I’ll make a quick space shooter in a week DAVE FLEMING
and was just this random afternoon project,” says Dave Fleming. “I’ll make a quick space shooter in a week, it’ll be fun!” Jay Faulkner was the first person to join the project. “[Dave] posted on, I can’t remember which Sonic forum it was, saying, ‘Does anyone want to do some art for me?’” A demo of the PC version was released in the summer of 2003, and continued development through 2004.
However, by the beginning of 2005 Dave had shifted focus to the Game Boy Advance. “I felt like it would be a little bit more pro and a little bit more interesting to develop for some kind of console,” he remembers. “The GBA had a good homebrew community at the time, it was really well documented.” PC Engine fan and musician Nate Mclain joined the project late in 2005 via the shmups.com forum, initially getting in touch with Jay and then Dave. “Dave said, ‘We do realise what you’re doing is redbook audio, but we can crush the tracks into 8-bit mono wave files.’ And I said, ‘We’ll get there when we get there. I’m just gonna start writing.’” Nate created a demo track for the
By the spring of 2006, the engine was largely implemented, Nate’s music was playing and both training content and half of the first stage were in there. However, starting university slowed progress. “I think as development went on, after we got all the fun initial stuff done and we started getting to the grindy bits like making bosses, which took a long time, and just trying to grind out content, it became harder and harder to stay on task with those things and not get a little bit feature creepy,” says Dave. Still, the soundtrack was complete by 2007 and development did continue slowly.
Terra Galactica hadn’t originally been designed with the intent of a commercial release, as it felt unachievable. “You needed £10,000 just to get a dev kit, and you needed to have a proven track record of published games to even get anywhere with Nintendo,” recalls Jay. There was some publisher interest, but the game would have to be ported to the DS as the GBA market was dwindling rapidly. “I remember all of our level art was very specifically tailored to the size of the GBA screen, so we’d have to redo a whole bunch of art. But we also could never figure out what the hell to do with the other screen.” Ultimately, it proved to be a non-starter.
Terra Galactica was essentially abandoned after the summer of 2008, and though the idea of reviving the game elsewhere was floated later on, the team didn’t feel it had the same charm outside of the handheld format. Nate did release the soundtrack in 2013, which you can listen to and buy digitally or on CD at bit. ly/tgsoundtrack And though the game was never finished, the team has now decided to make the final demo version available for the first time. You can play the training stage, two main stages and three bosses on your favourite Game Boy Advance emulator or flash cart, so give it a try and be sure to write in and let us know what you think.
PLAY TERRA GALACTICA NOW!
bit.ly/playterragalactica