Bruty's first image for the game was a doodle of an armor suit with a self-contained machine gun, and a helmet that could be used as a sniper rifle. Once he had this concept in place, he wrote a rough draft of the story, and brought together a small team of people with whom he had worked before; programmer Andy Astor, designer Tim Williams, artist and designer Bob Stevenson, animator Shawn Nelson and, later, programmer Martin Brownlow. One of the first decisions the team made was not to develop the game for the system with which they had the most experience, the Sega Genesis, but instead to develop it for the PC, making it Shiny's first PC game.