There were already at least a couple of variations on the title screen image in the SAM version of Manic Miner. The first appeared in the original Revelation release of the game, and doesn't look entirely finished. At the top of the screen is a reinterpretation of the view over the ocean from the original Spectrum game, with a curious, charming, childlike quality to it. There are clouds in the sky, an stylised sun with bold 'rays' emanating from it at one side, and the familiar little house on the cliffs at the other. While each set of caverns could be selected by keypress from the title screen, there was no visual indication of the choice made, the player would simply start in “The Central Cavern”, “The Coal Chute” or “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan?”, based on whether they had pressed a number key before starting... But it also didn't indicate which button to hit to start, presumably because that was noted on the disk inlay. A later version added simple text instructions, along with a cavern set indicator to the title screen in an otherwise empty area of the title screen, using the SAM's default system font, and using exactly the same image at the top.
There are signs that another artist took a stab at replacing some of the graphics at some point, in that the short demo which appeared on FRED disk magazine has an entirely new style of portrait for Miner Willy, and there's a YouTube video which features a similarly-styled title screen as the backdrop for some remixed music. Not certain who did it, but the style reminds me of SAM pixel artist, coder and diskzine editor Steven Pick. It's not clear if the plan at that point was for a complete graphical refresh, but I have to confess I'd be curious to see Pickasso's take on Manic Miner.
None of the SAM versions included the piano keyboard present in most other versions, instead relying on the tried and tested scrolly message running across the bottom of the title screen... also using the SAM system font. As far as I can recall, none of us ever discussed the possibility of reinstating the piano keys which is, in retrospect, a bit of a shame... Though I guess the effect may be easier to implement in MODE 1 than in MODE 4... Plus, the Spectrum had a single channel of beeper music... how on earth would a traditional piano keyboard follow the six-channel SAM rendition of The Blue Danube?
When it came to working on the title screen, I started out trying to keep it as close as possible to the original in terms of content and layout, but update the style. In particular, I wanted to include adaptations of some of the visual assets from the original Spectrum game, much as I had done with the scoreboard, but get rid of the weirdly creepy Miner Willy portrait. To this end, I brought in a version of the 'hewn from rock' Software Projects version of the Manic Miner logo, reused the Mutant Telephone from the final scoreboard, and then adapted an upscaled version of my new Miner Willy sprite. To go along with the text instructions, the coder agreed that a small strip of the title screen could be used to give a graphical indication of which set of caverns was selected, and these were originally described as “Enhanced” (MM, but with better graphics), “Remix” (the Bob McFarlane version) and “The Lower Caverns” (the 20 wholly new caverns).
Ultimately, I did want to create a new and unique image for the title screen but, equally, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to enjoy it. The only times I've done scenery-style graphics, it was either rudimentary stuff thrown together in a hurry or hand-drawn on graph paper and painstakingly transferred to the SAM pixel by pixel. Sprites are easy enough to draw, but landscapes really aren't my thing. Since the coder had sent me screenshots of the Game Boy Advance version's title screen, I converted one of those to the SAM, via Photoshop, back when we were still calling the game Manic Miner, in the expectation that this 'placeholder' might have to end up in the finished game.
This image was also planned to be used for the top of the 20th cavern in each of the three sets, hence the cut-out remaining in the bottom right corner. However, since there was no real point to that cut-out on the title screen, I soon squared it off and planned to fill out the landscape.
Around this time, we reached the point of changing the title of the game due to the trademark concerns previously alluded to so, alongside this, I decided that the visual indication of the chosen set of caverns could do with updating. I liked the 'metal badge' style of my “Remix” label and it worked well with the existing palette, so I decided to work with that as my basis for all three. To this end, the labels became “Renovated”, “Remixed” and “Revealed”.
I also thought presentation would be improved by using the left/right controls to switch between cavern sets, little realising that it would have been too fiddly to replace the existing binding to keys 1, 2 and 3.
The keyboard icons I'd put together seemed like a decent concept, though, so I developed them further for the next draft of the title screen. Creating a 'key down' version for buttons 1, 2 and 3, it was made more obvious which number applied to which set of caverns. I then started toying with an alternative set of titles for the caverns, also alliterative, because it's always good to have options. The first brought back “Enhanced” from the earlier draft, supplemented by “Extended” for the Bob McFarlane remixed caverns and “Exhumed” for the caverns designed by Phil Wilson et al. I have to admit that “Exhumed” probably wasn't my greatest work of alliteration... but none of us came up with anything better.
By this point, we'd done enough playtesting in the first set of caverns that it had become apparent the converted image from the GBA version just wasn't going to work. The SAM game has Miner Willy walk into his cabin when he completes the final cavern, but the GBA version doesn't even feature a door. I'd presumed we could easily alter the animation so that he walks up to, then through the gate, and then into the side of the hut. Sadly, that was not the case, and the original version had only a door that was either open (at the start of the final cavern) or closed (after Miner Willy gets home), with the sprite's path leading straight up from the final cavern's exit, which had to be in the same place. Altering this would have taken up more memory than we had easily available, and that would probably have been the least of the problems.
As a result, I ended up widening the cabin to accommodate a door at the required coordinates, then redistributing some of the other scenery to compensate. The fence and car were removed, but pretty much everything else remained. This version of the image stayed in place for quite a while, even though I felt it was lazy – I simply didn't think I could produce anything better. The cavern set labels were also retitled as “Revived” for the original 20 caverns, “Remixed” for the McFarlane caverns and “Renovated” for the newest set, since those titles better reflected the actual content of each set... “Revealed” was kept in reserve for the time being.
One thing I have to say I'm quite proud of is the way I adapted the sun's rays from the original design. Looking at it now, I can see a few things I'd have done differently, but it worked fairly well as I left it. This is essentially how the title screen remained for many months but, all the while, I had the nagging urge to completely redo the picture, eliminating everything I'd ported from the GBA game. If nothing else, some research had revealed to me that Manic Miner was supposedly set in the remnants of a lost civilisation buried beneath Surbiton... and the closest thing Surbiton has to a sea view is a slim section of the River Thames and a couple of reservoirs off to the west, towards Walton-on-Thames.
Actually putting this concept into practice was just as daunting as any other idea I might have come up with. By this point in development, I'd already created at least one new Cavern 20 'topper' in Photoshop, but I still hadn't quite built up the confidence to be comfortable creating pixel art from scratch. There were some elements of the original image that I wanted to keep – the hut was being used for all of the Cavern 20 'toppers', in one form or another, so it also had to appear on the title page. The tree on the lefthand side also seemed fairly important to keep (even though it wasn't included in the original SAM version's image). I settled on a handful of different landmarks, with the intention of placing them in as geographically accurate a fashion as possible but, in practice, this turned out to be unworkable. I'd originally planned on adding more layers of buildings to make up the city, but the small area I was working with – just over a third of the screen's height – coupled with the limited palette, wasn't quite sufficient to make all that work in a way that would fully register with the eye. As a result, I ended up removing some layers in favour of giving each layer some breathing room. Similarly, while I'd planned to have clouds on a separate layer, these ended up being removed and, instead, some variation was added to the colour and tone of the sky, supplementing the few shades of blue available with the yellow and orange to give the impression of a haze over the city. Working in Photoshop rather than SAMPaint made all of this substantially easier, and the risk of accidentally losing part of an image or a version of an image was significantly reduced.
During much of the time I worked on this image, it featured more layers than I'd had for the 'mountain' image – the sky, three separate layers of background buildings, the background treeline, the foreground, the main tree, the hut, and the path. For some of these elements, I had tried converting various photographic assets down to three or four colours, but most ended up pretty useless. In the end, I think only the treeline was even vaguely useful, and that had required substantial editing, to the point where it would have been easier – potentially also less time consuming – to have created it from scratch. The Wembley arch was manually drawn over a scaled down photo, just to get the shape right, and the foreground tree eventually came together after scouring the internet for pixel art tutorials.
The end result may not be quite what I'd hoped to achieve (the BT Tower is barely identifiable, in the background off to the right of the hut), and it certainly isn't my best bit of work on the game, but I can honestly say that it turned out vastly better than I'd expected to produce.
Comments
Post a Comment