Essentially, that tape had to be the basis of all my work... which seemed fine at the time but, in retrospect, I think a big contributing factor in how little of my work actually made it into the game - and, for that matter, how incomplete the Speccy version seems to be in comparison - was that certain elements just never came up in the footage I had access to. Some of the tiles didn't appear in the recording, and the purpose of those that did wasn't always clear if they weren't actively triggered... Several tiles in the C64 version are almost identical in appearance, but behave very differently when stepped on. So, while I did redesign a lot of the tiles, some of Paul's original material had to remain because I wasn't able to provide replacements. Additionally, while all the Speccy sprites are 16x16px, I didn't take sprite masking into account - I think I should have kept everything within 14x14px, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
Left: original material supplied by PG. Right: my finalised versions of the tiles within the not-quite-final panel
Left: the absolute final Rufus sprite and my final version of the panel (not quite what made it into the game). Right: PG's sprites, including his initial draft of Rufus, plus the sprites of mine that didn't make the cut on the far right.
The extremely funny 'joke' about Rufus being final "until the next ones" is kind of embarrassing... because I still have an annoying tendency to nit-pick my work. There's a project I've been working on for the SAM Coupé since mid/late 2018, which we're hoping to finish this year, and I've supplied dozens and dozens of extremely minor revisions to a lot of the sprites, which must have driven to coder barmy at times.
Of all the sprites that didn't get used, I'm most disappointed about the robot cat head, as I was really proud of it. It's not a perfect replica of the C64 version, but I reckon it's cute, and could have worked well.
From the very start, I wanted to get more colour in, because I felt too many Spectrum games were either monochrome or low-colour - for example, in one draft of the tiles, I used 3 colours for the crystal tile, and 2 for several others - but that wasn't to be. I can remember a conversation we had on the phone, regarding the way I'd designed the panel, such that it could only display 10 shots, where Rufus had 14 in the C64 version. Paul was concerned about this, but agreed (reluctantly, perhaps) that it would add to the difficulty of the game. In retrospect, I wish I'd redesigned the panel because, looking at it today, I think it's too scrappy and makes inefficient use of the space. In a way, it was frustrating to have so much screen area left available for the panel, considering the C64 version has everything within a 320x32px bar across the bottom. In another call, he asked if I thought he should include the animated bars from the title screen of the C64 version... For some reason, I thought colour cycling would look better, and I really regret saying that now.
I'm still quite proud of my Rufus sprite, and was so thrilled to see the double-page spread review in Your Sinclair - not to mention the fact that it was a YS Megagame. Also very happy with the font I put together, based on the one from the C64 game. I had designed a second font for the scoreboard, but that ended up using the same font, just at double height. Considering I was paid the princely sum of £250, I did pretty well out of the deal...
A couple of the tapes Paul and I exchanged during the course of development - unearthed in my parents' loft a couple of years back.
It was several years before I actually got to play the game myself (via a Spectrum emulator on the PC!), and I have to admit I was disappointed by how slow it was compared to the C64 version. More recently, I exchanged a few emails with Mike Berry, having discovered that he runs OldSkoolPixels.com, and asked if he had any plans to add some Reckless Rufus merch to his catalogue... Unfortunately not, as he didn't feel Rufus was recognisable enough.
