We started our work in 1999.
Final Fantasy 7, Breath of Fire and Wild Arms inspired us very often.
I was the Gameleader and Artdirector. I and Henning were the two who came on that glory idea ;)
At good times we where about 15 people who worked freely without getting money... and exactly that was the problem ;)
It was fully dev. across the Internet. Of course we often talked via phone about important story changes etc..
Our first engine was made in C. The second one was made in AMOS (it fully supported CGX and PPC).
At The beginning (first engine) we intended it for a A1200 with 8mb ram and at least a 030@25 mhz. Due growing of the engine we had to rise it to 040@25. Of course we always planed a CD release.
The story is everything in a RPG. Even with ugly gfx and lousy sound you can have a good game if the story is great.
We split it up into several levels. If I would fit all maps together it would be as large as Ambermoon/star.
Our first engine where stopped (after 1 year of dev.) because our first coder (Enrico) hadn't enough time to continue the engine. We contacted Andrew then and he was willng to start a completely new engine (he was more in AMOS than C). But he also stopped his work because of his job and lack of time.
Hmmm... Me;) The morale was deeply down after the second fail. I split up the group and dropped the idea of the RPG game after the search for a new coder failed. Then I met Frank M. . he had done a Quake 1 port those times and I asked him if he was willing to start a new project with me. He is a real talent in 3D coding so we decided to create a 3D game. We changed our team name to Anime Development for Amiga.
We made it over 30% (level, story) and a bit more for the engine. This sounds not very much but if I take a look at the storyboard again i know how much shit years of work lies in this "30%"
Sure, we actually still developing the Soms3D Engine...sometimes slow but we do ;)
Ambermoon, Amberstar, Moonstone and of course The Settlers.