Psionic was an intriguing title which was being developed by Robert Trevellyan, who later went on to work for Bitmap Bros and produce the likes of Speedball 2 on the Amiga.
His first commercial venture was for this game at Electric Dreams software, with a game set in a kind of vertical city, with different clans or tribes on each level.
Working with Robert was Nick Cook on graphic work duties, who Robert communicated a lot with during development. Stuart Hibbert oversaw production duties.
Robert worked on the C64 SKU, and sadly the game was far from complete when the project was cancelled. He had a very neat composite sprite animation engine running, and some silky smooth background scrolling. The player could navigate around the city, but there was no gameplay at this stage. Robert believes that one of the other SKUs had some basic gameplay in place, possibly the ST version which was in production.
It is suggested that the project was pretty much adrift with no expectation that it was going to come to anything. There was no design team, and the written design (by Mark Eyles) was a little lacking in detail. Electric Dreams had purchased the written design (and possibly 3 others too according to Robert) from Mark Eyles at an earlier date – from that point he had no further involvement on the game. Other team members were having to fill in the blanks to turn it into something playable.
When asked about the possibility of the game surviving, Robert sadly confirmed that he got rid of all his C64 stuff a long time ago. It is very unlikely that we will ever see anything of this game.
Contributions: Robert Trevellyan
