TALKING WITH JOHANNES GRAF (DURANIK) by @Giulio Palermo

Duranik is the pseudonym behind the two Austrian brothers Roland and Johannes Graf. After years spent underground, in the homebrew scenes for late Atari hardwares, they stepped up and embarked themselves in the last big project for Dreamcast, Sturmwind, the shoot ’em up of the day, whose beta-testing we collaborated to. So, since they owed us one, between 2012 and 2013 they granted us this interview...

PF: Who is Johannes Graf?

Johannes: I’m 40 years old and live in Vienna. I’m working as graphics artist in a games company. I’m doing all the graphics at Duranik.

PF: When was Duranik born, and why?

Johannes: The name Duranik was created back in 1989. The name is pure fantasy, there is no meaning behind it. We are 2 brothers. The other member of Duranik is my brother Roland. He is 41 years old and do the programming at Duranik.

PF: We have just realized you are the guys behind the stunning Jaguar shoot ’em up demo Native! How did you manage to push so much that impossibly intricated hardware? How did that project start? Why wasn’t it finished?

Johannes: Well the jaguar is not that bad, it just has a bad reputation, it had great hardware for the time it was released. The jaguar is especially good at 2d, unfortunately by this time, everyone wanted to go 3d, this was the big thing to have with the Playstation (one) on the horizon. The 2d capabilites of the jaguar were never really used, there would have been much more possible. We started Native just for fun because we were faszinated by the hardware, we had no real devkit nor documents because Atari already had closed the doors. As the demo was finished it was obvious that there was no way to get it published, the encryption keys necessary to “start” a program on the console were released a long time later, so it didn´t make much sense to continue with the development.

PF: When did you begin thinking about Sturmwind?

Johannes: We started around 2006 with some basic ideas. The game was planned to be completely different than it is now. But as with most of these games without deadline you just add stuff to it. Lots of stuff like more 3D effects were added very late.

PF: Why the Dreamcast?

Johannes: It is easy to get the necessary parts compared to lets say a SNES or Mega Drive. Also creating your own CDs is much simpler than a cartridge of course. It is also much more fun for us to work for this “old” machines compared to something more mainstream like ios or android.

PF: Don’t you have any problems bringing forward such an ambitious project, on a console without any support or official SDK?

Johannes: No. There is no need for an official SDK. KOS provides everything you need and if you need more or better performance on some parts you just customize it to your needs.

PF: What’s the biggest problem you have met during the game development?

Johannes: Not enough time. We are doing this in our spare time and there is so little time you can work on it, just the weekends or a litte in the evenings. With more time more stuff could have been added in a much shorter timeframe, but thats ok as this is just a hobby for us.

PF: Is there anything about Sturmwind you thought to implement, but had to cut out? If so, why?

Johannes: There is much more implemented than we original planned, but you could always improve everything as you learn new stuff but at some point you have to draw a line or you would never finish anything.

PF: How much are you expecting to earn from Sturmwind?

Johannes: Well we don´t expect to earn a lot from this as we have our regular daytime jobs we don´t need money coming from this.

PF: Do you have any plans for the future?

Johannes: Currently we don´t have any plans for a new game. We are just playing around a little bit with an updated Sturmwind engine but don´t have something specific in mind at the moment. Of course it also depends on how people like Sturmwind and if we find the motivation to work on something new.

PF: Does the future have any plans for us?

Johannes: Well I hope the future has some great plans for you. ;)

PF: What are your inspirations for Sturmwind?

Johannes: If you play the game you can easily see some of the inspiration coming from R-Type, Axelay and other games like Blood Money most of have been forgotten long since.

PF: How is life in Duranik?

Johannes: Well as said before this is just an hobby, we do some “work” at the weekends and communicate with skype or icq. So there is not really a daily routine or something like this.

PF: What are your favourite games?

Johannes: For the modern stuff I like the uncharted series very much, also other games on the PS3 like Heavy Rain. Of course there are always the classic games like R-Type or F-Zero, Super shinobi that we really played a lot back in the day.

PF: How is your relationship with redspotgames? Particularly painful?

Johannes: They try to do their best job to promote and sell the game. Remember these is a very small company for a niche system, there is not much money to make in the Dreamcast business unfortunately. So you have to give them some credit.

PF: Do you feel there is a hobbyist / indie developers’ community, beginning to work, if not together, at least in a common direction?

Johannes: No. I don’t have this feeling. Well there is KOS where a lot of people contributed work to, but apart from that there is in my opinion a lot more cooperation on programming related stuff in the Atari Scene. There are a lot of little sub forums in the Sega/Dreamcast scene, there is not on big central place.. This might be the source of the problem that its spread all around the net.

PF: Are there any games, or, even better, people from this “scene” you particularly like?

Johannes: Of course we follow what the other guys are doing. Senile Team even helped us beta testing the game.

PF: Is life a dream, or do dreams help you live better?

Johannes: Well life is just what you make out of it. Sometimes interesting, sometimes not. It“s just the same for me than anyone else i fear. ;)

PF: Thanks for your time, we wish you all the luck of this world.

Johannes: Thanks for your time, we wish you all the luck of this world.

Interview released on 12/22/2012