Babylon 5: I’ve Found Her | Project

December 25, 2000
Early Days — “Every light carries a shadow and vice versa”

     It began early in the earth year 1999, when I was sitting home on my butt trying to imagine how to keep myself busy before I find a new job (I just lost my previous one). And I’ve decided to write a story, or, perhaps, even a novel. After writing an article about Valen for my web site, I’ve had a beautiful story in my mind, a story that explained what exactly meant the greatest of the Minbari by saying “I’ve found her” in the end of his life, so I’ve started to work and collect the material for my story.

     I’m a professional game developer, but sometimes it’s impossible to find this kind of job here — the gaming industry in Russia is still pretty unstable. In such periods I usually work on my own games, usually simple and unworthy, just to keep shape and study the newest game technologies. The first 4 months of 1999 I had no job at all, and later I’ve found a tedious job in some pretty darn boring financial organization just to feed myself, my family and my computer (just kidding). And I had plenty of free time then. After a month or two of work on my new novel I’ve decided to extend the storyline from Valen’s time to “present” days, bringing the Earthforce fighter pilots into the story (relax, people, there’s no time travel in the game, except for the known case of Babylon 4) — the new storyline looked much more intriguing.

     But there were few disturbing aspects. The most important was the Sierra’s long-awaited “Into the Fire” space simulator game. I understood that my game will never be match to their. I realized that only one programmer, even very gifted (sounds humble, I know) will never create a decent game alone, without support of artists, modelers and so on. So, I worked without too much enthusiasm and soon after completion of first experimental engine, the development has stopped at all. I began to think about the novel again.

     Every light carries a shadow, they say. And vice versa. When Sierra cancelled “Into the Fire”, it was a perfect opportunity to revive my project. It wasn't that easy, though — I was still alone. But it has changed few months later, when Alexey “Smasher” Sirotkin offered his help and joined the project as 3D modeler. Then, for the first time in more than a year, I’ve started to believe in possibility of completion of this project.

     Now, there are three of us and we’re still open for cooperation. The work continues. We’ve released a first public demo and now working on next version. We’ve got a lot of help from different people and I thank them all from the entire IFH Team and from myself personally. Because, in the beginning, it was nothing more than my dream. And now, with the help of many people, that dream comes true.

     — Oleg “Renderer” Petrov