Manic Miner is not a game know for an elaborate, intricate, stylish or elegantly-designed UI so, on that point alone, the existing SAM version manages to be an improvement on the original.
Willy's air supply is represented by a couple of compressed air cylinders on the right rather than a simple bar running most of the width of the screen. Lives are represented by large, cartoonish (and, to me, somewhat creepy) heads rather than copies of the Miner Willy sprite. Score and high score were deemed worthy of their own font – a pleasant, calligraphic font using the shades of grey available in the unique palette applied to the 56 pixel rows at the bottom of the screen. The gradient border feels a little redundant and wasteful, but this panel does (almost) everything the Speccy version did, while looking slightly prettier by making better use of the SAM's graphical capabilities.
The lives counter is a bit of a problem, though. The size of the heads is such that a maximum of three lives can be displayed during the game. Successful play rewards the player with an extra life for every 10,000 points earned. A good score can be in excess of 30,000 points, and you start the game with two extra lives. The SAM version of the game happily accepts the existence of more than three lives, but it could never display more than three. That was the first, and most significant improvement to be made.
I'd be the first to admit that I'm not a great artist for scoreboards. I don't particularly enjoy designing them and, in most of my personal projects, they've tended to be quite bland and desultory. They're a functional element of a game, so the primary concern has to be clarity. The most elaborate one I have ever created was for Reckless Rufus on the Spectrum, and the programmer decided to make changes to it – removing both colour and detail, but adding more stipple shading – which, I still feel, just made it look uglier. I guess I'm still a little sore about those alterations.
For The Lower Caverns, I really wanted to put some effort in to create something unique, something that took full advantage of facility for a separate, potentially wholly unique palette, and something that actually made some sort of reference to mines.
A quick Google search found this image in Adobe's stock library, which I thought could be used as inspiration.
Another thing I'm not great at is drawing freehand with a mouse, but I ended up doing just that: no preliminary sketch on graph paper, just straight into SAMPaint (under SimCoupé, since I didn't have a functional mouse interface at this point). I used the red-orange-yellow range to draw the wooden support beams and ground in the lit areas, with the tracks and the shadowed wood in the foreground in the blue/purple range. Some very basic stippling broke up some of the odd shapes I ended up with and add a bit of texture to the surfaces. The exaggerated angle of the timbers gives the impression of either a high angle or a low ceiling, hopefully giving it a kind of claustrophobic feel either way...
Of course, with those functional elements added, this version of the scoreboard started to look a little crowded... and most of the tracks and the depth of the tunnel are obscured by the danger sign which accommodates the current and high scores.
I am nevertheless particularly proud of the shading on this image, and rather wish I'd kept a copy of the completed tunnel before I added in the functional elements. Sadly, I saved over that version without thinking, and it's now lost forever. Later on in development, I realised that I had the perfect opportunity to use this image in a different context, which gave me the impetus to revisit and rebuild it... But we'll get to that later.
My second attempt at a new scoreboard was deliberately far simpler, but included some of the iconic imagery from Manic Miner's printed advertising from the 1980s – Willy's boot, exiting screen left, and one of the Mutant Telephones. The latter was recoloured blue because the scoreboard uses essentially the same palette as the game, just with two shades of grey in place of the greens and the four colour cycling palette slots going unused. The blue blob in the middle is a photo of a pebble I'd picked up on a beach years ago, stretched out and reduced to five colours. Each element was downsampled and made greyscale in Photoshop, then painstakingly transferred by hand, pixel-by-pixel into SAMPaint with the colour being applied along the way. The pebble was the most troublesome part, and the aspect I'm least happy with, since it was so tricky to get the greyscale contrast right.
In future, this sort of thing will be much easier for me to prepare on the PC, as I was directed to SCADM – a great Windows-based utility that can transfer images of all kinds into SAM SCREEN$ format, to be saved into a disk image file, reducing colour depth and rearranging the palette along the way, as necessary.
The 'SCORE/HI-SCORE' text is basically matched to the 5 x 5 pixel font used for Manic Miner's iconic loading screen, in which the 'pixels' are attribute blocks made to swap between two colours using the Spectrum's FLASH command. The numbers are from the original, monochrome version of the font I created for the game
This second version of the panel remained the active version for most of the development, but it didn't take long for the plain red background to start bugging me. Trouble was, for absolutely ages, I couldn't think of anything else to do with that redundant background area. Every time I played through a newly-provided alpha build, the scoreboard caught my eye for all the wrong reasons and, truth be told, I started to actively hate it. It was never my best work, but I quite liked the use of a random pebble and was reluctant to try to replace it without good reason. Certainly not till I had something better to replace it with.
In the end, since some of the later caverns included various forms of hazard striping, I started thinking about adding some of these to the background. The scoreboard's palette had the game's yellow and orange as well as its reds, so it was quite easy to anti-alias between the black and yellow bars, and a couple of rows of orange at the top of each bar, acting as a shadow, gave the impression of depth that had been sorely lacking. It could possibly be argued that I should add some shadow to the Mutant Telephone and Miner Willy's foot, but I think they stand out well enough as-is. Switching the frame around the lives counter to grey helps that stand out a little more on the brighter background, and I ended up making some additional (minor) tweaks to the air cylinders.
In the later stages of development, long before I added the striping details, I asked the programmer if we could switch to the 'tunnel' version of the panel since the 'pebble' version was bothering me so much – a prime example of my blasé attitude, resulting from my ignorance of coding. By that point, however, all of the geometry – the positions of the scores, lives counter and air meter – was fixed, and unravelling it so it could be re-fitted to the other panel would have been a nightmare. While, at the time, I felt that wasn't ideal, I've come to believe that it was for the best. Even if I'm still not entirely happy with the final version, it is an improvement on the original, and fits the game better. Granted, it's basically the polar opposite of the largely empty Spectrum version, but it does more to show off the SAM's graphical capabilities, which was the ultimate aim of this project.
I just hope that, in my drive to create something with a bit more visual impact than the colourful frame, cursive text and creepy miner heads of the 1990s version, I haven't made something that ends up being too distracting for the player...
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