TLC #4 - Willy or Won't-y?

In the original version of Manic Miner for the SAM Coupé, the Miner Willy sprite has only 4 frames of animation, just like the Spectrum version. Of the later-generation versions of Manic Miner, those that did more than just duplicate the Spectrum graphics without attribute clash upgraded the player sprite to a whopping 8 frames, allowing for a smoother, more convincing swing of his arms, both forward and back.

I didn't initially plan on completely overhauling how the player sprite worked, and we were perhaps two months into the project before I even started dabbling. To my mind, improving the SAM version required increasing the number of animation frames, because my improvements to the sprite made it a little bit too obvious that his arms only moved in one direction, then magically popped back to their opposite positions.

But my primary concern from the start was the overall look of the sprite and its poor usage of MODE 4. On the existing sprite, Willy's headgear is all one colour, and looks more like an ill-fitting blond toupee with a quiff than a hardhat with a lamp on the front. He appears to be wearing a poncho, because his arms are not discernible, just his hands, purely for the convenience of a four-frame animation. Additionally, while his legs make use of two shades of blue, they're not giving the sprite any sense of depth.

Here's where the Game Boy Advance version came in very handy because, while I couldn't match it in terms of number of colours (somehow they squeezed 31 colours into a sprite only 22 x 16 pixels in size, comprising just 81 pixels in his most expansive frame!) it was fairly easy to use the comparatively meagre palette available to create something that (on a CRT, at least) probably wouldn't look appreciably different. The GBA sprite follows the basic pixel structure of the original monochrome sprite from the Spectrum, but does a few things that I just didn't agree with. For one thing, the red of Willy's shirt doesn't extend under his arms, and his trousers appear to have braces, so it looks like he's wearing a tabard tucked into dungarees. The single pixel in front of his eyes looks, to me, to be the wrong shade. Finally, while there is shading on his legs, it serves very little purpose due to the way it's applied, and it's only really the bottom three pixels of his legs/feet than actually animate.

In a funny old way, I think that having fewer colours to play with actually made it easier to get him looking good on the SAM. His shirt became solid red between the straps of his dungarees (with the darker shade used on his chest/belly and back to improve contrast with his swinging arms), while the boots could be made to present a more defined 'frontmost' and 'rearmost' thanks to the greater contrast of the orange-red range. He has only one 'skintone' available, but mixing that with white, yellow and the two shades of red brought greater definition to his face. Again, on a CRT, that contrast would help the sprite really pop. Making the hardhat graduate between orange/yellow/white made it look brighter but, try as I might, I never found a way to add a satisfying brim below the lamp – it always looked artificial. The one extravagance I allowed myself was the lamp itself which, like the GBA version, uses four colours across four pixels, and had a much more defined light at the front rather than just being a grey blob. Weirdly, despite being one of the earliest-completed sprite updates, the SAM's new Miner Willy has had the fewest subsequent amendments... For which I'm sure the programmer is grateful. Here's a comparison between a 4-frame version (left) and the 8-frame version (right) – pretty sure you'll be able to see the difference!

Because of the way the code was organised, increasing the number of frames in Miner Willy's walk cycle had meant rearranging other things to accommodate the four additional frames for each direction... But I doubt anyone could honestly say they believe it wasn't worthwhile!

The end result – almost contrarily – uses more of the SAM's limited palette than the original version of the sprite. Nine of the twelve available colours, as opposed to just six. This naturally meant that palette changes per cavern had to be considered even more cautiously, but we had been planning to keep them to a minimum from the start.

Repeated playtesting of the game eventually led me to propose another small change: it had started to bother me that Willy's arm-swing had no visible effect on the rest of his upper body. Just moving the blue 'straps' on his trousers along with the arms was enough to give the impression of more extensive movement. The legs were also tweaked very slightly, as I'd realised the lighter blue of his frontmost leg was broken in some frames, so it appeared as though only the lowest three rows of pixels were actually moving:

Unfortunately, this came about far too late in development, so the previous sprite remains... but it was suggested that the new sprite could be added instead to an upcoming remix-of-the-remix, which will hopefully be announced in due course.