Developer Synaptic Soup werd 8 maanden geleden opgericht door maarliefst 3 personen. Drie kwart jaar later heeft SS een mooie engine gebouwd, die het leven door gaat met de naam Cipher en is het bedrijf ook bezig aan haar eerste game: Crazy Car Championship.

Rik Heywood, Technical Director van Synaptic Soup, schreef een verhaal over de belevingen van het bedrijf:Well, we have finalised the technology needed for the game, so the game team can focus on creating a game instead of continuously being held up by R&D tasks that slip. The engine team is continuing to add cool new features to the engine, but the game team is not dependent on any of them. When a new feature is complete, we can decide if it is something we want to use and get an accurate idea of what sort of time impact it will actually have. All those features will be there for other games using Cipher of course.We also thought carefully about portability i ues before we started. However, no amount of planning will give you portable code. The only way to be sure is to port it to different platforms as you go. The first port was to Linux, and it really helped. It flushed out lots of i ues and it even helped spot a couple of bugs that were lying hidden in the code. The Mac port was a little harder, as Macs do almost everything differently from the PC. It has a bizarre file system (I still get shivers when I think about how much code I had to write to search a directory for files). They even store data in memory in a different order, which means you have to be careful when loading and saving data from disk. It still only took a few days to get everything up and running though.Over het algemeen een best leuk verhaal om even door te lezen, lijkt het je wat: surf dan door naar VoodooExtreme.