Cut production costs significantly and avoided annoying disk swapping by reducing the number of CD's required to store the game. Games of similar scope to Septerra Core have shipped on as many as five disks.

Septerra shipped on only one disk, which included:

• The game engine,

• 40mb of space for Publisher use,

• 10 minutes of cinema style movies,

• 200 non-tiled rendered 3d backgrounds,

• Over 7000 screens of navigable environment,

• 80 animated characters and bosses,

plus,

One of the most technologically advanced 2-D game engines ever was developed by Valkyrie Studios. Septerra Core utilized this in-house engine which exhibits features never before seen in a 2-D game. Many reviewers have been amazed that Septerra requires no 3-D acceleration card, believing the game to be truly 3-D, due to the use of many advanced features.

The Septerra game engine supports the following:

• Detailed depth masking,

• Alpha translucency,

• A robust particle system,

• Support for multiple colored light sources,

Originally built to create Septerra Core, Valkyrie has designed a comprehensive development tool which enables artists, production assistants, and quality control staff to assemble levels, orchestrate triggered scenes and effects, and perform complex game programming and logic tasks. In addition to its compatibility with the Septerra engine, this tool suite can be modified to produce and edit game data for 3-D engines.

Terrabuilder Features include:

• A non-tile based map editor,

• Interactive scene-building tool with real-time visual playback,

• Game logic scriptor,

• Enemy AI and behavior,

Valkyrie’s proprietary animation sequencing tool allows artists to control and assemble complex player modules in an extremely efficient space-saving manner, reducing the data by 25 to 50 percent before compression. Programmers have the ability to customize exported data through a simple script language, reducing the data down to only the essential information they require for a specific game.

Animation Editing and Export Features include:

• Timing Increment accuracy to 1 millisecond,

• Addition of frame by frame reference points for defining registration or points for spawning particles,

• X,Y flipping and Z-sort information,

• 8bit Palette creation and editing for generation of alternate palettes,

• 24bit real-time display,