AdventureGames

Early adventure games

One of the first types of game graphics that I worked on were illustrations for adventure games. Most of these were for a company called Interceptor Micro’s.

These early computers had very limited graphics. For example during this period I worked on:

The Sinclair Spectrum - which could only handle an ink and a paper colour in any 8x8 character square, and the colours you could choose from were limited to 8 (black, white, red, blue, green, cyan, magenta, yellow) this meant that colour boundaries had to match the character grid.

The Amstrad CPC 464 and 664 - which were a bit more forgiving, you could have a 16 colour mode (but that was 160x200 mode which made the pixels brick shaped and looked awful). There was a 320x200 mode - which I used a lot, but it could only have 4 colours. You could have any 4 colours you liked - but the palette was a weird 27 colours!

The Commodore 64 - that had a mixture of the two above with a multicolour low-resolution 160x200 mode which allowed 4 colours per ×ばつ8 character block (and brick shaped pixels again), and a high res mode 320x200 with 2 colours per 8x8 mode.

To fit lots of graphics into a console however meant that the graphics had to be programmed. I designed a graphic language to enable me to hand encode complex graphics. For example a line draw and a flood fill would give outlines and solid colours, while a character draw routine would draw dithers and bitmap graphics. The language was recursive so that you could even write subroutines in it. I'm not a programmer though – so I had to get the adventure game’s programmer (Dave Banner) to write the code to interpret this script.

But the results were efficient. For example we could get 10+ pictures AND the game itself into a 48k spectrum simultaneously!

Doing graphics for these machines was more akin to tapestry than drawing, but despite the crudity (especially compared to modern graphics) they did get some great reviews at the time.

Sinclair Spectrum graphics

Amstrad CPC 464 graphics