More youthful pie-in-the-sky: random edition!

[HEXdidnt]

Back when I was actively coming up with ideas for Spectrum games, it wasn't all big, licensed properties, nor was it all arcade/action games. I was often inspired by games on other systems, and tried to imagine how something similar could be accomplished on the Speccy. There were also instances of Spectrum games inspiring spoofs, or arcade conversions whose graphics were nowhere near the best the machine could offer (an opinion grounded entirely in my ignorance of coding, and precisely what could be made to fit in 48K/128K of RAM).

As I root through my tape archives, and the bits and bobs I've transferred over to the SAM, I'll add some of the highlights into this thread, since most of these really won't warrant a threat of their own. I've noticed, for example, that I put much more effort into things when I was either working on paper or on the Spectrum, using The Artist II, and the quality of my Spectrum-oriented material dropped off considerably when I moved onto the SAM Coupé... not that my early SAM stuff was much more than recoloured Spectrum-style graphics...

To kick things off, Here are a few SCREEN$ from a graphic adventure I was designing, back in my teens, somewhat inspired by the format of It Came From The Desert and Antheads on the Amiga. It's essentially a kind of 'visual novel'-type experience, and the premise seems to have been that a couple of investigators are looking into reports of possible alien activity in a small, desert settlement. Pretty sure I never came up with a full story but, if I did, it's long-forgotten.


Essentially, most the game would be played through a rudimentary first-person view, stepping from (mostly static) location to location, with occasional bits of incidental animation, like the ceiling fan in the bar in the second image. The main window would also accommodate battle scenes, where you have to defend yourself against angry locals. The lefthand side of the screen would have a character portrait - Sadler and Barrett being the two protagonists. I seem to remember the idea was that you could switch between them at will, but I didn't include an on-screen button to accomplish this, so I'm not certain what my thinking was on that score. Below the character portrait is a bio readout, which would show injuries, exertion, etc. along with a compass and a bag icon indicating your inventory. Across the bottom of the screen is a text window for dialogue and the player characters' streams of consciousness.


As shown in the second image here, the game would occasionally feature exploration/evasion scenes from a top-down perspective - like the hospital escape scenes in It Came From The Desert. Stuff like breaking into secret military bases to search for evidence, or breaking out of captivity if arrested. The text window would offer numbered dialogue choices (so, presumably, I wasn't intending point-and-click controls of any kind).


Didn't get very far with the characters, and there was basically just one pose for the male characters, and one pose for the female characters, with different faces/expressions and clothing options for each. Of the two sets, I think the female characters ended up far less distinct... I remember having a much harder time coming up with viable clothing and hair alternatives for them. Probably would have helped if I'd come up with some actual characters.

I'm a big fan of this style of game - It Came From The Desert was a big part of the reason I got an Amiga, eventually - and I've been larking about with a Visual Novel development kit called Ren'Py over the last few years. Might be interesting, at some point, to attempt a Ren'Py visual novel using Spectrum-style graphics...

[Einar Saukas]

Cool!

You should definitely upload these images to ZX-Art

[+3code]

Really nice collection. But in the second image of the first set, is a pain to imagine how are fit the fingers.

[HEXdidnt]

@Einar Saukas Funny you should mention that... I've claimed my (pre-existing!) page on ZX-Art quite recently, and have been wondering what to post there. I will most likely post some of this, at least.

@+3code I'm not sure I understand what you mean... if it's the player fists in the foreground, I used my own left hand for reference... admittedly, it's not at the most useful angle for getting into a fist-fight, and I'd likely do it differently now.

[Ivanzx]

These are very interesting screens and concept of game. Maybe a coder here feels like finishing a game with these?
Or do you know any, @HEXdidnt '?

[HEXdidnt]

@Ivanzx I know a few, mostly working on the SAM Coupé rather than the Spectrum... and all currently busy with their own ongoing projects.

The main stopping point with this adventure is the lack of story. No story means no characters, no puzzles, no objectives, etc. The few graphics I have might be enough to put together a bare-bones game engine, but a lot more work would be needed to turn it into a fully-fledged game.

[Ivanzx]

@Ivanzx I know a few, mostly working on the SAM Coupé rather than the Spectrum... and all currently busy with their own ongoing projects.

The main stopping point with this adventure is the lack of story. No story means no characters, no puzzles, no objectives, etc. The few graphics I have might be enough to put together a bare-bones game engine, but a lot more work would be needed to turn it into a fully-fledged game.

Well, I think working in a story for a game has to be something really amusing and satisfactory in order to get your game running

Wow, people working nowadays in the Sam Coupé? That is new to me, I always thought that the scene for it was half dead, did you by chance meant the Spectrum Next?

[HEXdidnt]

Wow, people working nowadays in the Sam Coupé? That is new to me, I always thought that the scene for it was half dead, did you by chance meant the Spectrum Next?

I have heard that the SAM scene is much-derided in the Spectrum community at large, because there's so little activity, and what little there is going on takes so long to happen... and that reputation is not entirely undeserved, I guess... but there is stuff happening. I've been assisting on an update/remix to an existing game for the past few years, and the coder has plans for a follow-up to that as well as a couple of other projects. There's a conversion of Treasure Island Dizzy in the works (WIP shown to one of the Oliver Twins last summer) and, while I had no involvement in that, I have done some work on a planned follow-up. Also got another conversion in the works, albeit somewhat stalled right now - graphically, it's all done (I think!).

There are some coders who enjoy just surprising people with SAM games once in a while. There's a near arcade-perfect version of Defender that came out a few years ago, and more recently there have been conversions of Battlezone, Rick Dangerous and Tiertex's awful adaptation of Street Fighter. Coincidentally, around the time the latter emerged, I was larking about converting/downgrading Street Fighter's arcade graphics to an optimised 16-colour palette on the SAM, just for my own amusement. There's also a fair bit going on hardware-wise, believe it or not.

I'd quite like to get involved in the Spectrum Next at some point... but my fondness for the SAM keeps me occupied for the moment.

[Stefan]

Wow, people working nowadays in the Sam Coupé? That is new to me, I always thought that the scene for it was half dead, did you by chance meant the Spectrum Next?

So you never click on any of the links in my signature?

[Ivanzx]

I have heard that the SAM scene is much-derided in the Spectrum community at large, because there's so little activity, and what little there is going on takes so long to happen... and that reputation is not entirely undeserved, I guess... but there is stuff happening. I've been assisting on an update/remix to an existing game for the past few years, and the coder has plans for a follow-up to that as well as a couple of other projects. There's a conversion of Treasure Island Dizzy in the works (WIP shown to one of the Oliver Twins last summer) and, while I had no involvement in that, I have done some work on a planned follow-up. Also got another conversion in the works, albeit somewhat stalled right now - graphically, it's all done (I think!).

There are some coders who enjoy just surprising people with SAM games once in a while. There's a near arcade-perfect version of Defender that came out a few years ago, and more recently there have been conversions of Battlezone, Rick Dangerous and Tiertex's awful adaptation of Street Fighter. Coincidentally, around the time the latter emerged, I was larking about converting/downgrading Street Fighter's arcade graphics to an optimised 16-colour palette on the SAM, just for my own amusement. There's also a fair bit going on hardware-wise, believe it or not.

I'd quite like to get involved in the Spectrum Next at some point... but my fondness for the SAM keeps me occupied for the moment.

That is nice to hear, I always felt intrigued by the Sam Coupé. a pity that it did not come out 2 years before it did.

Also, wondering if those coders that are currently working in SAM projects could later maybe help with Spectrum ones? (is it Z80?)

[Ivanzx]

So you never click on any of the links in my signature?

Hehe, I will from now on
The thing is that I co-wrote 3 books about Homebrew games in 8 and 16 bits, and when deciding the system we would cover, we had to leave the SAM out, because the amount of games was so tiny... even the Amstrad PCW seems to have more homebrew activity! (and the last book was written end of 2020!)

[HEXdidnt]

I found out a few years ago that my SAM Coupé Aliens Vs. Predator demo - released into the PD scene sometime in 1991 - had been turned into a YouTube video ten years back. Even now, it only has two comments and has been viewed just 302 times, so it didn't exactly set the internet at large alight. I'm honestly not even sure how popular or widely-known it was within the SAM scene...

...But the project actually began on the Spectrum, as a result of the Dark Horse Comics series, first published in 1990. I'm a massive fan of the Alien and Predator movies (some of them, anyway) and the first comic book series did a great job of pitting the two iconic creatures against each other. If only Fox had followed their template with the eventual movies, the first of which came out 14 years after the comics.

Set on a remote farming planet which was seeded with Xenomorphs by the Predators, for the purpose of a right-of-passage hunt, and in the mistaken belief it was uninhabited. The grazing livestock get impregnated just as they're due to get herded up and loaded into a transport craft, the Xenomorphs gain a quick foothold in town. The local doctor/vet, goes looking for whatever made the animals so lethargic, and has a fatal encounter with the Predators, destroying their ship in the process, and seemingly killing off the leader of the pack. The remaining trainees go on the hunt, killing anything and everything in their path, human or alien...

So, naturally, the story lends itself perfectly to an Ocean-style multi-level, multi-style game featuring both action and puzzles! And those were always awesome!


A pretty terrible - and unfinished - attempt at a loading screen. The Predator's pose is based on Konami's Haunted Castle arcade game splash screen, while the human protagonist's was based on one of the cover pictures from the comic book series.


Some incidental images and animations that I threw together


Level 1 was a 'quality control' game, based on the opening scene of Issue #0, in which a captured Alien Queen has her eggs harvested and scanned, with all the 'royal' facehuggers getting incinerated. Three conveyor belts, three grabber arms, and the idea is to let the normal eggs (blue) get loaded, but grab the black eggs and dump them into the holes. Very 'Game & Watch', essentially.


On their way into town, the young Predators attack a small, remote homestead, killing most of the family. The young son escapes on a hoverbike, flying through the canyons toward the town, dodging boulders and Predators along the way... The perfect opportunity for level 2 to be a pseudo-3D chase game, similar to the canyon sections of Afterburner... and because I hate drawing rocks, the canyon walls are pretty flat, and their only 'detailing' on their edges was a stock fill pattern from The Artist II's repertoire.


Level 3 would be the bog-standard, sideways-scrolling run-and-gun, in which the player controls the settlement's new operations manager, Machiko Noguchi, defending a handful of wandering townsfolk from both sets of invaders... Kind of like Defender crossed with the Death Wish 3 game.

I seem to have lost much of levels 4 and 5 for the Spectrum. 4.1 was another hoverbike run, but inside the town, with the idea being you have to rescue the doctor/vet's wife from their office, get her to safety with the other survivors, then pilot on to the spacecraft. 4.2 Was a sliding-block style puzzle where you have to 'fix' the control panel to the animal pens, so you can release them, causing them to stampede through town, killing off some of the invaders.


5.1 was more side-scrolling action, but with the player controlling 'Broken Tusk', the Predators' leader, as he tries to salvage the situation and teach his young charges some discipline. Machiko Noguchi would tag along for part of the level, acting kind of like an Option from the Gradius games - additional firepower - and taking care of any human technology that needs to be activated/deactivated along the way. 5.2 was a side-scrolling driving game, travelling by tractor to the spacecraft, planning to use its comms system to bring its payload down from orbit, to destroy the settlement (and, hopefully, all the aliens!). Level 6.1 was more sideways-scrolling action, controlling the Predator as he escorts Machiko through the spacecraft to the control room where, in level 6.2, you have to 'unscramble' the control codes to reprogram the spacecraft's guidance system. Placeholder scenery, such as the lift platform, came from (I think) Ocean's Total Recall game.


Finally, as one might expect, we have the face-off between Broken Tusk and the Alien Queen in the cargo bay. the Queen has a segmented neck to allow her head to move more freely, while she spits acid and attacks with her hands, telescopic inner jaw and tail (not pictured, but that would have been segmented as well). Drones and facehuggers would join in every so often

[Ivanzx]

Man! you need to find a coder! I would love to see these screens/projects coming to the Spectrum!

[HEXdidnt]

@Ivanzx looking back at some of this 30+ year old work, I'm tempted to suggest that I'd need a graphic artist as well. I think my own art has improved dramatically on the SAM, and I'm curious to see how I'd tackle something like AVP or Ghostbusters nowadays, given the same constraints. The biggest breakthrough for me came when I discovered the concept of an 'optimised palette', via the Pixel Joint forums, just a few years ago. Before that, I was fixated on having at least three shades of every colour I wanted to use... and, when you're limited to 16 colours total, that doesn't offer much flexibility. Even on the Amiga, with 32 colours available, I kept falling into the same trap.

It's been years since I did anything tailored to the Speccy and, much as I loved The Artist II back in the day, I've since grown accustomed to such luxuries as Photoshop and Aseprite. I'm trying to get the hang of Multipaint at the moment, but I really don't like the way it handles adding INK/PAPER colours to its attribute blocks... I was aiming to rework and finish the AVP loading screen pic, but have been finding it too frustrating so far.

Then, also, a lot of my forays into graphic and game design ground to a halt because it took so damned long. I rapidly ran out of steam on a lot of my projects... Perhaps that wouldn't happen so much if I was working on something that was in active development... but recent experience suggests I'd just go the opposite way, and inundate the coder with change after minimal change. It's sometimes very hard to switch off and just considering something 'done'. But, there again, with something in active development, perhaps it would be different, if only by necessity of actually releasing a finished product.

[Einar Saukas]

It's been years since I did anything tailored to the Speccy and, much as I loved The Artist II back in the day, I've since grown accustomed to such luxuries as Photoshop and Aseprite. I'm trying to get the hang of Multipaint at the moment, but I really don't like the way it handles adding INK/PAPER colours to its attribute blocks... I was aiming to rework and finish the AVP loading screen pic, but have been finding it too frustrating so far.

Try ZX-Paintbrush!

[HEXdidnt]

OK, now I need to talk about DodoCop.

For many years after seeing the first RoboCop movie on VHS, I was fixated on the idea of things-brought-back-from-the-dead-to-be-police-officers, and the one idea that stuck with me for the longest was DodoCop. A literally extinct bird (somehow) brought back from the dead, encased in a suit of cybernetic armour, and put out on the streets as a force for truth and justice. Part bird, part washing machine... totally expendable.

I cannot estimate how much time I spent on the concept, generally, from sketching DodoCop himself and his mortal enemy Eµ-209 (probably the greatest pun I have ever created, whose final design was pretty much an AT-ST from Star Wars with a robot bird head on a long neck) to actually writing a rudimentary 'screenplay' for his story (spoiler warning: it wasn't very good - lots of unnecessary swearing, and hints of an 'intimate' scene between DodoCop and his human partner - I think I may have been a rather troubled teen). I have a couple of the sketches framed, but they're currently in my parents' loft...

Naturally, my obsession with the DodoCop concept eventually turned to a computer game, and Ocean's seminal adaptation of RoboCop for the Spectrum provided the basic template for my spoof. I essentially ripped off Dawn Drake's incredible animation for the legs (there was no way I'd have been able to create anything that smooth in my mid-teens), and the rest of the existing artwork is pretty rudimentary... but if there was one project I'd like to revisit, even in one of the AGD-style game making systems, it would probably be DodoCop.


Something I never quite got the hang of, back in the day, was loading screens. I'm still not a huge fan of trying to create a single, static image over the whole screen - it just feels too laborious - but I've gained a better understanding of how other people do them well. This was basically my game sprite, upscaled and refined, slapped on top of a rudimentary pavement with a rough wooden fence and a bunch of light flares in the background, per the RoboCop poster.


Level 1 follows the pattern of the Ocean game pretty much step-by-step: walking along a run-down city street, in front of bars, shops... and apparently laundrettes. Enemies would include gun-toting cats and dogs, as well as chainsaw-wielding butchers, and the very end would feature an alleyway shootout with a perp who's taken a chicken hostage. This would be a first-person, pseudo-3D scene, but with a lower-resolution, colour crosshair superimposed over the picture. The brick pattern and ground texture are both default fill patterns in The Artist II.


Looking back on this now, it's an embarrassingly bad attempt at recreating the photofit scene from the RoboCop game... But, in my defence, this was a rare instance of my drawing something directly into The Artist II, with a mouse. There was (and probably still is) a good reason I tended to draw things by hand on graph paper.


The final level of the game would have involved making your way up the building, just like in RoboCop, facing off against security staff and, eventually a final showdown with Eµ-209 before winding up in the secret abattoir of the main villain for another first-person, pseudo-3D shootout. The background here was another freehand effort, drawn directly in The Artist II with a mouse, and making use of its default fill pattern for the brick wall at the back.


Dredged out some of the paperwork for this (and others) today... Including a couple of gun-toting dogs, the butcher, and an early version of Eµ-209, looking more like a larger, longer-necked version of DodoCop himself.

[HEXdidnt]

Some AVP paperwork...


A 'design document' of sorts, where I set out how each level would work, and how it related to the original comic book story


My second attempt at a loading screen, which ended up only being used for the SAM Coupé demo disk.



Lots of unfinished animations for several characters... along with miscellaneous older stuff that, foolishly, I'd inked onto the Pixel Pad pages.


These were technically created for my second version of AVP on the SAM, which was intended to be a point-and-click adventure game, far more closely tied to the story of the comic book. The first pic is a selection of sprites from I guess what would now be called an 'easter egg': in one of the locations there was an arcade cabinet, and using a coin on it would launch a Mario-style AVP arcade game in which a chubby little Predator has to run around, bouncing on Xenomorph heads (or, y'know, shooting and stabbing them) and rescue humans before they're attacked by facehuggers. The second is some little incidental animations that were planned to enhance the 'comic book' feel of the adventure, based on panels in the comic itself, but they'd be fairly easy to repurpose as cutscene images for the Spectrum version of the original arcade game design.

[Nitrowing]

@HEXdidnt all of this work looks fantastic

[HEXdidnt]

It can safely be said that the Spectrum has had its share of pretty duff arcade conversions: monochrome graphics, tiny sprites, slow scrolling... Tiertex...

One of my favourite section of the Speccy mags, back in the day, was the Arcade pages... not least because, before any official conversions came along, it gave me the opportunity to try to adapt arcade graphics onto the humble Speccy. Where the screenshots were large and clear, I could almost get 1:1 reproductions of one or two sprites, but others I had to just guess. With the Spectrum's 8x8px attribute blocks, part of the challenge was fitting things in such that I could apply colour adequately.

Among the earliest games that I put time into - going far beyond recreating a screenshot or two - was (Bad Dudes vs.) Dragon Ninja, which I'd been able to play in a chippie, while I was doing Work Experience at a company based on Northfields (the teacher who organised WE for my year was very proud of themselves for getting me a placement in an office that "do something with computers"). One of my schoolfriends had been given the same WE placement, and we ended up spending pretty much every lunch hour playing arcade games in the local cafes...

So you can probably imagine that I was extremely eager to play the home conversion of Dragon Ninja on the Spectrum... and you can equally imagine how disappointing it was. I'd started working on 'full size' sprites before the Spectrum version came along, end ended up repurposing what I'd done into a kind of sequel... Here's a selection of stuff:


Colour and Mono versions - the former with an ugly, rudimentary background, drawn from memory, the latter with no background at all. A slightly altered version of this second image ended up on Games That Weren't back in 2020.


Bits and bobs drawn on paper: the player sprite, including very basic animation for a few moves that weren't available in the Spectrum conversion, and notes on controls (presuming 2-buttons). The first boss, Karnov, with very little animation. The rank-and-file ninjas, used throughout the game, with just a few frames of animation, bonus pickups and notes thereon, and the border I chucked together once I decided to make 'my version' a sequel, with a very crappy dragon motif paying homage to the frame on the Speccy version's tiny game window. Two vehicles which would act as mobile scenery for the game, kind of like on level 2 of the arcade game, plus a few notes on damage.

I have absolutely no recollection of what I might have planned for a Doctor Who game... sorry!

Other arcade games:

Devil World, the Gauntlet-style run-and-gun adventure... A very rudimentary loading screen based on the arcade game's intro animation, and a single, incomplete screenshot mockup... You can really tell I got bored drawing the background elements.


My take on Double Dragon, sometime after the Melbourne House version came along.


A more colourful interpretation of Gemini Wing, with 2-player action and my usual basic/lazy background scenery.


I'm fairly sure I started this attempt at Shadow Warriors before Ocean's conversion happened... which probably explains why it's largely monochrome, with just a few touches of colour. Some of the background elements were copied from arcade screenshots, but the ninjas themselves were drawn from memory.


Pretty sure this came after Ocean's conversion of the arcade game, in response to the dinky sprites and limited use of colour... But I never got round to drawing the statue of Lincoln that should have been sat between the columns.

Aside from the obvious issue of my lack of knowledge/understanding of coding and memory constraints, a big problem with a lot of what I did was that I drew things either based on screenshots in magazines or from memory, having played the game myself. In the former case, I had no direct experience of the game, and drew screen mockups as I imagined they could or should work... And it's far easier to draw a static screen than it would have been to create sprites and backgrounds that would actually work in practice.

Some of these SCREEN$, I tried adapting further to the SAM Coupé, but most of them were just transferred over to disk, for ease of storage and access... But I did recover several of my tapes when helping my folks sort out their loft last year. Haven't found anything 'new' yet, but some of the tapes haven't aged well, and I got quite a few tape loading errors.

[HEXdidnt]

@HEXdidnt all of this work looks fantastic

@Nitrowing thank you! I'd kind of like to revisit some of this, and see how much further I can get these days. Bit out of practice, though...