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RR #1 - Revisiting Past Glories

While the majority of my graphic design/pixel art has been on the SAM Coupé, I started out on the ZX Spectrum, and wanted to get into game development from a very young age. At the very beginning, back in the early/mid 1980s, I used Pixel Pads, created by a Hertfordshire company named Computer Agencies Limited, which I'd acquired at a ZX Microfair. These were ideal for sketching out anything from a complete screen to individual sprite graphics, since they were designed with the Spectrum's 256x192 pixel screen in mind, with the 32x24 attribute block grid marked out using heavier lines. Most of the time, I used pencils but, over the years of using and reusing the pages of the pad, I ended up using felt-tip colouring pens on quite a lot of them, making them harder to reuse effectively in future.

Eventually, however, I acquired The Artist II by Bo Jangeborg, which allowed my creativity to take flight in new ways. I wouldn't say I ever mastered The Artist II, nor OCP's Art Studio, which I acquired later. Looking back at my early efforts, particularly those drawn freehand, after I got a mouse, there's a certain scrappy simplicity to it all. Nevertheless, as I approached the end of my school days, I started compiling cassettes full of my graphic design work, and posting them off to the leading publishers of the day. What I hadn't anticipated, though, was the technological quantum leap that coincided with my coming of (working) age. 16-bit machines, like the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, had slowly been eroding the 8-bit computer userbase since the mid-1980s and, in turn consoles like the SNES and Sega Megadrive took an ever-increasing market share during the late 80s/early 90s, due to their nigh-instant loading and almost arcade-level graphics. The Spectrum had been treated as an afterthought for years by Amstrad, and the bigger software publishers were slowly dropping their support, leaving the budget labels to clean up the scraps.

As a result, most of the letters I received in response to my tapes - if I got a response at all - were of the "thanks, but no thanks" variety.

I did, however, get one positive response, from Alternative Software. They called me up and offered the opportunity to produce graphics for the Spectrum conversion of a Commodore 64 game called Reckless Rufus, for which I would be paid the princely sum of £250. Having accepted the job, they put me in touch with the programmer, who sent me a tape of his work-in-progress graphics, noting that several of the sprites were based on circles, because he wasn't much of an artist.

Along with this, he provided a VHS tape of gameplay from the C64 version (which had originally been titled Awesome Dude), to help me determine what he had been aiming for.

Now, the Commodore 64 has a screen resolution of 320x200 pixels, or 160x200 in its high-colour mode. The game occupies the full screen, with the play area made up of 13x7 tiles, with a timer bar on the righthand side of the screen and a 32px high UI across the bottom. Due to the Spectrum's attribute blocks, this was translated into a much smaller play window in the conversion, just 208x56 pixels (26x14 attribute blocks), with a much larger UI outside an 8x8px frame surrounding the play window. Of course, I had to keep to this when redesigning the graphics and, after several revisions, the finished material I sent to the programmer would have yielded a game that looked something like this:

When the game was finally released - and awarded a Your Sinclair Megagame rating, no less - I was somewhat dismayed to find it looked more like this:

Much of the colour had been toned down, if not removed completely, and the programmer's own sprites had been used in place of almost all those I'd designed, though quite a few of my redesigned tiles made it into the finished game, and my version of Rufus had prevailed. When I finally got to play it on an emulator, I found it desperately slow as well... But, hey, I was paid £250, so they clearly felt they got their money's worth, regardless.

Since, by this time, I had a SAM Coupé, I set about adapting the graphics almost immediately upon completion of the Spectrum assets. Still being fairly new to the machine, though, the results were best described as 'underachieving':

The play area was the same as the Spectrum version, the retained UI was amateurishly recoloured and 'upgraded', while still using the standard ZX Spectrum palette, so it might have looked OK, and it might have been decent enough for my early efforts in SAM's MODE 4, but it was far from being the best that the SAM Coupé could offer... so it's probably a good thing that I subsequently left it well alone for almost 30 years.

At RetCon 2019, I got talking with Howard Price - aka Tobermory of the SAM coding group Wombles - about games we'd like to see on the SAM, and naturally mentioned that I still had a yearning to do a conversion of Reckless Rufus... And that discussion was enough to get me started on remaking the graphics.

I also - as a matter of courtesy - contacted the original developer of Reckless Rufus/Awesome Dude on the C64, Mike Berry, for his thoughts, and was pleased to find him in favour of a SAM Coupé conversion, since it was a project he had fond memories of working on. I can't speak to the coding side of things - as usual - but I know Mike and Howard chatted for a bit, and he was kind enough to provide all sorts of resources related to the C64 game.

Hopefully, the assets I've produced thusfar will show signs of my improvement as a pixel artist in the intervening years.

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