Difference between revisions of "Category:PPP Team"

PPP Team

Sylvain “Pypein” Martin, his brother Pierre, and associate Pierrick Hansen form the core of a mid-’90s Belgian demogroup called PPP Team. Later on they would release some tracker music and projects coded in assembler. It seems, though, that they got their start with RSD’s Game-Maker.

It's unclear exactly how many games they worked on; many are unfinished, and some appear lost to time and computer failure. Depending on how you count, maybe 17 or 18 games still survive in some form. The games touch several genres, but mostly focus on and toy with the side-scrolling platformer mold. They include a few long-running or frequently referenced series, several one-off games, and a fair number of tributes or pastiches.

Though the earliest games freely borrow sprites and backgrounds from existing sources, the group soon graduated to completely original elements. Even within a series the sprites are rarely duplicated from one game to the next. By the time they start to import graphics from Deluxe Paint, PPP Team seems to have total control over its resource pipeline.

At this point it’s the areas without that control — for instance the music — which glare the most. RSD’s chosen music format is famously lacking in available tools, and their software is famously lacking in support for more sensible formats. More than other authors, PPP Team’s choice of temp tracks always feels temporary; you can sense the eagerness to replace the music with original pieces that never materialized. It’s frustrations like these that seem to have been the last straw, eventually leading the team to move on from Game-Maker.

Even as the team outgrew Game-Maker, “Pypein” turned his growing skills back to RSD’s file formats, to dissect and study them in hopes of salvaging some material for future projects. Although those projects never quite materialized, the research continued sporadically. Recently Martin’s attention has turned to porting some of his Game-Maker material to the Nintendo DS, so since mid-2009 he has posted a handful of Perl scripts used to manipulate Game-Maker’s tile, map, sprite, and organizational files. At the moment the tools are more or less a curiosity, most useful for rendering precise diagrams of game levels, but they lay an intriguing groundwork.

Overall PPP Team is both one of the more productive and focused Game-Maker designers.

Team roster

(translated from Pype's '97 presentation in Badman III) The PPP Team Software

Pierre Martin ALIAS Piet

• 18 years
• Tracker under ScreamTracker III. Formerly just a level designer and head of PPP Team, he is starting to slowly become a "competent" graphic designer, specializing in abstract scenery.
• MASCOT: Spector - Spector is the 1st game that Piet completed with his own hands.

Pierrick Hansen

• Musician-designer-Programmer
• Departing on CPC programmer, he quickly came to teach us the art of basic graphic and animation
• MASCOT: Badman - Badman is the group's first game based on a idea by Pierrick. Not to mention that whenever he drops in, he affects the whole game. We wait impatiently for his next visit ...

Sylvain Martin ALIAS Pypein

• Graphic artist / programmer
• Responsible for most of the graphics in PPP's games. Even when he's not, he works on them anyway! He also is a programmer in BASIC and assembler A86. His sense of humor leaves a mark on all his games.
• MASCOT: Bilou - Although Bilou is Pierrick's character, it's Pypein who adopted him.

Pascal Deiting ALIAS Vegeta

• Japanese Branch - Manga Master
• Pascal is primarily a sort of "underground" level designer, in that his images are not the same size as his maps: his monster mazes are of such monstrous complexity that there isn't a tile to spare!
• MASCOT: Gohan - Pascal, whose programming history includes Dragon Ball Z 2, is now one of us. He is the only manga fan who's bigger than I. Unfortunately, I'm the one who had to draw Vegeta...
• PS: It is often said that we forget that Pascal is not supposed to be an artist, but he draws anyway, sometimes to funny results. Furthermore, we don't always fix it properly...

Lawrence Mazzapichi ALIAS Parmy

• BASIC Programmer
• Parmy is a man traumatized by his time with the C-64. Using the glorious Quickbasic, we have reproduced 'Island' and several other little Commodore games. (Those were good times.) Parmy is also a musician. It was he who composed "Outer Space".
• MASCOT: Purple - It's a BASIC game that made me sweat when I had to work on it with him. (I won't say how much work that was.)

Valentin Boigelot ALIAS Tentacle Bob

• Realization in Game-Maker
• TBob and his brother Puce often make their games together, with a few alterations by Pypein or Piet. Their games have a strongly surreal quality. (It's they who concocted Ratman, Tentacle Bob, and Bart Simpson.)
• MASCOT: I chose Tentacle Bob in particular because it is through this fellow that I discovered the CHEATER side of Tbob

Simon Boigelot ALIAS Puce

• Director of games under GM
• Simon, as his name suggests, is the brother of Tbob. There are not many games for them yet because they have DESTROYED their Game-Maker not so long ago, they're just like "It's no good, we're moving on."
• MASCOT: It's not for the sake of resemblance, but I chose Ratman because the B. Brothers managed to produce more BUGS than I have ever seen!

Francois Bare ALIAS the Clicker

• Turbo C and A86 programmer
• Francois is an application programmer in TURBO-C, and very very advan-C. (Haha!) He controls the mouse, screen, and everything. It's just a bit excessive: he tries to do a 'Clicker' (I will not detail here). And believe it or not, I offered to help!
• MASCOT: no, it's not a caricature of Frank!

So add it all up, and you've got a swell band of misfits.

Contact information

Address any inquiries to pype_1999.geo(at)yahoo.com.

Links

• Distribution page
• Cyborg Jeff's distribution page
• Sylvain Martin's Game-Maker recollections
• Game-Maker blog