Kinetica was formed by Jake Glover and Dave Lawson who both previously worked together at Psygnosis and Imagine. Jake lived near Dave's mother and a chance meeting went from a chat to forming Kinetica.
Mostly artwork and animation with games design thrown in. Dave came up with the game play and later levels were designed by myself and Jack.
Jack and I worked on different levels but we always viewed each others work so we could stay close to the game's style.
The animator system basically was a way of reducing the sprite size by chopping up the artwork and then reforming it back in the editor. This had to be done for every frame of animation. It was a long and laborious task. It allowed you to have large sprites on screen without slowing down the frame rate. It was run from a Mac attached to an Amiga. The programme was run on the Mac. An example of it would be you'd name all of the individual pieces on the Mac and cut then rebuild each sprite on the Amiga.
With the animator system we could have larger sprites on screen so it didn't really become a problem. The reason we put in a large sprite was Dave was told by one of his former colleagues to put something big early on in the game to impress people.
I'm glad you mentioned the chase scene as this was a level that I'd designed. Most games the character just advances and destroys his enemies. I thought it would be more exciting to be chased by an enemy while keeping your path clear to aid your escape. I can't remember how you finally destroyed/lost the monster though.
The octopus was my favourite piece. At a computer show at the time (something like ECTS) they painted a large version of it on the side of the stand. I didn't like the bats. I just couldn't get them right.
I think we had just started on the game while Gold of the Aztecs was being tested for master.
The look and feel were totally different. There were to be 4 levels each of them on a different type and style of alien ship. Not much organic artwork. All hard edges and surfaces which was away for the green vegetation of Aztecs.
Jack and I were heavily influenced by Aliens and Star Wars. But the plot idea was Dave Lawson's. He based it on an old myth of a ships' grave yard which he seemed to think was called Saragossa. It's in fact a Spanish town!
It was a platform game but the idea was the player on some of the ships could walk on all surfaces. So he'd be able to walk up walls and on the ceiling.
Having the player walking up walls caused some problems. We needed 3 times as many sprites for the hero.
Jack, Dave and myself left Kinetica at close but different periods. Jack went to Ocean software where I followed him some months later. I think without Dave the company became a bit rudderless. Jake was more about code than games design.
Bermuda Project was my first game on the Amiga. The artwork was terrible but it was my starting point in the industry. I worked with Jake and Eugene Evans on that project.
At a rough guess I'd say 60%. A lot of the artwork was complete.
Yes I'm currently a concept artist for a studio in Australia.