After Mech Assault Phantom War, I joined the Gauntlet DS team at Backbone Entertainment.
Our game was a new take on the Gauntlet franchise, but using the original four character classes and voiceovers.
Gauntlet DS was one of the first Nintendo DS games to feature dual-screen 3D. To accomplish this we rendered half of the scene to a texture, using a sheared camera transform, on alternate frames; we used that texture to paint the normally 2D-only second screen.
For Gauntlet DS, I prototyped parts of the game engine, early gameplay, and camera synchronization code. I optimized the game, which featured vast swarms of enemies, to stay in sync on multiple Nintendo DS units, and I designed and implemented the 4-player and 8-player multiplayer communication and game logic including a UDP protocol stack written from RFCs. I also designed and implemented the global data module and texture overlay system, font rendering and spawn collision code, game user interface elements, and the scripted transition screen system.