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TLC #5 - Eugene's Journey

The story behind Eugene's omission from the original SAM conversion of Manic Miner is more than a little ridiculous... The developers were unable to locate the sprite in the ZX Spectrum version's source code, and the two artists involved forgot to draw a new one. In his place, one of the Amoebatron sprites presided over his territory, in a level retitled “The Sugar Factory”. It had exactly the same layout as Eugene's Lair, and the same snapping toilets to avoid, but the sneaky sprite which would try to squat on top of the exit, preventing your egress, was just wrong, damnit.

It had to be fixed.

It's not even as if the sprite didn't exist – one of the first thing I was sent to work with was a RAW file of the sprite-dump. In common with most of the graphics from the SAM version of Manic Miner, it was simply a coloured-up version of the Spectrum game's sprite, taking very little advantage of what Mode 4 on the SAM could offer. Colour cycling was applied to the frames of his glasses and is running constantly, which seemed a little weird to me.

In the Spectrum game, the Eugene sprite isn't even animated. Once the player collects the final treasure in his Lair, he simply starts colour cycling as he makes his final descent. Surprisingly, this is also true of both the PC version and the GameBoy Advance version, despite the myriad alternatives available on these formats. One of the less obvious upgrades in the existing SAM version would have been a single alternate frame to be used as he drops down one last time to camp on top of the exit. His smile was replaced by an opened mouth, his arms straightened, and he sort of hunches down lower toward his feet.

Initially, all I did was liven it up a bit, improve the shading and moved the palette cycling onto the lenses, because I thought it looked better, and because that made more sense to me. A later draft adjusted the pattern of cycling pixels to further differentiate between the two frames.

But, much later on in the project, I got to thinking... This character was meant to represent Eugene Evans, a real-life figure in the history of British computing, but it's just a bespectacled circle with noodly arms and stubby, angular legs. Why not try to make it actually look like Eugene Evans?

So I started researching the Bright Young Thing of 1980s Videogame Development, aspiring to a recreation of his likeness in a 16x16 pixel block. There were a couple of well-publicised photos of Eugene, from the tabloid newspapers of the day, my favourite being the one where the teenager is leaning over from his seat at the wheel of the (reportedly leased) Lotus he was too young to drive, mouth wide open in a triumphant roar. I wanted to at least try to capture some of that energy. Given the palette restrictions, it was never going to be perfect, but I could damn well do better than a smiley, stick-limbed circle. The biggest problem was that Eugene appears to have been blond, which would have be very tricky to accomplish with the colours available. Since the black and white photos suggested his hair was a dark sort of blond, I initially settled on making it blue instead. I also reinstated the palette cycling on the frames of his glasses, while also retaining the effect on the lenses.

Much later – during what I thought, at the time, were the final playtesting stages – I realised I'd made a mistake by using yellow as the lightest 'skintone'. Switching it to white would allow me to make use of the red-orange-yellow gradient on his hair, thus restoring his locks to their more accurate blond. While doing this, I figured I might as well remove the flashing from the frames of his glasses, since that didn't look any less weird on the new version. The bridge of his glasses also needed altering since the double-bridge started to look a bit odd with the frames recoloured...

It's a bit of a shame I can't get his eyebrows in there, but I think it's turned out quite well for a 16 x 16 pixel caricature sprite, drawn by mouse from grainy photographic reference. It certainly has more character than the smiling circle from the original game.

Have to justify these changes to graphics somehow, right?

But, at the end of the day, The Lower Caverns not only successfully reinstates Eugene – one of the few unequivocally named characters in Manic Miner – but it gives him a new look, unique to the SAM Coupé version. The more unique features The Lower Caverns has, the better.

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