One of the many aspects of the original SAM version of Manic Miner that makes it look unfinished (to put it mildly) is its use of the SAM's default system font for the cavern names displayed throughout play, along with much of the text and the scroller on the title screen. The Spectrum version didn't have a custom font either but, pardon my saying so, the Speccy's default font is much prettier than the SAM's:
The Spectrum's character set is almost entirely comprised of elegant and uniform 6 x 6 pixel characters centred within its 8 x 8 pixel attribute squares (at least for upper case), while the SAM's is mostly 5 x 7 pixels within the same attribute squares (albeit displaying at effectively 8 x 9 pixels by default when the machine first switches on). This means the gaps between characters are appreciably wider, and the effect is exacerbated on the SAM when you get slim characters like the three pixel wide I in the upper case, or the lower case i, j and l – each only 2 pixels wide – while the exaggerated serifs of the Speccy font's equivalents mitigate the effect just a little.
It's said that the SAM's font is derived from that of the Sinclair QL, but it seems to me that the upper case characters and numbers are heavily derivative of fonts created by Atari and Taito, circa 1978, while the lower case are not significantly different from the Spectrum's except on certain specific characters: b and d have taller loops, f has a longer, double-ended crossbar and an overhanging ascender, q loses the serif on its descender, etc. The majority of characters across the full character set are consistently one pixel taller than their Speccy equivalents.
It may already be apparent from the preceding paragraphs but, having worked in print/publishing since my late teens, I've developed a reputation for being somewhat of a typography nerd. To my frequent dismay, I spent much of my late 20s/early 30s being the go-to guy in my office for identifying and matching fonts from printed samples, or recommending fonts to add some flair to an advertisement, whenever the designer couldn't be bothered to think for themselves. Furthermore, I have a particular passion for the bitmap fonts used in the coin-op arcade games I played in my youth, and was thrilled to receive Toshi Omagari's amazing book Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type as a surprise Christmas gift from my girlfriend, back in 2018.
To me, it is basically a cardinal sin to use an unedited system font prominently in a videogame. It does more to instantly tarnish the look of a product than even the shoddiest of graphic design.
In spite of this, replacing it wasn't high on the list of priorities for The Lower Caverns. I made tentative enquiries a couple of times quite early on in development, and learned that the game treats all text as sprites, meaning it would likely be possible to incorporate an arcade-style full-colour font, memory allowing. Even so, it was another couple of months before I actually started working on any new fonts, and then only really for my own amusement. At that point, we were still working on the premise that The Lower Caverns should be able to run on a 256K SAM, so we had to keep a careful tally of memory usage.
That said, as far as I'm aware, there are no font creation utilities for the SAM, though it is possible to redefine the entire character set within SAM BASIC, and the art package Flash! has a rudimentary (that is to say, frustrating and slow to use) facility for defining fonts and saving them off as code. However, since I was told that The Lower Caverns stores its font(s) as graphics anyway – even the basic SAM character set - I was free to simply draw out replacement character sets and supply them in a SCREEN$ file, like all the other graphics, to be grabbed as code for use in the game.
I have to confess that I was initially very tempted to use the 8 x 8 pixel rendition of Colin Brignall's distinctive font Revue, which Atari used in their 1990 arcade game Hydra, or the angular, futuristic font Konami had used throughout their Gradius series, but quickly realised neither were entirely appropriate to a game like Manic Miner.
The first draft of my custom font was a jaunty but basic, mono bold face taking cues from fonts by Sega, amongst others, but with lowered crossbars, notches taken out of stems on certain upper case characters and an emphasis on curviness on the lower case. Z is a tricky character to make unique, so it's easily the least interesting character in the font. The deliberate, subtle asymmetry of traditionally mirrored characters like b/d and p/q is something that tickles me to this day, since it's not instantly apparent that they retain the left-side weighting bias of the upper case characters.
The numbers are comparatively uniform, but with a lowered crossbar on the 4 and rotational asymmetry between the 6 and 9. The apparent italicisation of the question and exclamation marks was a bit of fun I threw in just because they looked a bit dull when drawn straight.
To add a bit of an arcade-y flourish, the second draft features both a Capcom-style gradient and a drop shadow. Many fonts in the arcades go for a diagonal gradient, but I found it ended up looking quite ugly here due to the higher contrast between the available colours, so horizontal bands worked best. While the full range runs from yellow to the darker red (which only appears on the descenders of lower case characters), I left the red out of all the ascenders on the lower case characters, as it made them look unbalanced. Naturally, the drop shadow gets cut off on the lower case descenders, but it's not overly apparent.
With the extra colours, I was able to add some simple anti-aliasing to some characters, but didn't want to go overboard for fear of making it harder to read, particularly on CRTs. Some aspects are deliberately a little inconsistent, such as the closing of the eye on the e, or the softening of the link on the g and y, but I think they improve the overall look of the font.
However, while this font looks great at its standard height, when enlarged to 16 pixels in height for the title screen scroller, it started looking quite clumsy, with the combination of the harsh gradient and the blue/purple drop shadow making it harder to read while mobile. I'd like to use it for something, but it's definitely not suited to The Lower Caverns!
Of course, if mono fonts are inherently boring, while highly-coloured fonts are not ideally suited for use as a double-height scroller, the answer has to be somewhere in the middle ground, which is what led to the next two options.
Adding bands of grey pixels down the lefthand sides of pure-white characters made them look both subtly thinner and slightly three-dimensional. It also gave me the opportunity for a touch of simple anti-aliasing on a few key points of certain characters, as well as softening the bars on the A, B, P, R, b and y, as well as the slanted line in the 'slashed zero' commonly used on computers with low-resolution displays, to differentiate between a zero and an upper case letter O. This was the font finally chosen for the title screen scroller since, of the three versions of this font, it worked the best at double-height.
But because I couldn't just ditch the idea of a gradient altogether, I tried also using the shades of blue/purple. This both drastically reduced the anti-aliasing possibilities and pretty much precluded the use of a drop shadow as there wasn't a suitable colour available. Also, being substantially darker than the other versions, it didn't work at all well on the title screen scroller.
Again, it might well find a use somewhere, but not in The Lower Caverns. Looking at it now has got me wondering if a sort of 'desert horizon' type gradient (blue to white to red), such as was used in some games by Taito and Sega, would be possible, but I suspect all the blues available are too dark and wouldn't offer enough contrast, even at their lightest.
Just in case I ended up thinking that I'd been barking up the wrong tree all along with the previous font, I had a go at something smaller, and perhaps a little more playful. While reading Arcade Game Typography, my eye had been drawn to a font from a game called Black Heart, by UPL Co, Ltd. I'd never heard of the game or its maker, but the font was unique, dramatic and strangely charming. It had been designed to look three-dimensional, but in the sense of being viewed from a low angle that revealed the increased depth of the characters. The letters (upper case only in Black Heart) were all effectively 5 pixels high, but extruded 'back' by 2 pixels. Strangely, the numbers were much bolder, and only extruded 'back' by 1 pixel, so they didn't match very well.
While the arcade game's font has the edges graduating between purple and red, I found that any attempt to add a gradient in the colours available to me looked too harsh, so the edges ended up being pure red, and a shade darker where the edge is visible at the top of a character. The letters in my version have a slight slant (except, I now notice, on the B) and the numbers are not bold, becoming just 5 x 5 pixels, except for the zero. Lower case e and s suffer from their reduced height (only 4 pixels for all single-storey characters) so their upper loops aren't that great... but they remain legible in the context of a word, at least.
While this font is absolutely unsuited to being stretched to 16 pixels in height, it was felt that it would work well for the names of the caverns, displayed above the scoreboard. The use of this font necessitated the replacement of the traditionally yellow bar behind the cavern names but, personally, I think it was worth it.
Of course, the winning fonts weren't 'right first time' – a close examination of the images above will reveal some inconsistencies and some outright errors, plus I can rarely leave these things along and ended up making tweaks. We also figured out – rather late in development, but not so late it couldn't be fixed – that we needed an additional, special character – the letter 's' with a caron – for the title screen scroller, since it includes a credits list, and the music for the game was created by František Fuka. It was only required for the white font, but I ended up adding the extra character to both of the fonts we were using. On thing I didn't duplicate between the two versions is the crossbar on the upper case 'Z', since it would have made the smaller character look muddled, given the red shadow already present.
In a lot of ways, but particularly because I'm a font geek, this was one of the most enjoyable aspects of my work on The Lower Caverns. Not to say the sprites and scenery weren't fun or a great challenge in their own way, but creating unique, fun and – most importantly – legible fonts for a game is more fulfilling to me than adapting existing graphics take fuller advantage of a machine's capabilities.
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