Interview with Backbone who brought Space Invaders Extreme to XBLA
How was the conversion done?
The engineer for the game, Kevin Pickell faithfully transferred the PSP engine over to the Xbox. Once we perfected that base, engineering, design and art added a variety of changes from top to bottom. These added features range from fleshing out a robust networking experience, designing new multiplayer modes, all the way to upresing, correcting, and adding in new art.
What was the most difficult part of Space Invaders Extreme to transition?
Believe it or not, the art staff had a hard time trying to get a nice crisp straight line to display! There's a process in most of today's next gen consoles called bi-linear filtering. What this does is it takes any harsh edges displayed and smoothes it out a little to make the edges softer, usually when something is scaled up or down.
In our case, we actually wanted the invaders to have that crisp, harsh edge, but instead they kept getting 'smoothed out'. So the other artist, Conrad Seto, and I went through each of these cases and manually tweaked the art. I'd like to think we did a fairly good job, but it sure was a laborious task for something that most people won't even see!
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It's like Space Invaders. But EXTREME.
Now, a decade later and with Space Invaders hitting its 40th anniversary, Space Invaders Extreme has been revived on PC. It’s roughly based on the Xbox 360 version but with a some major tweaks and quality-of-life enhancements.
