We speak to Stephan Katteneder, whose games, Total Refill and The Coffee Break Shootout, have both just been released as a double pack by Commodore 64 publisher Psytronik
Where did the idea for The Coffee Break Shootout come from?
In 1999 there was a free-to-play game called Moorhuhn which was used by Johnny Walker as an advertising gimmick and a productivity killer in offices at the time. I loved it, and when I was looking for a game idea for the Commodore 64, I wanted to pay homage to it. The Coffee Break Shootout uses a simpler approach without the scrolling background and only one layer of birds, but otherwise it has Moorhuhn’s fingerprints all over it.
And how about Total Refill, what was the original inspiration for that?
I wish I could say it was Tapper, but I have to admit that I didn’t know of Tapper before Kenz labelled Total Refill as ‘Tapperesque’. The inspiration was a real bar, with the real Chris running it. He was an awesome bartender, always on top of things, a multitasking genius in his job. One evening I thought,
‘What an unforgiving job that is, there is constant pressure.’ Add to that a little bit of Mario’s Cement Factory and that’s Total Refill.
How long did both games take to develop and who was involved?
That’s hard to answer; I didn’t keep track of that. I had no clue how a game is made, so I just started hacking away on my old laptop. Big mistake, by the way: a rough estimation is 200 hours for TCBS and about twice as much for TR, testing not included. I got lost too much in detail I guess. Saul Cross delivered sound and music at an intimidating speed once he got on board, then Trevor Storey and Kenz of publisher Psytronik turned the whole thing into a product. TCBS supports mouse input, was that difficult to implement?
I had no idea how they worked, but felt that a shooting game like TCBS needed mouse support. After some research and experimentation, I found an example for a C64 mouse driver online. Some modifications of that (buggy) example code later, I finally got it to work but could not limit the crosshair at the left side of the screen. Everything else worked just fine and it took me a while to find out what caused the overflow and a solution, but I bet there is a more elegant way of doing it.
How has the C64 gaming community responded ? RGNS showcase video has only thumbs up so far, this is a friendly community. No one is just waiting to get a chance to bash a new developer. I guess most retro gamers know how much work it is to get something done in assembly language on an old system.
Finally, have you got any future plans our readers might be interested in?
There is a new game evolving right now, and all the things I learned during the making of my first two will go into it. With a full-time job, it’s hard to estimate when it will be ready. I don’t like the idea of putting videos of development stages online so there will be nothing to see before I am done with it.