these older games, which he felt would lead to greater satisfaction for players. He noted during development, "I think it comes closest to recapturing the depth we've only seen until now in text adventures". Believing that an adventure game composed only of minigames would be incohesive, he devised The Space Bars murder mystery storyline and Empathy Telepathy mechanic to bridge the gaps between the game's shorter segments. Meretzky considered the result his furthest-ever push into nonlinear gameplay, and later compared the solution to his design for Boffo's previous game Hodj 'n' Podj. After roughly four months of developing the design, Boffo began production of The Space Bars visuals and code in the middle of September 1995. Production The Space Bar was created with the BAGEL ("Boffo Adventure Game Engine and Libraries") engine, which was designed to advance technological and interface ideas that Steve Meretzky had enjoyed in Activision's Return to Zork. However, like QuickTime VR and the Z-Vision engine of Zork Nemesis, Boffo Games chose to enable 360° panoramic scrolling of each environment the player visits. As Meretzky believed that "traditional 2D sprite-based animation wasn't suitable for much of what they wanted to accomplish," according to PC Gamer USs Todd Vaughn, the team opted to pre-render the game's graphics. In 1996, Meretzky summarized BAGEL as an amalgam of the most successful elements of every adventure game released during "the last few years", which he had studied for ideas. Boffo co-developed the engine with Rocket Science Games. Continuing a trend that had started with Hodj 'n' Podj, Meretzky wrote no code for The Space Bar, although he did offer design input on the engine. BAGEL was programmed in C++ and was created to be platform-independent; The Space Bar was developed for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. A very high-level programming language was implemented for the creation of in-game content, such as conversations, locations and puzzles. Ron Cobb worked as The Space Bars concept artist and art director, the first time the latter position had existed in a Meretzky production. Previously, Meretzky had relied on his own "awful sketches" to direct the art team. One such sketch was the starting point for The Space Bars Vedj race, which was then developed through several iterations by Cobb. The Mos Eisley Cantina sequence was among the game's points of influence, and the team sought to match that scene in quality, according to Meretzky.