Psygnosis was an excellent company to work for and was the start of my career in D.I.E. I began in QA and was made redundant after the sale to Sony. I was Lead designer on four original projects, generating all pertinent documentation, including, level, character, weapon, sound, user interface, scripts, cut-scenes, while managing up to eight level designers and motivating team members.
This particular product is one of my proudest moments and a definite example of ”design is problem solving”. Lemmings had been a huge cash cow for Psygnosis for many years ( and i had the honour of testing Lemmings 2 !) however when they launched Lemmings 3D it bombed!
This was the early days of 3D gaming and the problems of navigation, cameras and controls in this new dimension were never more obvious and prevalent than in Lemmings 3D.
Myself, Nick Burcombe and Jim Bowers were tasked with the Job of how to make Lemmings in 3D. It was a great hour or two of banter before we resolved upon the idea of “the Cheese Slice”. The cheese slice was a method by which we maintained the flat plane for Lemmings movement, thus maintaining the games playability, but wrapped it onto the outside of a Circular object. The design solution was perfect, as a “solution” should be. However marketing were unconvinced ” 3D lemmings doesn’t work” and a prototype was made , launched on the website and the public decided whether the game should be produced or not.
The public new it was a winning solution and the game went into production and won awards for innovation.
I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving.
JEFFREY VEEN
This was my first product as a fully fledged game designer, and despite its flaws Tenka was a “cult classic”. This was Psygnosis first foray into 3D games along with wipEout and Krazy Ivan. The scenes were exported from Softimage with a second export for 2D collision data…..
There was lots of innovative design in Tenka, much of which is standard in 1st person perspective shooters nowadays:
1. Integrated Story.
2. Ammo Display on Rear of Gun for continuous visibility to player.
3. Shot placement: Certain enemies reacted differently to shot placement, for example, taking the legs off the “walking heads” could cause them to run around in circles.
Tenka really was ahead of it’s time but suffered from serious technical restrictions in collision, level design and baddie density. We did the voiceovers to the script (which I’d written) in one afternoon, unrehearsed. The outcome was terrible and we all certainly learned a lot about games design and production on this one. In some ways I should have stuck with this genre as in another iteration or two I’m sure we would have been the first to create something along the lines of real-time Resident Evil.
The decision to design the gun in such a way as to morph into upgrades allowed for one extra floating baddie type per level and was not a rip-off of Judge Dread 
“I loved this game. It had a really committed cult following and was a total mind job. The ending followed suit and finished a game that was a total trip by completely screwing you over in the very best WTF fashion possible. To this day I hope that? at some point a sequel will be made.”
ANON – Youtube
Novastorm was a conversion of Scavenger 4 from Fujitsu CD to Mega CD and PC. With only a six man team we converted to two new platforms and added significant new content. The game structure was redesigned, movie scenes added, FMV edited, blue screened actors, new sprite formations and power-up systems.
We also got to add one new level which is featured in the video below. (skip to 2:10 to see the start of another famous Psygnosis game).
Novastorm was a pretty old skool , a shooter blotted onto the top of an hour and a bit of CGI. What’s interesting looking back, is the cut scenes resemble today’s modern real-time scenes.
Psygnosis was eventually brought by Sony and it was this in-depth understanding of 3D graphics across the whole of Psygnosis development studios which made it such an asset in the progression of 3D graphics in games and the start of Playstation.
This was my first role as a “game director”, the name for games designers in 1993. The product was “complete” and had been submitted to QA and magazine review. Review scores were around 5% and I was tasked with improving the game in three short months. I added significant features, re-edited the video footage, changed the music and sfx, reworked the character controls, edited (where possible) the rendered backgrounds and completely reworked sprite movement patterns. The result was a review score of 63%.
One of my favourite games that i was lead QA on, absolute classic!
Scavenger 4 was one the first CD console games ever released (Fujitsu CD ). It was one of the many CG rendered background games that Psygnosis produced. These products were a graphical tour de forces with hours of CGI hi-res footage which was created in Sofimage. Unfortunatly game design at at this point, for us at least, was adding sprites on top of animated backdrops!
