The main reason I had been upset about most of my sprites being left out of the Spectrum conversion of Reckless Rufus is that I was uncharacteristically happy with how they'd turned out. Sure, they're not as colourful as the original C64 sprites, but I felt that I'd captured their essence within the 1-bit limit of the Spectrum, while also cleaning up some of the details that didn't come across so well due to the C64's fat pixels.
Looking back, I suspect this was the main reason I even considered the possibility of porting Reckless Rufus to the SAM: to make use of sprite work I actually liked, and to use MODE 4 on the SAM to further refine them.
Thing is, back when I first started porting my Spectrum graphics over to the SAM, I didn't even bother adjusting the palette from the default Spectrum colours, so I ended up doing just one version of each enemy sprite. Given that the C64 version offered a range of colours for each sprite - coincidentally, like many versions of Manic Miner - when I started to give SAM Reckless Rufus a second go, I looked back at them with some disappointment. I'd tried repurposing some for The Lower Caverns, in the very first batch of sprites I produced for that game, which led to some improvement. Taking things further, I realised, required rethinking the whole thing. However, reworking the sprites into The Lower Caverns' 12-colour palette had given me a much better idea of where to start.
My first instinct was to try to match the C64 palette - as far as is possible on the SAM - but the C64 is notorious for the idea that its palette is about 75% brown. Of course, that's not the case... but it's certainly flat and dull. Its 'red' is essentially a mid-brown, then the colours in slots #8-10 are a pale brown, khaki and a warm brown. There are three shades of grey, three shades of almost-blue, two shades that are distinctly green (with khaki acting as the darkest green as well as a brown), a flat magenta/purple, an extremely flat yellow, and then black and white.
Most of these colours translated remarkably well to the SAM, albeit perhaps a touch brighter or more vibrant (which is no bad thing). However, both khaki and pale brown turned into slightly yellow shades of grey:
It's possible I could have got away with tweaking the pale brown but, the fact is, while I often complain about the SAM's full range of 128 colours being too similar, it does have an excellent range of bright, vibrant and distinct colours, so I decided to tweak all the defaults into something a bit more punchy. This also allowed me the opportunity to rearrange the palette into something that looked a bit more organised:
...Just don't ask me why I left dark green in slot #1 rather than placing it with the other shade. I don't know. Looking at it now, as I write, I feel like I should correct it. I also ended up with no 'white' in the palette. The lightest colour is the SAM's brightest yellow, but also functions as - technically - the brightest shade of green. It's close enough to white that, should it become necessary, I could just make it white... but, so far, this somewhat counterintuitive choice has proven quite effective.
Initially, as with my work on tweaking the sprites from Manic Miner for The Lower Caverns, I only put together one colour version of each sprite, even though the C64 version could show each one in a range of hues. However, the experience of making at least one additional colour version for all those sprites led me to re-examine each of my Reckless Rufus designs, to see if I could squeeze at least one more colour option for them, to bring it even closer in line with the original C64 version and, hopefully, improve upon it further.
After my most recent round of tweaks, just this week, I ended up with the sprite sheet below:
Looking it it now, I'm pretty sure I could produce a grey version of the 'space helmet', the 'robo-kitty', the 'blob', the 'sparker' and the 'chomper', a green version of the 'rod', and a red version of the 'hypercube', giving five iterations of each enemy sprite... but that would likely depend on available memory. As a teenager, on Work Experience, a professional graphic artists (Mark Anthony, then working on Shadowlands for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and DOS PCs at Teque London Ltd.) once told me:
It's my job to fill a computer's memory with beautiful graphics... and it's his job [indicating his colleague,
Barry Costas, Shadowlands' coder] to throw most of it away to fit the game in.
These words have stuck with me for more than thirty years now, and I endeavour to follow his sage advice in all new ventures. Given the limitations of the SAM are comparable to those of the Atari ST, I'd like to think Mark would be proud of my RAM-hogging ways. Mark also influenced me in several other ways - not least sparking my earliest interest in anime and manga but, more specifically, with his character portrait design in Shadowlands, which I tried to emulate when trying to design Iron, my attempt at a Command And Conquer-style game for the SAM.
It's worth noting that several of the sprites got some detail/shading tweaking along the way. I changed the specifics of the pulsing lights on the 'rod', and reduced the size of the 'hypercube' by 1 pixel both horizontally and vertically to give a single pixel centre of rotation of the ball in the middle, while also varying the colour and blink pattern of the corner lights for each colour variant. I changed the electric arc on the 'sparker' so that it builds and fires rather than being permanently buzzing between the antennae, because a height of 4 pixels isn't really sufficient for a convincing electric discharge. The 'chomper' got some additional shading and changes to the shading on its eyes, while also making its spinning arms grey rather than the same colour as the body. Knowing me, these aren't the final final versions, but I'm at least as happy with them as I was with my original ZX Spectrum versions, back in the 1990s.
While these are all styled after the sprites in the C64 game, I think the bolder, more vibrant colour really gives the SAM an edge. Effectively, the original game also combines two sprites into one - a high resolution 'outline' with the 'fat pixels' of the C64's high colour mode - to give the impression of higher fidelity sprites, where the SAM has the advantage of retaining its square-ish pixels in MODE 4, so it looks cleaner and sharper overall. The sprites might, technically, be smaller, but I believe they are at least as effective.
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