In case you’ve been living in your moms basement playing Call of Duty for the past 5 years, there is a new Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game on the near horizon by Watermelon Games, creators of the influential Pier Solar. Its name, is PAPRIUM! A true 16-bit beat ’em up inspired by the likes of Streets of Rage and Final Fight. PAPRIUM will receive a physical cartridge release in 2017 on the nearly 30 year old Genesis hardware, but the game looks to go well beyond what its 80s and 90s predecessors have done. For starters, it will be massive. Featuring 24+ levels, dozens of original music tracks, a colossal 80 Megabit cartridge, a co-op mode for 2 player action and an enhancement chip called the “DATENMEISTER” which “unlocks the true potential of the Mega Drive.” Are you excited yet? You should be! And if you are one of the few who haven’t seen the PAPRIUM trailer yet, (it’s well past 200,000 views as of this writing) you can check it out below:

YOU CAN PURCHASE PAPRIUM HERE

In this all encompassing interview, I talked to Gwénaël Godde, (Fonzie) lead designer, art director, background artist and co-founder of Watermelon Games. Luis Martins, (Goldenboy) art director, character designer and pixel artist. And David Burton, (GrooveMaster303) lead composer. We discussed everything from the games pixel art, to its many musical styles, to the lengths Watermelon went to push the Genesis/Mega Drive hardware to its absolute limit. We also discussed in depth many of the technical aspects of PAPRIUM and how a game like this was achieved using nearly 30 year old hardware. So, without further delay, let’s get to it!

Fonzie, what can you tell me about the early days of Watermelon? How did Pier Solar and its development influence PAPRIUM?

Pier Solar was originally an idea from Sega fans on a message board named Eidolon’s Inn. We were a couple of guys that picked up the idea and it soon grew bigger and bigger. We decided to setup a company so it could be legally viable (copyrights, etc). Like PAPRIUM, Pier Solar had many setbacks and released in late 2010 (instead of the intended 2008 as I recall) but it did exceed what could be reasonably expected (back then).

After that release, I took a break from WM but later came back to create WM’s Magical Game Factory in 2012, which was an experiment in crowd-funding (with moderate success). A bit later, we also had a Kickstarter to develop Pier Solar HD (PSHD). The game released in early 2015 on many digital platforms and late 2015 physically on the Dreamcast!

And now, once again, we find ourselves getting back to the basics with a huge new game for an old system (and not the opposite!). Plus, with PAPRIUM, we wanted to be one step ahead: Working with as many pros as possible so we could kick out a really high quality game.

How was PAPRIUM conceived and who was involved in its development in the early days?

At the very beginning, it was just an open project on WM’s Magical Game Factory. Our hardcore fans could vote for what the game would become (Game System: Mega Drive. Genre: Beat Them All. Theme: Post-Apocalypse/Cyberpunk). From those votes, I added a couple of months of preparatory work and tried to gather a team. This task was quite difficult as the specifications for the game were quite high, so we ended up having a mixed team of contractors and volunteers.

If you’d like a full list you can check our website, but here were the main contributors:

Luis Martins made character design and helped with art direction.

David Burton composed the soundtrack, later joined by Trevin Hughes.

Tim Jonsson made quite a lot of pixel art preparatory work and helped polishing sprites.

Tiido Priimägi did some of the audio tools to help composition.

There were also around 20 other people who actively helped at some point during the development.

Luis, tell me a bit about yourself. What got you into creating videos games. And what other games have you worked on?

I started around the age of 21, I began as a game tester for a small company here in Montreal. I then showed them my portfolio and was offered a job as a concept artist. A few years later I became a lighting specialist. It is a very challenging part of game development, both technically and artistically. I’m honored to have been part of a few AAA franchises such as: Tomb Raider, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, For Honor, Watch Dogs 2 and many others.

How did you and Fonzie meet? What has it been like working with him?

At the time Pier Solar came out, I was so impressed that some guys were making a new Sega Genesis game that I decided to contact them and expressed my interest in helping out. After a great conversation with Tulio (Watermelons other co-founder) and Fonzie, I told them how much I love beat ’em ups and that’s when I was given the offer to join the PAPRIUM team.

Can you tell us more about the trailer? Where was it filmed? Who is the muscle guy with the microphone?

The game is set in Asia, after the Apocalypse. We wanted something that looked like a 90s ad with live action elements. We filmed the trailer close to Shanghai in China. The Golden Muscle guy is actually a character from the game (not playable). It was a lot of fun to make that film and I hope you enjoy it. Of course, more details will be unveiled as we approach release because you only saw part of the whole thing.

Why did you move production of the game to China?

It may sound ridiculous now, but at the time Pier Solar was made, there were no previous attempts at making real, new Mega Drive games (they all used old stock or pirated parts). We had to design our manufacturing process from scratch, make new (cartridge) molds, etc. I also live in China and supervise every single production batch to ensure quality is as high as possible.

What is it like working on a game that runs on 30 year old hardware?

Honestly, it’s awesome! There is nothing more satisfying then making a game for the Sega Genesis. I wish more companies would still support older consoles, even if it was only lower scale projects with small budgets. I’m sure many people would support the format.

The graphics in PAPRIUM look fantastic! Other artists have been involved but you were responsible for much of it correct? Can you elaborate a bit on your job and what it entailed?

I can say to some extent that PAPRIUM looks this way due to my hard work and involvement. But it is also a shared collaboration between Fonzie and myself in terms of art style, design and direction. We shared ideas while creating the story for the game and how the scenarios would play out and in which level. That’s when I started creating the characters and back story. Fonzie already had a great prototype with WM written down, but eventually we pushed it further. Fonzie created most of the backgrounds with some initial help from Tim Johnsson and I helped with direction and some concepts. Suffice it to say that the quality jumped tremendously and the fact that Fonzie knows the hardware very well helped to push the hardware graphically.

As for the characters pixel art, I created all the initial templates for style consistency. Then we hired a few other pixel artists but initially didn’t get the quality we were looking for. I had to go over a lot of the animation sheets and make corrections. In total there were a good few pixel artist that helped out to some degree. But eventually, Tim Josson joined on and with his help we were able to keep the quality at a much higher standard. He followed the templates perfectly which led to less retouches to do. In a nutshell, FX is a mix of pixel art and clever programming.

What sort of graphical tricks did you use to get the most out of the Genesis hardware?

The whole game was optimized with the Mega Drive VDP (GPU) limitations in mind. Life bar sizes, sprite sizes, backgrounds, colors. This already gives quite a great boost comparatively to many games back then (which were made with multi-platform in mind or just butchered jobs). More over, there is the “IPL” tech to bring more parallaxes, “DATENMEISTER” for extra audio channels, and the “EXS-VI” for “Expanded Sprites Mode VI” which allows the game to exceed other games limitations and quite some more surprises. Really, our hope is to have created the ultimate Mega Drive game!

What more can you tell us about the DATENMEISTER enhancement chip? It is purely for sound? Or does it help with actual processing and sprites?

I won’t go into too many details here because I don’t think you need a 30 page long answer. But what I will say; due to Sega design choices at the time the Mega Drive was designed, neither the Mega CD (Sega CD) nor the 32X can really improve the stock Mega Drive graphical capabilities when it comes to 60fps performance (most of the Mega CD or 32x games with extra graphical capabilities run below 30fps). So as much as we are fond of those hardware add-ons, we can’t compromise ourselves here!

There is however, a back-door Sega left to us in the audio department. We developed a special chipset (the DT128M16VA1LT “DATENMEISTER”) that adds, among other things, several more channels of audio to the existing hardware and fixes the issues the original hardware had (poor SFX quality mostly). We made our own audio drivers and tools and now the only real limitation is in the composers ability to create music. I hope you enjoy listening to the hours of music that were composed for the game!

David, while we are on the topic of music, can you tell us what method you used to compose for the Sega Genesis? For people who aren’t familiar with the process, how is it accomplished?

We used a custom made tracker code named: Wavemelon, which Tiido created. He would then routinely ask for feedback regarding bugs and features we wanted implemented. Tiido’s tracker gave us the option to create custom instruments for the YM2612, (Genesis sound chip) so if we ever needed a certain sound, all we had to do was tweak away in the software until we got the sound we wanted. I included a demo track (which you can listen to below) which demonstrates a programmed TL tweak (Total Level, a volume setting that distorts sound) right at the beginning of the track. This helps create a more dynamic sound.

The YM2612 is a 4OP chip. This means that it has four Operators (labelled in the image below as 1-4). Each Operator can be used to add depth on any given channel of a track. And by combining various parameters such as feedback, for example, all kinds of amazing sounds can be created. In a nutshell, the Mega Drive was actually a pretty powerful synth device, but only with the right tools. Yuzo Koshiro, for example, had the tools to shape his own sounds which is why his FM soundtracks sounded so good.

The Wavemelon also includes virtual cutoff and resonance knobs which can be found on most real hardware synthesizers. These offer the ability to filter sound so it can be very crisp, sharp, or muffled. Many dance acts use this technique to create variation in repetitive patterns. And thanks to the Wavemelon, we can now do it on the Mega Drive.

Demo Track Example: