No Respect is a 3d action game / shooter developed by Appeal (our team) and published by Ocean in 1997.

How it all started

Side project

When the company we recently founded, Appeal, started its flagship project Outcast in the summer of 1995, a lot of new technology had to be created. We were young and without much fear, but our new partner Infogrames was a bit nervous about the risks involved.

Outcast was always going to be a very large and complicated development, spanning over several years. It looked like they would be reassured about our ability to develop and handle those new technologies if some output could be produced in-between. After nearly a year into development Infogrames, who had just bought the troubled publisher Ocean, asked us to think about a smaller project that could be produced and released quickly and would be published under the Ocean brand.

We thought this was a very bad idea, indeed our limited ressources meant that creating a second game in parallel would invevitably push back the release date of Outcast (and it did), which was for us a much greater risk. But they had the money and as such had all the power to force us to do things their way, even when it was plain stupid.

The technology in question was a hybrid voxel/polygon 3d engine (an early version of the one that would fuel Outcast later) entirely written from scratch and running entirely on the CPU as there was no 3d acceleration hardware widely available in 1995 for gaming on PC, and the existing ones provided very crude graphics with extreme low poly geometry.

Team B

The first version of the technology was now up and running and we picked some programmers and artists to setup a second team that would handle the side project. Gil Damoiseaux, one of our main programmer was a fan of Quake, more particularly its multiplayer mode, and I was a fan of an arcade game called Cyber Sled where the player could control a overcraft virtually in any direction by using two simultaneous Joysticks, and fight a second player in some arenas.

We thought having the same kind of control over a spacecraft in a local multiplayer game similar to Quake would be quite fun to play. The hybrid voxel/polygon engine would allow us to create intricate environments, but the budget and timeframe only allowed for limited ressources, so we went for an industrial setting that allowed the reuse of graphical elements throughout the game. We built the backstory of the game around those constraints.

Of course, making a multiplayer-only game was not commercially viable at the time, Lionel Badiou, one of the programmers developped some simple but efficient AI for the single player campaign.

In the end, from my opinion the team, led by Gil, managed to create a nice little fast paced action game.

My contribution

As a co-founder of the company I was involved in the decision processes when the game started, then I would continue supervising the art department during the development. I did very few assets myself as I was mainly occupied with Outcast. The second team pretty much managed to create the game all by themselves.

During development, I was also responsible for the contracting of the music and providing artistic direction for it. The story behind the music comes from Outcast. As I was looking for a composer for Outcast, I received a demo from Alex Kharlamov. Although I did not think he was the right person for doing the Outcast music, I was really a fan of his work. When I had to pick up a musician for No Respect, I knew he was the guy I needed and he kindly agreed to provide the excelent atmospheric musics heard troughout the game.

Here is an excerpt from Arvum from the soundtrack as an example:

No Respect remastered soundtrack now available

The newly remastered (2013) soundtrack from No Respect is now available from all major digital stores at a bargain price. Please buy if you want to support us and the composer ! Available from:

Amazon

iTunes

Deezer

and many more !

Screenshot gallery

Reviews and articles

Retro-gaming reviews:

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/24211/No+Respect 

http://www.squakenet.com/download/no-respect/1861/

Original reviews:

A scan of an article featuring some nice pictures, from french magazine Joystick (82) in May 1997

Box art

Trivia

As we were looking for a project name, Gil proposed to use the temporary title 'No Respect' during development, this was almost an inside joke and we never imagined we would keep it for the release of the game. In the end we were under such pressure to deliver the game that no one took the time to change it (and the publisher didn't asked for either), so it was kept like that, although it bears no relation with the theme of the actual game whatsoever.

As the marketing department at Infogrames (who had recently bought the Ocean publisher) didn't know much about what they were selling (as is often the case), they made some really bad taste advertizing about the game in a french magazine with some guy showing a finger, without asking us for prior consent, of course. We immediately asked for the ads to be removed as we didn't want our company to be associated with such an image.

Credits (developer)

Lead programmer : Gil Damoiseaux

Graphic design & texturing : Adam

Environment modelling : Filip Camermans

Ships & special effects : Renaud Dauchel

AI : Lionel Badiou

Music : Alex Kharlamov

Sound Effects : Max

Additional programming : Christof Jans, Vincent Penquerc'h, Benjamin Legangneux, Norbert Cellier, Yves Grolet, Yann Robert

Additional graphics : Catherine Marechal, Dominique Peyronnet, Franck Sauer

Production team : Yves Grolet, Franck Sauer, Yann Robert, Olivier Masclef