RR #5 - Adding Character (Sets)

When I first received the coder's ZX Spectrum assets for Reckless Rufus, I was pleased to see that he was already using a custom font rather than the Speccy default. There was, admittedly, nothing particularly special about it, and either he or I had replaced it with something completely different very soon after. I don't recall who made the call or when it happened, but the SCREEN$ I have labelled as "2nd draft" has a cuter, curlier font in place for the few text characters the original, basic UI used. Given that the C64 game had such a strong, distinctive typeface (several, in fact) I felt it would be worthwhile developing something similar enough, but within the Spectrum's limits. 

From the C64 version, the choices were as follows:

The title screen uses both an angular sans serif font, and a similar, but irregular font where horizontal and vertical parts are of inconsistent lengths within each character and some corners are rounded. The bonus screen shown between each level uses a more basic-looking font, albeit with a similar, asymmetrical uppercase 'Y'. I figured it wouldn't be worthwhile creating Spectrum versions of all of these, so I didn't waste any effort, except for creating a larger, bold font the score that were ultimately left out. I didn't have complete reference for the characters in any of the C64 game's fonts, but the irregular one used for the credits and scroller on the title screen was by far my preferred options, so I set about adapting that into 8x8 pixels. This was originally roughed out on graph paper along with the sprites and tile designs, while watching one of the VHS recordings of the C64 version. Since most of the video was focussed on the game, there were only brief recordings of the title screen, so this involved a lot of rewinding and pausing to catch as many characters as possible:

The above isn't the first draft, though - I can see from my collection of SCREEN$ files that, for example, the upper-case 'M' was originally quite different. Once I was happy, I built it up using The Artist II's built-in font editor, creating a complementary lowercase set, numbers and assorted special characters as well, and saved it off for the coder:

Funnily enough, though, this isn't precisely the font that ended up in the game... and I can't remember if that's because I amended it further from my paper copy within The Artist II (which was common enough, since seeing something on-screen is a very different thing to looking at pencil on graph paper), or if the coder altered my font as well as ditching many of my sprites. From what I've seen of the numbers, in-game, they're barely different from the Spectrum's default character set. All the more disappointing when it came to the score, which not only got coloured in green rather than red, but was just an ugly, double-height rendering of the basic font.

Regardless, while adapting my assets to the SAM, even as far back as my first, faltering steps on the machine, I tweaked the font further. More recently, I've gone back and taken a closer look at the C64 version, both in YouTube videos and in screenshots on fan sites, and realised that I got quite a few characters completely wrong. In trying to fix them, I ended up deciding to reduce the character height to even out the spacing between the horizontals, as well as replacing the irregular numbers with something a bit more like a small version of the numerals used for the score, leading to this:

In this version, some of the lowercase characters work better than others and, in particular, the 'a', 'e' and 's' are the same height as their corresponding uppercase character. I also realised that my upper- and lowercase 'Y' are identical, with just a 1 pixel row difference in their vertical positioning.

Thinking about it now, I could just as easily have developed a 16x8 pixel font, identical to the C64 version, or an 8x8 one that could be displayed at double-width. The only drawback to that being that the C64's much wider screen could accommodate more text per line, in those wider fonts. To fit the equivalent amount of text on the SAM, each character would have to be just 12 pixels wide.

However, since I knew the SAM can more easily handle multiple character sets, I designed a separate, larger character set for the score, featuring only the numbers from 0 to 9, modelled as closely to the C64 numbers as possible, given that they had to fit within 10x14 pixels rather than 16x16:

The score font on the C64 rounds off the bottom of the '2', but I chose not to do that for the SAM version. I was never quite happy with the '1', though, and recently decided to give it a tweak, making it 1 pixel wider to even out the shading and bulk out the stem. While doing that, I also realised that I'd made a mistake with the '2', since the middle part is wider than on any other number in the set:

As a final touch, I figured I may as well do a bolder version of the default Rufus font...

In some ways, this actually looks better than my original, 'thin' version, coming across almost like a half-size version of the C64 font. I feel that the letters and numbers suit each other better as well, even though the latter are 7 pixels tall rather than 5, so there's a good chance I'll recommend switching over to this once work resumes on the game.