TLC #3 - Graphical Overhaul I: Sprites

It's worth mentioning that, when I was first brought on board, I completely misunderstood the programmer's intent behind asking me to “create some new graphics” for a Manic Miner remix. As a result, and in what was probably an example of the fastest pixel art work I have ever done, I knocked out most of a full screen's worth of new 16 x 16 sprites, each with up to 4 frames of animation, in a matter of days. Part of the reason was that a number of them were simply repurposed versions of old, otherwise unused SAM and Spectrum sprites of my own, but a lot of them were new and unique, so I was pretty proud of myself. It's unlikely that any of it will go completely to waste – if nothing else, it's more material for my own library of sprites, some of which may yet inspire new game ideas but there's a good chance some of them could appear in Manic Mansion.

Something that tends to plague full-colour graphics created for original games on the SAM is a phenomenon known as 'pillow-shading', whereby anti-aliasing is manually applied, with equal emphasis on all edges and no consideration for giving the impression of a shape illuminated realistically by a specific light source. This is pretty much the opposite end of the scale to my early approach to graphic design and always looks terrible. Pillow-shading didn't come up constantly in the existing Manic Miner graphics on the SAM, but nor was it entirely absent.

With a few interesting exceptions, I found that a lot of the existing graphics were barely different from the Spectrum versions, while others – particularly those which were wholly unique, those that appeared in the extra levels in the SAM version, for example – just didn't make any sense, visually. Some might have been able to benefit by additional frames of animation, but they proved so difficult to interpret, I didn't know where to start. Since the only caverns we were keeping from the previous versions were the 20 from the Spectrum version, many of the problem sprites were simply scrapped. While the Bob McFarlane caverns largely re-used existing sprites, some of those ready-made caverns which had been omitted from the previous releases came with all-new sprites which also needed some attention, to present them in the best possible way.

I won't go over every single sprite I replaced here, but will single out a handful that had been done exceedingly poorly in the original release of the game. Certain key sprites will be featured more prominently later on, so these will only be brief observations. Just to note, though, I'm certainly not of the belief that mine is only way to present these sprites. There have been some exceptionally good graphics produced on the SAM by some very talented artists. However, it's hard to deny that, even for its time, the SAM version of Manic Miner was not a shining example of its best visuals.

All that said, following the emergence of the ZX Spectrum Next, it seems there's a contingent in the 8-bit fandom that actually prefer the simplicity of the original Spectrum's display. It seems all they really want out of the Next is the same colour depth, but without the attribute clash. Given the vast improvements available to the Next – which far exceed MODE 4 on the SAM – I find this quite baffling... Nevertheless, it does lead me to retrospectively second-guess most of the decisions I made in remaking the graphics for The Lower Caverns. In bringing the graphics more in line with some of the higher-spec hardware, have I unwittingly destroyed the unique 'character' of the original SAM version? I'd like to think not, but then my nostalgic connection to the Spectrum doesn't quite extend to its graphics... Unless you count wondering “how could this have been better?”

The Original Set:

Amoebatrons (Cluster-type) – This was one of the sprites that made no sense in the way it had been recoloured from the Spectrum version. It's pillow-shaded from the centre outward, but over the entirety of the sprite, tentacles and all. In isolation, the end result almost looks more like a super-low-resolution animation of the midday sun as seen directly overhead, from the floor of a densely-shadowed forest than a gribbly, mono-cellular monstrosity extruding its pseudopods. For this one, I simply adjusted the tentacles to a consistent colour, with shading of their own, and tried to make the central mass appear a bit more three-dimensional, and lit from a single source, off the top, righthand corner. There's really not a great deal to be done with a sprite like this in its original size... but my adjustments certainly made it easier to create alternate colour versions of the sprite later on. Comparatively speaking, the 'Jellyfish-type' Amoebatrons needed very little work.

Bears/Ewoks – Another one that made no sense, though it was certainly one of the more colourful sprites in the original versions. Given that the name of the cavern these appear in is “The Endorian Forest”, one would tend to think these were supposed to be cute, cuddly Ewok-like teddy bear creatures... but, for whatever reason, these looked humanoid... possibly Simpsons-style, due to their yellow skintone. At a stretch, maybe they were intended to look like Rupert the Bear... but I don't believe that's the case. I've no idea what the blue bobble on the head was supposed to represent, and the red shirt and green trousers combo didn't look great. Initially, I just took these back to basics and made them look more like simple teddy bears, but ended up producing a unique version with a cheeky hood, for the original set of caverns, with the basic version applied to the equivalent cavern in the Bob McFarlane set, “If You Go Down...”. My only regret with these is that we couldn't make them 8-frame, to match the Miner Willy sprite.

Blinking Eyes – These were odd, as they weren't entirely without shading, it just wasn't applied in any useful way. The eyeball itself was stark white, with a dark blue iris, while the eyelids and eyelashes were both largely skintone. One pleasant surprise was that the animation was asymmetrical, in that the mid-point between open and closed was slightly different in each direction – a holdover from the original Spectrum version. Most of the animations in the SAM version of Manic Miner are technically only three-frame, with a single mid-point frame used twice, between either extreme. The differences here add some real weight to the animation, and make for one of the more interesting true four-frame sprites in the game. All I really had to do here was improve the shading, so it looked less flat. This has become one of my favourite sprites in the game, and I tried to make an alternate version with a vertical-slit pupil. This required reducing the sprite's width by a single pixel, since the 'round' version has a two-pixel wide pupil and is nicely centred. It worked out OK, though we ended up not using it, as I came up with a better alternative.

Jackhammers – The originals of these just baffled me. There was shading, of a sort, but it was extremely harsh. It looked almost like bevelled edges on an otherwise flat central part, in which there's nothing to differentiate between the main body and the jackhammer's blade. While the movement of the blade is pretty good (albeit not asymmetrical, which appears to be the case with all versions), but then the arms are completely static and the movement of the balls on the top (which I took to be eyes) is perhaps a bit too subtle. The most important things, to me, were to ensure the body of the jackhammer and its blade were different colours, and then emphasise the spinning of the 'eyes'. I did also try making the arms move, but was never satisfied with the results. Even now, I'm tempted to make the blade's movement asymmetrical, but I don't think it's necessary on this particular sprite, as it's surely intended to exhibit regular, mechanical movement.

Kangas – Another SAM sprite that was barely different from the Spectrum version. Without looking closely, it's not apparent that there is some shading on the original, but it does go from orange on the main body to red for odd pixels around the edges, essentially a rather basic and largely ineffectual form of anti-aliasing. Beyond that, there was an error in the grabbing of the original sprite which meant that the Kanga never actually leaves the ground was it bounces along. The first order of business was correcting that – it only required ensuring that one frame had the sprite lifted 1px off the bottom of its frame – then it was simply a case of improving the shading to make it look less flat. Initially, I only did the one (yellow/orange) version, but later added red and blue versions.

Kong's Flaming Barrels – Very clearly just a recoloured version of the monochrome ZX Spectrum sprite, on which the rotation of the barrel was actually reasonably well done, but rendered virtually invisible by the choice and application of colours. The 'flames' were just stippled strips of pixels rising off the top of what might as well have been a small explosion rather than a barrel. My very first draft changed the barrel's colours to clarify its rotation, then filled in the yellow-to-red gradient in these strips to join them up a little right on top of the barrel, but this really looked no more like fire than the original SAM or Spectrum sprite... possibly less, in fact. I ended up researching as many different kinds of flame animations as possible, and tried to emulate those as best I could within the size and palette constraints. Having a mere four frames to work with, it wasn't easy, but I was quite happy with the end result. One thing I hadn't considered was that my first version of the newly-developed sprite was a few pixels wider in service of the more 'realistic' flame. This only becomes a problem in a couple of caverns, and even there has only a small effect on the timing required to get past them. Nevertheless, I did end up trimming the width of the flame so it matched the original.

Mutant Telephones – The SAM version of the telephones is essentially a sort of pillow-shaded version of the Spectrum sprite, even down to having a single pixel black border between the cradle and the handset. That, just for starters, had to go. That kind of thing might be necessary on the Spectrum or in MODE 1 on the SAM, but in MODE 4 it's a sign of poor planning and looks horrific, not least because the game's coding treats 'black' as transparent. For this one, I looked to the Game Boy Advance version of Manic Miner, and found that it solved the problem by having the handset a different colour to the main body of the phone (technically just a much lighter shade, since each sprite uses a 16-shade gradient and just varies the hue between each on-screen iteration). Initially, I duplicated that as best I could with the SAM's more limited palette, but it never sat right with me, as those old-style, rotary-dial phones always tended to be more consistently coloured. It took me till quite late in development, but I managed to solve the problem by making the cradle a different colour. This then allowed me to make several alternate colour versions of the phone sprite. Another interesting feature of the GBA version is that the animation of the handset it asymmetrical and a full four frames, which I felt looked better than the three frame version from the Spectrum.

Pac-Men – While I know that the original Pac-Man was a simplistic, single-colour sprite, pretty much every iteration of the sprite since the original game has had a lot more character, so the SAM version of Matthew Smith's take on it was extremely disappointing. Flat, with the barest of anti-aliasing around the edges. The movement of its eye seems inconsistent with the position of its mouth. The single pogo leg had some shading but, like some of the other original sprites, didn't really make sense. Initially, I just adjusted the shading to make him appear a bit more spherical, clarified the leg into two thinner, separate legs with a greater range of movement and shifted the eye back so it didn't need to move at all. Rather than leaving it as a 2 x 2 pixel block of black, I added some white to the eyes, and some shading behind them, but later ended up adjusting them again to make them appear a bit more like the traditional, curved Pac-Man eyes, which are almost like slimmed-down versions of his silhouette. For later caverns, I added a Ms. Pac-Man sprite for variety.

Penguins – These were just outright terrible: absolutely flat, using three colours with zero shading, the overall look made that much worse by the use of white separating the flippers from the body in one frame. It wasn't even particularly visible that the beak is yellow, due to the way it butts up against white and a single shade of blue. The feet, meanwhile, don't really appear to be 'walking'... I genuinely cannot figure out what they're supposed to be doing. It looked for all the world like something from a bad NES game. Even so, this was more a case of tidying up and adding some shading rather than outright redesigning, but the end result is a definite improvement. Of course, when we later discussed having a lighter, icy blue background in all the penguin caverns, I altered the shading so it got lighter, rather than darker, towards its outer edges. We later reconsidered, since the lighter backgrounds just didn't look that great once we saw the caverns in action. One odd thing about the penguins is that the SAM version uses only two frames to animate them, where pretty much every other version – even down to the Spectrum original – uses four.

Skylab – Being a pretty much lifelong fan of the US space programme, I took the execution of the original SAM version of the Skylab sprite almost as a personal affront. While it's largely based on the Spectrum version, whoever adapted it for the SAM seems not to have understood what “Skylab Landing Bay” was all about (despite having only just turned five when it was allowed to crash, I have vivid memories of the event, and the resultant debris strewn across a good chunk of the southern hemisphere), and possibly didn't even know what Skylab was. Of the angled protrusions, the lower pair are the same length as those of the Spectrum version, but the upper pair have been extended to meet the horizontal protrusions from the 'head'. Thus, rather than looking like Skylab with its solar panels fully deployed, it looks like a stickman hanging on to the underside of a glowing ball by the large, wide handlebars sticking out of its sides. While it would be impossible to do the world's first true Space Station justice in a mere 16 x 16 pixel sprite, I was at least able to correct the angled solar panels. I didn't do much else, certainly not to the 'disintegrating' portion of the animation, because the final few frames already look like a small explosion.

Solar Reflectors – These were particularly odd because, while the sprite is animated, the wheels were left completely static. The only moving part was the buffer on the front. The main problem, obviously, was the lack of shading, but even with 3 x 3 pixel wheels, and a four frame animation, it was simplicity itself to give the impression of rolling wheels. The vehicle itself remains much the same, just a little bulked up to accommodate a bit of shading, while the reflector and the buffer have some additional colour, made to look as if they're catching the light, to further help them look a little more three-dimensional. The blue-bodied one was my original update, with the red- and yellow-bodied ones added later. The blue version was eventually scrapped because there seemed to be too many blue sprites.

Spheres – Not entirely sure what the thinking was on these, considering the shading that's there is actually not bad, albeit a little confused as to where the light is coming from. It almost gives a chrome effect, implying that it's reflecting a light 'ground' and a darker 'sky'. Where it's gone wrong – in my opinion – was in using white for the rotating cross detail. That made absolutely no sense to me. I completely reworked the shading, then used the darkest blue for the majority of the cross, switching to black for the darkest-shadowed parts, and also fixed an oddity in one of its four frames, where one of the diagonals doesn't line up with the others. In retrospect, I'm almost tempted to attempt a new version, playing up the chrome effect by using the full range of colours from “Solar Power Generator” to create a simulation of full-on reflection... but probably won't, as keeping it single-colour enabled me to create multiple versions of the sphere in unique colours which, personally, I think is more valuable to the look of the game.

Toilets – The main issue with these were that they were too dark and indistinct because the lightest blue is still far, far darker than the game's white. Initially, all I did was lighten them by extending the coverage of white and tightening up the shading. To add a bit of variety, I then changed the colour of the snapping lid to green (possibly as a subconscious reference to the Avocado Bathroom Suite sketch by Mitchell & Webb). They then remained entirely untouched until quite late in development, when I decided – pretty much on a whim – to make the cisterns jiggle as well, because I felt it needed a bit more 'life' than just a snapping lid. After this, I ended up making the u-bend behave more like a tail, so there was some movement in the lower half of the sprite.

Phil Wilson Cavern Set:

The material provided for the caverns designed by Phil Wilson were a little sparse in places. It looked as though the majority of the sprites he wanted could be recycled from the existing set – things like the Blinking Eyes, Kangaroos, Birds, Pac Men, Toilets, Penguins, Clockwork Hooter and Seals were drawn differently on his sprites SCREEN$, but the differences appeared to be largely cosmetic. There was also a unique Eugene sprite, but this was superseded by my version, so there were only a handful of wholly new sprites that really needed looking at within this set of twelve unique caverns.

Cake – I liked the idea, and this one worked well enough within 4 frames since it didn't really move that much, it just sort of tilts out of the screen. It bugged me that the sprinkles on top appeared to be a fixed pattern that was simply hidden as the cake flattened out, and that there was a stark black border between the grey icing and the orange cake, so that was all I tackled originally. However, once I saw the sprite in action, I decided to completely remake it, with the cake stretching and compressing as it moves. Initially, I tried a version with a bouncing swirl of icing on the top and a jam filling that oozed out from the sides as the cake compressed, couldn't quite get it looking right. Simplifying it, so the icing was more like a layer of fondant, and adding a bouncing cherry, yielded a far better result, I think.

Knight/Executioner – I kind of liked the look of this one, and particularly the swinging axe. It's somewhat based on the Willy sprite, but is wearing either a hood or a helmet. I chose to interpret it as a hood, and rebuilt the sprite using my 8-frame Willy as the basis, but had to trim it to 4 frames and made sure the axe swung properly, forward and back, rather than swinging forward, then snapping back to its original position. The cavern he appears in, “The Mediaeval Dungeon” got a more significant palette swap than most caverns, with the blues traded in for greys to facilitate a more castle dungeon-like appearance.

Multicolour Balloons? - While this is my given name for the sprite, I haven't a clue what they're actually supposed to be, they just looked like a collection of balloons to my eyes. Of course, while colourful, there's literally no shading on any of the colours... and it's not even because the altered palette wouldn't support it. Granted, few of the colours had more than one shade, but it would have been possible to smooth at least some of them, to a degree. By using the original palette, I was able to keep the basic idea, but improve the look of the individual 'balloons'. The colour cycling is an interesting effect, but tends to suggest that they're not actually supposed to be balloons at all...

Teacup – Another one I liked the idea of, but it was pretty clear that four frames was not sufficient to fully express a teacup jumping off its saucer and spilling some tea, which then runs down its side to collect in the saucer. Nevertheless, the first thing I did was simply add some shading to the two parts of the sprite to make them a bit more three-dimensional. Seeing the sprite in action, however, it became apparent that something else had to be done with it. Later versions of the sprite did away with the tea altogether, I tried one version that just had the cup rotating... but even that didn't work particularly well with only four frames of animation. Eventually, I settled on bringing back the saucer, and having the two elements tilt in opposing directions... It's OK... but still not my favourite.

Space Rover – Simplistic though it is, I have to confess to a certain fondness for this sprite, due to its well-executed treads and its purely superficial resemblance to a certain popular character from the ZX Spectrum, due to its colour, the large, white window and the flapping, tail-like 'door' at the back. That didn't stop me changing pretty much everything about it, though. Much as I like the idea of the door, it doesn't work especially well, so I replaced it with a bouncing cab and a pod on the back that rises and falls. The treads had some shading applied to make them look a bit more solid, but they way they work is pretty much unchanged.

Star Flower – This was probably my favourite of the sprites, because of the way it cheekily pokes out its tongue as it reaches its highest point. Nevertheless, I felt it looked a little lifeless since the points of the star are immobile. The weirdest thing – certainly while it's animating in place – is that the irises/pupils are fixed in place, and the Star Flower animates around them. I brightened him up a bit (making him largely yellow rather than orange), added shading to the outer edges rather than the inner parts, and gave some weight to the 'petals' so they hang down as he rises and float up as he falls. I also made his stem stretch and contract, but made sure to keep the poking-out tongue.

The most frustrating things about the SAM – other than its all-too brief lifespan after its initial launch – were the 'Super Spectrum' moniker it picked up, and the habit people (myself included, back in the day) had of trying to 'upgrade' Spectrum graphics to the SAM rather than draw something unique. While there are some great graphics on the SAM, far too many games barely make use of MODE 4 to its fullest and, while Manic Miner had a very limited palette, there was still plenty of scope to do better.

Even some of the conversions to ostensibly higher spec machines, like the eventual Atari ST conversion, ended up with some pretty terrible adaptations of the Spectrum sprites, while the Amiga version is more of a re-imagining of the game, with everything drawn larger, requiring each individual cavern to scroll, as you can no longer see the entire cavern on a single screen.

Even if The Lower Caverns doesn't go down in history as one of the SAM's greatest games – being a remake of a game that was already considered outdated when first published for the SAM, more than thirty years ago – hopefully it will at least more clearly demonstrate what the machine is capable of, graphically. Furthermore, the decision was made part-way through development, once I started churning out colour variants of as many sprites as possible, to make the game for 512K SAMs only, to ensure sufficient space for the new sprites.