Following work on the Quantarallax technical demo, Shane Mussell and Richard Hawkins began work on a much more ambitious shoot-em-up called Inertia.
Unlike Quantarallax, which was primarily created to experiment with sprite movement and collision detection, Inertia was intended to become a proper game with more fluid gameplay and a greater challenge for the player.
Shane recalls that one of the more interesting ideas involved enemies detaching from buildings after the player had flown past them, whilst effects such as flowing water and energy pipes were created by cycling character graphics. Richard Hawkins once again handled the graphics, whilst Ian Crabtree composed what Shane remembers as some amazing music for the project.
Sadly, Inertia would never be completed. According to Shane, both the source code and binaries have since been lost over the years, with only some of the graphics perhaps surviving. It remains a great shame, as the project had progressed much further than Quantarallax and was shaping up to be a very promising title.
If any further materials relating to Inertia should ever surface, we will be sure to update this page.
Contributions: Shane Mussell
Supporting content
Creator speaks
Shane Mussell talks to GTW about the game:
“The game [Quantarallax] was more of a demo, as by this time I had worked out that you needed a challenge to make a good game. This was really just some tests that were working towards Inertia, another game that was much further along, with more fluid gameplay and rather nifty enemies that would detach from buildings once you had gone past them. At this point I was using character blocks and cycling the bits through to create a flowing water effect (as in pipes with fluid/energy etc).
So yeah, this was never intended to be anything more than a demo to show I could handle sprite movement, control and collisions (which we changed for Inertia, using character checking rather than sprite detection, as it wasn’t the best).
Ian Crabtree did the music for sure. He also did some for Inertia, which was amazing. Sadly, all that source code and the binaries have been lost, although I did recover some GFX.”
