In this section i try to detail my motivations for the creation and further development of Typhoon 2001 and also i talk about some of the details and decisions "behind the scenes". It is not strictly in chronological order, but is divided up into sections. If you like development diaries (even though this is not one) you might want to read on. If not then you can safely skip this section, since you would only be bored to death

If you want to follow the current progress of the game, you can go to its development thread on retroremakes.com.

The first time i saw something Tempest-related must have been around 1995, when a friend of mine showed me Tempest 2000 on his Jaguar. I was instantly hooked - things were so different compared to "ordinary" shooters, the game pacing and style was refreshingly different, and the music was amazing. My friend borrowed me his "Jag" for a while, and like many others, my favorite games became Alien vs. Predator and Tempest 2000.

Fast forward to late fall of 2006. I had a lot of free time then, and decided to continue messing around with OpenGL a bit. I had used it for some time in some "experiments", but i always did all the transformations and the like "by hand". So i fired up my editor and thought about what to try. For some reason i thought "A Tempest Web should look really cool if rendered with OpenGL", and i started with that.

A few hours later i had a basic Web loader and a simple display routine ready. Then i thought "Why not add a claw as well!". So i did. After that i added some enemies and shots for the claw. The enemies did not shoot, they did not flip, and they could not even kill you in any way, but i had a *very* basic Tempest like game running in only a day!

After a little thinking i decided to carry on. Since i always was more a fan of T2K as of classic Tempest i decided to add elements from the former. But first i had to get the flipping of the Flippers to work... and since i could not really concentrate at that day it took me the whole day to come up with the flipping code. It was only a few lines, but i sweated blood over them. A few days later i even found a strange bug, that luckily just took a single line to fix.

I kept adding features, like the Powerups , the Particle Laser and later the A.I. Droid (Tempest 2000 spoiled me so much in that regard that i do not think a Tempest-like game can do without them).

Some time ago i read in an interview with the creator of Tempest that originally the web was to rotate, and the claw was to sit still. But people complained about motion sickness and it was changed around. I decided to implement the rotating web anyway, and i really like the result (and so do many people i hear).

The plain "fixed scores for everything" model is good and well, but i wanted more. My first idea was to give players a reward for keeping the webs clean - so i made the scores a function of the enemies distance - the farter away from the rim an enemy is killed the higher the score the player receives. The second idea i had was based on the scoring model some japanese shooters employ - raising a score multiplier every time a enemy is destroyed, and resetting it when no enemy is destroyed after a set time (usually a second or so). This gives the possibility to rack up "astronomical" scores, and shifts the focus of the gameplay considerably.

To be continued...