Hi Peter. Are you the same guy who coded Ziriax on the Amiga?

Well, I hope I have evolved a bit during these 30 years, but yes, I made Ziriax, and that is also my nickname . One day someone contacted me about this, his surname actually was Ziriax, go figure! On the Amiga, my nickname was Chatterbox...

How do you pronounce your name, and where do you come from?

Peter is easy . Verswyvelen is a hard name even over here in Belgium..., but let's see, in English you would pronounce this as vers-why-vellen, more or less, but it really is impossible to pronounce in English.

What was your first experience of a computer, and what was the first computer you ever owned?

My first experience with a real computer was with an IBM PC from Telerex, the company of a friend's father. That must have been around 1983 (I was 13 years old). We did some BASIC programming on this machine, but since it was a business machine, we weren't really allowed to fool around with it anymore . My first interest in "programming" came after making custom mazes for Munchkin (a pacman clone) on the Philips Videopac (1981?). [Note: Philips is a Dutch company, the Videopac G7000 was a rebranded Magnavox Oddyssey 2 console made for Europe]. The level editor in this game made me see how awesome content creation was. I designed a maze that always made me win . The first real computer my mum bought for me was the good old mighty Commodore 64 (1984?).

How did you start learning how to program a computer?

I started with BASIC on the C64, but I quickly discovered that I needed to learn assembly language to make anything decent. I purchased a KCS Power Cartridge, and reversed engineering the game Thing on a Spring. At that time I didn't know anyone that was programming a computer (the internet didn't exist yet, and furthermore I used to be very shy). I wasn't able to fully understand the game logic, but it opened the door to hacking and demo making.

Together with 3 other members of the local hobby-computer-club, we started a demo-group. We made a lot of demos and trainers for games. To automate all this I made my first big project, a floppy disc full of goodies for the Trilogic Expert Cartridge, that contained a sprite editor, text editor, automatic lives and level address searches, full-memory-snapshot packer/unpacker, etc... Instead of selling this (I was 15 years old and didn't have a clue that this was worth something), I entered a competition organized by a Dutch shop called "Cat & Korsch", to make the best software for that cartridge. I won and received an Amiga SCSI harddisk. Hurray!, business mistake #1 .

What did you think when you first saw an Amiga?

I was blown away. This machine was way ahead of its time. For me especially the excellent reference manuals made it possible to start programming on it, although I must admit I had the Amiga for months on my shelf because I was overwhelmed by it. It took time to master. Anyway I did make some demos for a hackers group called Bamiga Sector One. But I really wanted to make games.

Which language did you use for your Amiga games?

All my Amiga games were made in 68K assembly language (using the Hisoft DevPac assembler and debug monitor). Ironically I learned to program in C much later! At the time I always looked at the output of C compilers, and I thought I could do way better... I developed a lot of tools to make the creation of these games faster: a real-time linker, level editor, sprite animation editor, event recording systems to make crash debugging easier, a patch system to send small patches to the publisher (modems were slow and expensive!).

Ziriax (1990) is a very smooth 50fps scrolling, full screen PAL Amiga exclusive title. Was this your first game on the Amiga? How did development start?

Yep, that was my first game. I made many demos for a famous group, but I was really an arcade game player, so me and my friends spend a lot of time in the luna-parcs, playing games like Konami's Nemesis, Vulcan Venture, Thundercross... I wanted to make something similar.

Why did you make a horizontal shooter? Were you influenced by other games, such as R-type and Gradius perhaps?

Only the Gradius games. I didn't like R-Type that much, it felt too slow .

You managed to combine a neat package of gameplay, graphics and great music. How did you meet Erlend Robaye (Graphics) and Tomas Dahlgren (Music), to form The Whiz Kids?

I met Erlend Robaye at the same hobby-computer-club where I met all my friends . I was searching for someone to make graphics for Ziriax, and Erlend presented himself. He was also studying programming, so that helped a lot because he knew about the limitations of a machine. I didn't know Tomas Dahlgren, and never met him, he was introduced by the publisher as far as I remember, or it might have been Hugues the Jonghe, I am not sure.

Ziriax is very difficult after level 1. How much was the game playtested?

Well, you see, Ziriax was made for my friends and myself, and we were all arcade gamers. Ziriax is hard, just as Nemesis and Vulcan Venture and all these Konami games. We wanted to push our limits. A beta-tester and friend of mine (Eric Mielonen) was able to finish Ziriax multiple times! But he was an arcade-ninja, he also was able to finish the Gradius games! It was as if he knew what the game was going to do, he seemed to be able to look into the future . Level 2 is not that difficult IMO, but you need to know how to use the weapons, and master them. Level 3 is difficult, and level 4 is insane.

But you could always type 'slovex' when playing, that should give you infinite lives... I think that is a secret still today. But I am not sure this code made it in the many different versions of Ziriax that circulated.

Unlike most Shield upgrades, in Ziriax the shields are missiles, which move backwards and forwards around the ship. Is there a way to change their pattern?

Yeah, these "shields" were the only graphics I made myself, I shouldn't have done that, they are confusing! These "shields" were actually destructive missiles that you could aim by holding down the fire button, and releasing at the right angle. This was the weapon that you had to master to make Ziriax possible. But most people (and most reviewers that destroyed the game) didn't read the manual, and used rapid fire joysticks, so they never got to master those missile firing skills. The weapon was actually an anti-rapid-fire design .

Is there a way to keep the upgrades after losing a life? This happened to me once, but I cant figure out how I did it.

As far as I recall, when you die, you get a lot of upgrades around you. The problem is that many different versions of Ziriax got "leaked" by beta-testers and the first publisher, so it depends on what version you are playing I guess.

The bosses seem to time out after a while. Was this to make the game easier?

Only the mid-bosses time out. That was because of a limitation in the game engine, instead of repeating a part of the background level, cycling until you killed the mid-boss, it was just scrolling a fixed background, so the mid-bosses had to retreat for the level to continue.

Do you think the game was too hard?

Not for us, making a hard game was the goal, we spend too much money and time on the arcade games, and we wanted a similar challenge on the Amiga computer. But for most players, yes, certainly, it was way too difficult. From a marketing point of view, Ziriax was just crazy. But Ziriax was never officially sold... Well, I now know that the initial publisher The Software Business did sell it without my knowledge... But when The Software Business told me they didn't want to publish the game anymore, Hewson showed an interest.

How did Hewson Developments become the publisher of your games?

When I made Ziriax, I send VHS video tapes to many publishers. Hewson was one of the few companies that reacted. I had to make many changes to Ziriax, but while doing this, my hard drive crashed. I tried to restore the code from backups on floppies, only to find out all these floppies were corrupted. I guess it was because of new carpet that generated insane static electricity. Anyway I lost 2 years of 14-hours a day work, followed by a small nervous breakdown .

Your next game with 'The Whiz Kids' was Zarathrusta (1991). How difficult was it to make a smooth multi-scrolling game, with music and sound effects, on an Amiga in those days?

It is hard to say, because I was just hacking around and having fun, not really designing anything, just going with the flow. Programming always felt natural to me. I also had friends that were programming games and demos, like Kris Cleynhens and Hugues De Jonghe, and I learned a lot from them. But looking back to it, I would indeed call myself insane, writing a zillion lines of a code in 68K assembly language is just crazy. I should have used C for most of the game, but I was a freak, I wanted to squeeze as much out of the machine as possible.

Why is Zarathrusta a Thrust game?

Erlend was a big fan of Trust on the C64, and made some nice graphics for it. We decided to make a game out of this, not realising that Trust was copyrighted . Hewson purchased the rights from Firebird, and wanted to publish the game. Unfortunately they went bankrupt just after I sold my rights to them... Followed by the second nervous breakdown .

Did Hewson give you the go ahead to remake the sequel to their Stormlord game, Deliverance (1992), or was it your idea to make a conversion?

Not at all. After the commercial failures of both Ziriax and Zarathrusta, I wanted to quit game development. But Kim Goossens, a friend of mine that made the intro picture for Ziriax, was searching for a job. 21st Century Entertainment - the reboot of Hewson - asked me if I knew someone to make the graphics for a quick and dirty conversion of Stormlord II. Kim took the job.

Unfortunately a couple of months later, the freelance UK programmer that was working on Stormlord II left 21st. So they asked me to program it. I refused because I felt miserable, but they offered me to pay me the money Hewson still owed me for Zarathrusta. And since I still had to pay back Erlend, I took the job.Now Kim was a stubborn artistic genius, he wanted to show the world his skills, and a stupid conversion of Stormlord II was not good enough for him. Contractually we just had to convert 10 levels in 6 months time, but Kim just started designing his own game . When 21st saw these insane graphics, they just let him continue doing so . But that took way more than 6 months, and Kim was not paid enough, so he got demotivated (making a game is fun, but finishing is very hard, even if you get paid well). So I gave half of my fee to Kim, and we finished the game.

Was Deliverance inspired by The Bitmap Brothers' Gods?

Kim was certainly influenced by Gods, because he was playing it a lot. But Gods had a different feel to it I would say; Deliverance was raw, rough on the edges, Gods was a polished game with way more budget. But maybe that is nice about Deliverance.

Deliverance was famous for its graphic torture scenes, and beautiful naked ladies. Did you ever get any feedback on the nudity, blood, gore and horror content in those days?

Well, in the Mac version for the US market, a friend of mine (Hugues de Jonghe) that made the conversion drew green bikinis over the naked ladies . In those days you also had the Rambo etc movies, many of these were rated 15 uncut, so blood, gore and horror were not that special I guess back then, at least not in Belgium .

The game seems huge, but there are only 3 levels, plus a shoot 'em up flying sequence. Is this how you imagined the game would be, or did you plan to have more levels?

I really just wanted to get the game finished . Originally we had to convert 10 levels from Stormlord II, but unfortunately we ran out of budget, and had to finish it with a stupid shoot'em level.

What happened to yourself and Kim Goossens after finishing Deliverance?

After Deliverance, Kim and I started doing 3D stuff. I made my own Amiga 3D software and 2D 24-bit RGB painting software (CarryCAD and Panter, for the Harlecain board, never commercially released). After that I started working for SCALA, working on MM100, and Kim joined Imagination In Motion (IIM), a Belgium 3D animation company. In 1996 I joined IIM, creating custom 3D animation software (we had a contract with Fox to make a 3D animated movie, but unfortunately that never made it, see this video for an old teaser made mainly by Kim).

Do you have any stories during your time with the Amiga? What were your biggest problems and mistakes?

The Amiga days are the best days I had when it comes to creative coding. I never had that feeling again. The biggest mistake was being naive from a business point of view. I just let the business sharks eat me alive, twice. I also believed too much in the Amiga, when Commodore went bankrupt, I had no experience whatsoever with the PC or Mac. To make a living, I had to learn DOS and Windows. It was a horrible experience making stuff on a PC, the architecture (both hardware and software) was so ugly!

I still love the Amiga though. It was a mean education machine, and together with the other home computers from that era, they shaped an industry. You have to see the documentary from "Bedrooms to Billions, the Amiga Years" to appreciate the vision from the engineers behind it.

Your latest game to be published seems to be Xyanide (2006). I notice Kim Goossens was the Art Director. How much were you involved with the game?

That is painful story. The girlfriend of a very good friend of mine broke up with him. He was heartbroken, he didn't want to continue living. But his dream was to make a videogame. So we tried to convince him to make one with us, to give him a purpose: Xyanide was supposed to be a classical side shooter with realtime 3D rendered spaceships over prerendered 3D layers. The name Xyanide came from cyanide, the poison... Luckily that was hard to find . We never really made this game, but we had the intention. He made it through the rough period, and is actually making game-like software now.

But I told people I knew at Playlogic about this game we wanted to make, and they liked the idea really. But in the end they just kept the name, and turned it into a 3D twin-stick shooter. Sven - a former programmer at Imagination in Motion that moved to Playlogic - asked me to work for them. Initially I refused, but I lent a lot of money to someone at Playlogic, and she didn't pay me back. So I kind of "blackmailed" them: I was only going to work for them if she paid back the money she owed me. And that happened. Of course I was also interested in programming on games and consoles again . Nevertheless I always had mixed feelings about this, after all, Xyanide was supposed to be something different... I did convince Playlogic to put the names of my friends in the credits.

In the end I had a really good time at Playlogic, working on games again was fun. But I was just the framework and tool developer, not the game designer, otherwise Xyanide would have been a completely different game.

What are you up to these days? Are you still in the software or video games industry?

I have been teaching for many years to video-game-development academies (first IGAD.NL and then DigitalArtsAndEntertainment.com). That was fun initially, but teaching is draining for your creativity. Then I worked a couple of years as a business consultant for smartphoto, creating the backend photo production rendering system, and front-end html5 product editors.

Now I have two projects:

I'm leading a team that creates real-time 3D animation software at https://wondermedia.tv. Currently we are writing our own 3D engine since we didn't get a license from Unreal, and that was our only option really. I also made the Maya2GLTF open source project.

My second project is called ViKiD. This is funded by the Flemisch government (VAF/Gamefund). It is a web-site to learn young children (8-10) the basics of future programming. We make this for Flemisch schools, but we will also release a free open platform accessible to everyone. It is a bit like Scratch, but then mathematically and functionally oriented, like real computer scientists write programs. The prototype is finished, and we are now moving into production. We should soon start looking for angel investors, or start crowd funding, since the funding from the government is not enough in the long run. Exciting times ahead!

Thank you Peter for helping us with these questions!