One thing common to the SAM Coupé games I've thusfar been involved with is a certain... haphazard quality to the development. My experience with 'professional' game development is admittedly limited (high school Work Experience and one published game more than 30 years ago, working by phone/post with a freelance coder), but it's easy enough to see when things are happening (or not happening) because something hasn't been fully thought through or discussed with all parties involved.
Something I've been guilty of in the past is raising a hypothetical, then driving ahead with designing sprites, etc. based around that hypothetical, without having first adequately confirmed that it would ever be anything but hypothetical. For example, I mentioned in my first post about the sprites in The Lower Caverns, that I produced about 2/3 of a screen's worth of new and unique sprites before the coder pointed out that all he'd really wanted was for the existing sprites to be remixed and improved upon.
On that same game, I came up with concepts for caverns that would have required a complete rewrite of the game engine, because the mechanics I wanted to use did not exist within the code... and that was after at least two caverns we'd hoped to include had been scrapped because they also required mechanics that didn't exist. While it had been decided in advance to use a set of caverns designed years ago, but never included in previous iterations of Manic Miner on the SAM, there were a couple that had to be left out (again!) because they required mechanics that weren't already available and could not be added. 'Feature creep' is an issue even large, established developers have to tackle, particularly - but not exclusively - when working with publishers who want to push DLC. The 3am brainstorms and the temptation to squeeze ever more features into an existing project can be quite tantalising, even when one knows it's a Bad Idea in practical terms.
Yet it is a tricky thing to navigate, even on an ostensibly simple project like adapting an existing game to a new format. It becomes exponentially more tricky as more people become involved. That's precisely what happened toward the end of last year, on two separate projects - Westen House and NetKarts, specifically.
The coders for both approached another pixel artist create a loading screen - something I'd said from the start I was in favour of, not just because I lack the patience for loading screens, but because the artist in question is phenomenally good at them.
In the case of NetKarts, the artist was given free rein on art style because development is at such an early stage, without a style having been discussed at any length, let alone firmly decided. He chose to produce a loading screen with a realistic-looking Kart, which looks fantastic, as expected.
However, this could prove to be a problem for three main reasons:
- The coder has made a deliberate choice to use a palette derived from the Pico-8 'Fantasy Console' since it, conveniently, operates with a fixed palette of just 16 colours... none of which are particularly conducive to presenting realistic sprites.
- The coder has made use of sprites from an existing game as placeholders for demo builds of NetKarts... and they are very much not in a realistic style.
- The coder and I had already briefly discussed the style of the sprites and, given the above, my vibe was that we should aim to keep the bright, cartoonish style of the placeholders and perhaps lean into it by creating sprites that reference other SAM games... and he seemed to be broadly in favour... albeit dubious as to whether there was a sufficient number of recognisable, SAM-specific characters.
In the case of Westen House, and unbeknownst to me, the coder had started spitballing ideas for expanding upon the MSX original by adding to its intro sequence. I only became aware of this when the artist copied me in on an email to the coder, querying why he'd been presented with what he took to be a work-in-progress loading screen of mine, along with the title screen I'd adapted from the MSX original.
When I explained what I was aware of - that he'd kindly offered to do a loading screen, and I was offering a couple of layout ideas - he revealed that there had been discussion of some form of animated intro, featuring lightning behind a scrolling image of the house itself. This was news to me. Bearing in mind, the MSX original has all the intro sequence it needs, while the expanded version already adds a short, self-contained tutorial chapter, before the game proper, to help familiarise the player with the controls and gameplay mechanics.
The artist suggested using my loading screen and my update of the MSX title screen before the options screen (which, on the MSX, uses the same banner as the title screen), then his animated scrolling image before the game's intro.
The problem with that is that the game's existing intro happens before the protagonist's arrival at the house, so the game would then start with a scrolling image of the house, flip back to the protagonist at his own home, and drop into gameplay proper after his arrival at the house... which really doesn't make sense. Suffice it to say, the artist wasn't exactly happy, and felt that what I was saying was the complete opposite of the brief he'd been given.
It was here that I - somewhat confused - learned about the aforementioned spitballing session, because that's what the artist had understood to be his design brief. The coder had been impressed by a scrolling image he'd seen in someone else's game, and wanted to do something like that in Westen House. Where my understanding of the requirements most significantly differed from that of the other artist was that, from my point of view, the art direction of the original MSX game - and particularly the EX version, with its box art by Sergio Cabanillas (AKA Sirelion) - were so strong, it would be a waste of time and effort to do anything but take them as a template.
Furthermore, the coder's work was still in its very earliest stages, so there was no guarantee that, once complete, there would still be sufficient RAM to accommodate a scrolling, animated introduction sequence, even if we shifted it into a more appropriate point. Simple enough in a conversion of the first version of the game, since it would play before the game proper starts. If we were aiming for the EX version, it would have to play after the map screen at the end of the tutorial chapter... Which then starts to feel like far too much introduction.
There was also talk of scrolly texts which, while admittedly a staple of games on the SAM Coupé thusfar, have become rather outdated and unnecessary in my opinion. These days, if I see scrolly text in a game, it feels like the developers didn't really care about the presentation, or that they have a very 90s-centric sense of presentation. Westen House has a vertically scrolling credits sequence at the end, which is more appropriate and movie-like. From my point of view, a horizontal scroller with instructions and the inevitable 'greetz' would cheapen the feel of the completed game. Besides, the MSX version deals with control instructions via a sequence of images/icons, all of which I'd already adapted for the SAM, and the physical edition of the EX version came with a printed manual.
There's also the small matter that the EX version also has a built-in ending sequence, when Professor Kelvin faces off against the final vampire, and an expanded credits text crawl showing off the cast of monsters from throughout the game. The original version, converted to the SAM, would already be impressive enough, but adding the EX features would make it something truly special, without the need for any additional 90s flourishes as part of the introduction.
The upshot of all this was that the other artist chose to bow out... Leaving me the unenviable task of cleaning up or otherwise adapting one of the mockup loading screens I'd prepared, using the original artist's amazing assets. In the meantime, he's continued to produce some awesome loading screens for games that were either already complete or at least in progress for the SAM, along with a vast library of assets for games yet to be started.
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