreds of sprite animations in Deluxe Paint one by one, pixel by pixel in the most traditional animation way you can think of .

Programming out of the blue.
The whole programming of our first video game was in itself a video game history saga.
Endless dead ends due to the many, many diferent primitive graphic boards the game had to run in but sometimes didn´t, and plenty of technical issues that were to many to mention and wich Leote the main programmer had to overcome, basicaly by learning in the spot while facing every challenge as there was no place where he could get help or technical advice from.
Then came the creation and testing of the levels. 100 of them in this first video game wich drove the programmers Nelson and Leote nuts as well as many of the people who´ve tried these levels to search for glitches in them.

Rendering Gambys
Other than the 2D sprite drawing and endless frames of hand-drawn animation with its hundreds of little frames for our first video game, I worked on over a period of 8 month´s back in 1993, i´ve also worked on the 3D Studio gamby modeling and rendering.

Now we look at those video game history images compared to the actual computer video games, they seem extremely primitive and trully amateur, but then it was a real achievment to get those results out of the original pencil illustrations.

486 at 66MHZ power !
Specialy considering the limitations of the modeling features on the 2.0 version of 3D Studio. Its rigid and still primitive video game design modeling tools made my life really difficult to come up with the organic Gambys shape and subsequent 3D animations.

We were rendering all this on two 486 at 66Mhz computers and one pentium at 133Mhz with less than 100mb Ram, and sometimes a single frame took more than five hours to render on the old 486 computers.

We left the computers rendering overnight for many weeks and sometimes we only came up with less than 2 seconds of animation after lots of trial and error efforts, as it took forever to render a single more complex frame, as the modern interactive preview features we have today in rendering software were just a science fiction video game design dream back then.

If done today, i could have rendered the entire animations and 3d gambys of the game in less than three months.
In 1993/94 all the animations and screens took more than one year and a half to complete.

The first Gamby ever designed by me was not any of those little blue fellows that end up getting that name. The original "Gamby" is that character wich is also in the game and got called "Weirdo".
That was the first drawing i did when i trying to come up with the video game design concept for my creatures. Later this character ended up as one of the bad guys.

Then came the one called Dark Elf, the litte gray guy with the trident. For a couple of days i´ve considered that one to become a Gamby, but i totaly disliked the fact that it was too human and i was trying to create a non-human character so i kept drawing.
These first atempts were created pixel by pixel in Deluxe Paint, but then i moved to real paper and color pencils and i sketched the original image of the Wizard Gamby and that was it. The concept for the video game design for Gambys was found.

GAMBYS video game was available in Portugal and Spain.
We were a very small independent software house and so distribution limitation was a natural consequence of our isolation back then and there was no Internet to promote computer video games or video game design the way it´s done now.
The game was going to be released by Psygnosis in England but Windows 95 was around and as DOS games were going to be outdated soon, Gambys remained only available localy altough many players still consider it one of their best video games at the time..

From then on, i´ve created the first pixel by pixel frame for Gamby Wizard in Deluxe Paint and just kept adding frames to what became the original character. After that it was just a question of changing colors and clothes to create the aditional characters relating to what we´ve had planned for each one to do within the original gameplay that Rui Tito had come up with originaly.