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You Know When You’ve Been Tango-ed

My friend Samwise and I are both enthusiastic users of the GNU/Linux operating system and also enormous fans of the incredible range of retro computing emulators produced by the brilliant Tom Walker.

Tom (left) and Samwise (right)
Photo courtesy regregex

There’s seemingly nothing that Tom isn’t able write an emulator for. He’s written emulators for everything from the humble Acorn Electron to the StrongARM-ed Risc PC with Spectrums, Amstrads, Beebs, Archimedes and much else in between.

Elkulator, running on Fedora 14

So it wasn’t altogether surprising when, last month, Sam asked if I could create some icons for his desktop he could use with Tom’s emulators.

Superior’s EGO:Repton4, running on RPCEmu

Sam is a KDE desktop power user, whereas I’ve always been a GNOME numpty. Fortunately for us starving scribblers and colourers in there is a project that aims to standardise all free software desktops and ensure we can create icons once that look good on all of them. The project is called the freedesktop project and the part concerning icons is called Tango.

There are numerous tutorials on the web that explain how to create Tango icons in both Inkscape and The GIMP.

The first icon I tried to create in Tango format was the three dimensional RISC OS era Acorn logo, to use with Arculator. Below, you can see the real Acorn logo on the left, and the “Tango”-ed version on the right.

More Tango-ed than Judith Chalmers

As you can see, the Tango version looks rather cartoonish – and the colours are rather muted and pastel. And the direction of the light source has been changed. This was all done deliberately and in order to follow the Tango guidelines.

Sam was happy with this icon and asked if I could create icons for all of the Acorn-related emulators. And that’s when sticking to the rules started to get a bit of a pain. For Tango icons, each icon should be a distinctive shape in order to help those with poor eyesight and each icon should also contain a metaphor as to the icon’s purpose.

However, for the emulators all that we really needed was a square icon with a logo that told you at a glance what computer you were using so the guidelines rather went out the window. The Tango colours were also very restrictive as far as what I could use so I just threw caution to the wind and did what I felt!

Here’s the Elkulator icon:

I really like the background grid, which was the trademark of the Acorn Electron.

Here’s the B-Em icon:

And here’s the RPCEm icon:

I also created some Archimedes artwork – here’s the Archimedes logo I created as an SVG file in Inkscape:

Click to enlarge.

Here it is “Tango”-ed!

And here are the full set of icons I created for Sam:

Click to enlarge

In future, when I have more time, I’ll create proper Tango themed icons for all of these emulators. I spent about two minutes on each of the icons above and it shows! This will require me to actually draw the systems being emulated and make sure that I’ve got a different shaped outline for each one.

So I’ll probably return to this topic when I’ve done some decent, real, Tango icons!

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Designing Repton’s Lost Realms

If you’ve been here before, you’ll probably already know that this year is Repton‘s 25th anniversary. And, as part of the celebrations, Retro Software is releasing Repton: The Lost Realms for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron.

I’ve already blogged about creating the cover artwork and the loading screen for the game. However today is the 6th November and Repton: The Lost Realms is being officially launched at R3PLAY in Blackpool. That means I can at last talk about creating the graphics for the game itself.

My cover artwork

I was first approached by Dave Moore about contributing to Repton: The Lost Realms in mid 2008. Peter Edwards had just recovered a load of my old Repton 3 and Repton Infinity screens from some of my 5.25″ floppies and the graphics in them had impressed Peter and Dave enough for them to ask if I would be interested in creating some screens and graphics for Repton: The Lost Realms.

Like Repton 3 before it, Repton: The Lost Realms is a game that allows you to not only edit its levels, but also redefine its graphics. That means that it’s possible to provide a selection of different screens and graphics for players to load into the game.

Lost Realms as I first received it

At this stage, the Repton: The Lost Realms came with only one set of screens. As you can see above, it used the Repton 3 graphics with a few additional graphics for the game’s new elements designed by the game’s original programmer Paras Sidapara.

As there were to be four sets of six screens included in the game, my first idea was to theme each set of graphics around the existing Repton releases. In other words, have a Repton 1 set…

Repton 1 Lost Realm

…a Repton 2 set…

Repton 2 Lost Realm

…a Repton 3 set…

Repton 3 Lost Realm

…and a new set for the final set of screens.

I quickly hacked about and transferred the graphics from these games into Repton: The Lost Realms. At this stage I was designing new characters in the Repton Infinity graphics editor (Film Strip) and then transferring them over to Repton: The Lost Realms by transferring blocks of data between files using the BBC BASIC command line.

Film Strip – An excellent graphics editor

The reason why I preferred Film Strip was that it was designed for use with a keyboard. I didn’t have a real BBC Micro to use so I was using these programs via the excellent emulator BeebEm. In fact, as at that stage there wasn’t a native GNU/Linux emulator for the BBC Micro at the time, I was using BeebEm via WINE.

The Repton 3 and Repton: The Lost Realms editors had adopted the then very fashionable WIMP paradigm. However, using a WIMP interface with a keyboard is very hard going and I found the AMX Mouse option tricky to get working in BeebEm. That meant I couldn’t use these editors with my mouse.

Another problem I had with Repton: The Lost Realms’ editor was the awful yellow and black colour scheme used for the editor’s pointer. It was probably the worst colour scheme you could have picked if you want to design graphics precisely – the outline of the pointer gets lost against black, but most of the graphics have black backgrounds or outlines!

Repton: The Lost Realms’ Editor

After I had designed Repton 1 and Repton 2 themed graphics it soon became obvious that this approach would not work. There were various new elements in Repton: The Lost Realms that were not present in previous Repton games. I wanted to redesign these in each set to match the style of previous Repton releases. However Dave wanted to keep the new game elements that Paras had designed looking the way Paras had designed them. However this would have looked out of place, particularly in Repton 1 which is quite abstract and geometrical in design.

Therefore, after talking it over with Dave and Paras we decided it would be best if I design four completely new sets of graphics for the game, bearing in mind the need to keep the original design of Paras’ new game elements in each set. We would also only vary the game characters that varied in the sets of screens supplied with Repton 3: namely the walls, eggs, monsters and crowns.

I had a few ideas for the graphics having got used to playing the game. I didn’t think that the inverted cage colour scheme for the anti-clockwise spirits worked at all. I needed to find a way to make these cages look a little less incongruous. I wanted to make the graphics look 1988-ish – so I used the style of later BBC games like Richochet and Star Port as inspiration. And I wanted to use stippled colours as much as possible to make the apparent colour palette seem more than the four colours that the game was limited to.

I designed the set of graphics for the final set of levels (PRESTO) first. My inspiration for these were the full-page adverts for Repton 2 and Repton 3 that Superior Software used to run in Acorn magazines at the time. In particular, I wanted to design a set with light mortar between distressed bricks. I’m very proud of this set and I think it’s actually my favourite.

Presto – not for the faint hearted

I got a bit carried away, and I also redesigned Repton to look like he did in Superior’s adverts – this was very quickly and firmly rejected, and rightly so!

My Redrawn Repton went down like a cup of cold sick

I had one set down, three more in front of me and even using FilmStrip on a BBC Micro emulator seemed like very hard going. I really wanted to use The GIMP to design the graphics and suddenly it dawned on me that I could.

I could design the graphics in The GIMP and then transfer them to the BBC Micro emulator using the BBC Micro Image Convertor by Francis G Loch. This is an application written in PureBasic that takes image files (bmp, jpg, etc.) and downconverts them into the native screen display formats of the BBC Micro.

The process has a few stages. First I design all the graphics as separate files in The GIMP:

Completed graphics designed in The GIMP

Then I use the GIMP to slice them up and put them in rows:

Sliced and Diced in The GIMP

And finally I convert the graphic into BBC Micro format using the BBC Micro Image Convertor:

And converted to BBC Micro format

So, I fired up The GIMP and the next set I designed was for the LARGO set. This is the default set that loads when the game or editor loads, and the levels in this set were the original six levels designed by Paras Sidapara back in 1988.

Largo – the Realm of the Exile

Because I knew Paras was a huge fan of the game Exile, I decided to base the design of the walls on the walls found in Exile. This set looked very nice and thanks to The GIMP I was able to design them very quickly.

Adagio – Exile crossed with Repton 2

The third set I designed was a set for the ADAGIO screens. This set was a kind of cross between the walls found in Exile and the walls found in Repton 2 (my favourite Repton release). It didn’t work as well as I would have liked and I wish I’d done something a bit different.

Allegro – juicy, apparently…

The final set I designed was the ALLEGRO set. It was loosely based on the graphics for the game XOR, which my children were madly into playing at the time. This set has been described as looking “juicy”, whatever that means! Dave Moore accused me of taking a little more care over these graphics than some of the others because I knew I was designing all six levels to go with them. How very dare he!

The work on the graphics Repton: The Lost Realms was very straightforward. I did very little rework once we decided on what we were doing and there were only two real debates about the game characters. The first concerned earth, the second concerned fungus.

As far as the earth is concerned, I wanted to experiment with some dense Ravenskull style earth, whereas Dave Moore preferred the very sparse earth used in the Toccata level set of Repton 3. Dave got his way on that one!

Now that’s what I call fungus!

The fungus debate concerned my preference for fungus that looked like a toadstool rather than the amorphous mould that was presented in Repton 3. In the end, I redesigned the fungus to look slimy rather than mouldy but it’s probably the graphic I am least happy with.

Now that’s what I call fun, Gus!

We also had a discussion about the “freeze pill”. This was a green pill that froze monsters temporarily. What with absorbalene pills and time pills I thought Repton’s drug habit had gone far enough.

Freeze pills – just say no.

 
I wanted to replace it with a Citadel style snowflake. Everyone agreed, and that also involved making changes to the editor and game map graphics which I did by hacking the code about. But, although my snowflake was a good idea, I think the graphic I designed was horrible.

Snow flake – just say yuck.

Once I’d designed all four sets, I thought that that was that – only it wasn’t. By this stage Tom Walker (someone for whom the word genius seems utterly inadequate) had joined the project, and had started work coding an Acorn Electron version.

The Acorn Electron is cruelly afflicted in many ways, but one of the worst is that it has no hardware scrolling. That is terrible news for a game like Repton which relies on scrolling. Acorn Electron scrolling has to be done in software, which eats up the memory available for the game – and its graphics. The graphics in Acorn Electron Repton: The Lost Realms are 12 x 24 instead of 16 x 32 for the BBC Micro version.

Skull (Acorn Electron)

This meant I had to create cut down versions of all of the games’ graphics for the Acorn Electron version, and doing this took as long as it took to create the original graphics. In fact, I put in so much effort I actually prefer some of the Acorn Electron graphics.

Largo – All ready to transfer to Elkulator

Probably the most interesting thing about doing this was the lack of an Acorn Electron editor – or indeed an Acorn Electron version of the game itself! I had actually finished the graphics and put them in game files before Tom had finished coding the Acorn Electron version of the game.

It was quite some time after I had finished the graphics that I was actually able to play with the graphics in the game itself via Tom’s excellent Acorn Electron emulator Elkulator.

 Acorn Electron version

Keen eyed Repton fans will notice that Acorn Electron Repton: The Lost Realms reintroduces Tim Tyler‘s Repton sprite from Repton 2. I think this has much more personality than the one used in Repton 3.

I knew that there was a keen interest in the Repton: The Lost Realms from Acorn Electron enthusiasts so I put an enormous amount of effort in the graphics for the Electron version – I just hope they like them!

And finally –  a word about the design of the crowns. I spent many years living in my wife’s home-town of Mélykút, the birthplace and home of the legendary restorer Szvetnik Joachim. He was famous for supervising the return of the Holy Crown of Hungary from the USA in 1977. I went to his workshop in Mélykút to translate for some tourists from New York State, and enjoyed my visit so much I decided to make the crown in ALLEGRO look like the Holy Crown.

Allegro Crown (BBC Micro version)

The other crowns in Repton: The Lost Realms are also based upon real crowns – I wonder if you can work out which ones?

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Stairways to Starways

For over ten years now, one of my favourite web-sites has been “The Stairway To Hell“.  This web-site has been an invaluable resource to anyone who ever had a BBC Microcomputer or Acorn Electron in their youth. As well as being a fascinating site in its own right, it was also bolstered by a lively and interesting forum.

At the end of March this year Dave Moore, the web-master, decided it was time for a change. His initial plan was to replace the site with a new one – BBCMicro.com – that would be less focused on gaming.

He asked if I could provide an image to close the site down, and thought something similar to the kind of screen you got when you completed one of the Repton games might be nice.

I completed Repton 2 in the GNU/Linux port of the BBC Microcomputer emulator B-Em, screen grabbed the final screen:

Once was enough Tim!

I loaded the BBC Micro version Repton 1 into the screen memory in B-Em so I could cut and paste from the Repton1/2 font:

Repton 1 loaded into the screen memory

Now I used the letters from the Repton 1 screen to edit the Repton 2 screen in The GIMP to say what Dave wanted:

Pristine Screen

However, this didn’t really look “retro” enough. The look I was going for was BBC B on badly tuned domestic telly with some interference.

So I ran this image through my own simulated PAL filter which I wrote in Python for The GIMP. Then I used some VHS noise that I extracted from a old recording of ATV Today using Grain Extract and then added it to the image using Grain Merge. I also added a Lens Distortion in The GIMP and desaturated the colours slightly.

Click to enlarge

I was delighted to find out that some people thought the image was actually a real screenshot.

A few months after this picture went up, Dave shelved his plans for BBCMicro.com. His work with the CGEU with organising shows such as R3PLAY and Acorn World meant that he no longer had the time to devote to creating a new site.

However, this wasn’t the end, as Peter Edwards stepped in to carry on the good work with a new site called stardot.org.uk. He asked me to amend my image accordingly:

Click to enlarge

Sadly I didn’t do such a good job on this image as I was in a hurry – it’s a bit dark. But the most important thing is that the on-line Acorn community is thriving and stardot.org.uk looks destined for great things.

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Covering Acornsoft

Dave Moore of Retro Software asked me if I knew which fonts were used on the old Acornsoft releases for the Acorn Electron, and whether I could produce a mock-up cover in this style. There were several examples on the site “The Stairway To Hell” in the Cover Scans section, such as the one below, but they are all quite small.

It’s not Pac-Man, honest…

One of the most important rules when you are given something to copy is “rubbish in rubbish out”. If you only have a low resolution scan to work with it simply isn’t worth spending a lot of effort trying to get it right – with small source material you will always be guessing to some extent.

So the idea was simply to see if I could get the general idea right – I could spend time getting things exact later. So, with that in mind, I fired up Inkscape and had a go.

For a start, it was difficult to get the spacing of the grid just right as the artwork wasn’t even particularly flat on the scanner. Fortunately Inkscape has a nice “Render Grid” feature that can produce a grid in seconds.

Used this on the Central News caption too.

The Acorn logo was too small to see properly, so I just used one I produced for another project. If I had a decent sized scan I’d produce the logo from scratch.

The slab serif font for the Acorn Electron namestyle could have been one of several slab serif faces. If you look at the illustration below, it’s the letter a which tells you which one is the closest match, and that was Rockwell. I’m still not convinced I’ve got the right font yet, but again I won’t bother looking for an exact match until I have better source material.

Look into my “a”s…

The “handwriting” font used for the game title is something I’m a bit more certain of. It looks like Freestyle Script Bold from Letraset.

Mick Robertson’s Freetime used this one too…

After I applied the game title, I angled it and added a glow. But it still didn’t look right. I made a copy of the game title on the layer below, made it the background colour and then used the Path Outset function in Inkscape to make a nice dark border around it that helps to highlight the glow.

What would this fetch on eBay, I wonder?

What I ended up with was certainly close, but with a better scan I should be able to get the cover perfect.

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Repton: The Lost Realms loading screen

After I created the artwork for “Repton: The Lost Realms“, Dave Moore of Retro Software asked me if I would create a loading screen for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron versions of the game. Initially the brief was quite loose – he thought we needed a Mode 5 screen for the cassette versions and a Mode 1 screen for the disc versions.

My cover artwork for Repton: The Lost Realms

On a BBC Micro or Electron, Mode 1 and Mode 5 are both four colour screen modes. The difference is that in Mode 1 the resolution is 320 x 256, whereas in Mode 5 the resolution is 160 x 256. However, both images are the same size because in Mode 5 the pixels are twice as wide as they are high. Due to its lower resolution, Mode 5 uses half the memory of Mode 1 so will load far more quickly for those using cassette recorders.

My first thought was to create the Mode 1 screen, and to use the excellent BBC Micro Image Converter software by Francis G Loch. This is an application written in PureBasic that takes image files (bmp, jpg, etc.) and downconverts them into the native screen display formats of the BBC Micro. To aid you in doing this it offers an almost bewildering array of image processing options specifically tailored for getting modern images into BBC Micro format. It can  also takes BBC Micro screen dumps and convert them to modern image formats.

BBC Micro Image Converter copes with anything

I use Ubuntu Linux, which means I have to run the Windows binary of the BBC Image Converter under WINE. I’ve found the operation of the program under WINE to be problematic if you don’t export import and output images from and to the WINE “C:Program Files” folder. It also seems happier with being fed bmp files than pngs under WINE.

Inspired by Michael “Mic” Hutchinson’s excellent loading screen for the disc version of Repton Inifinity, I decided to use the same Red, Black, White Green palette. I was very pleased by my early results – particularly the way the brown came out on the safe. However I hadn’t left any room for branding and so on.

My first try in BBC Image Converter

So I decided to create a version that had an area at the bottom that could be removed in the same way as the version on Repton Infinity disc for loading messages etc.

My rejected disc loading screen

I showed Dave this version and he had a number of reservations – the main one being that the loading screen in Mode 1 didn’t really grab him at all. He wanted something more colourful for the disc version, and he suggested trying Mode 2. Mode 2 is identical to Mode 5, apart from the fact you can use eight colours.

The first thing I did was to create a screen in Inkscape that was 320 x 256 pixels that was set out exactly as I wanted to my loading screen to look. I would use this to feed into the BBC Micro Image Converter.

The image I made to feed into the BBC Micro Image Converter

When I imported it, the results were excellent. In fact, the results were too good. Although obviously I needed to retouch here and there to tidy up the writing and the balloon strings I was overwhelmed by the feeling that really I should be producing something that was done by hand on a pixel editor – not put through some ingenious image processing we could only dream of in 1987.

All it needs now is for me to make it a bit rubbish

Therefore I fired up “The GIMP” and tried to add a sort of “hand designed” feel a pixel at a time. I was quite aware that what I was doing wasn’t as good as what the BBC Image Converter could produce, but the idea was to get a “retro” feel.

Final image after I gave it a “hand made” feel in The GIMP

I showed Dave Moore and he was happy with the Mode 2 screen, so the next job was to produce the cassette loading screen in Mode 5.

When it came to creating a Mode 5 screen, I decided to convert the eight colour Mode 2 screen to a four colour Mode 5 screen by hand, instead of running through the BBC Image Convertor again. This was because I wanted to keep the two loading screens as close as possible to each other in appearance.

I reduced the colour depth by hand in The GIMP

Dave was happy, so that was my first two loading screens for Retro Software done and dusted.

Repton: The Lost Realms is under development by Retro Software. Repton name used by permission of Superior Interactive.

The BBC Image Converter is currently released under a non-free licence but it’s free as in beer to use for commercial or non commercial uses. You can look at a number of the PureBasic routines Francis wrote for it here.

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Repton: The Lost Realms artwork

Some time after the release of Repton 3, Paras Sidapara started work on “Repton 4” for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, a new Repton game with several novel features. When Repton Infinity came along the game was reworked as a new game, Cyroid:X, before being dropped completely.

Paras’s Repton 4 game was thought lost until a year ago when it was recovered from an old 5.25″ disc. Development on the game resumed, and Retro Software got permission from Superior Interactive to release the game for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. The project was retitled “Repton: The Lost Realms” in order to avoid confusion with the Repton 4 game in Repton Infinity and Superior’s Repton 4:EGO game for the Archimedes.

Dave Moore of Retro Software approached me and asked how I would feel about trying to come up with some cover art for the game.

I bit his hand off. Repton was a bit of an obsession to me when I was growing up, and no Christmas was complete without me receiving the latest Repton release. I spent hour upon hour playing, designing screens and designing graphics. The game itself looks like Boulderdash superficially but is a very different creature to play – it’s more of a logic puzzle and attracts large numbers of chess players.

The first thing I did was to doodle on the back on an envelope whilst I was on the phone:

The Scream

The Repton in the sketch owes more to Edvard Munch than Tim Tyler, but it showed roughly what I wanted to do. My idea was a bit like “The Secret Garden”, with Repton opening a door and finding fantastic “lost realms” inside. Doors are also a feature of the game itself, so it seemed the obvious thing to do.

I chose to produce the artwork in vector format. This was because as we planned to print everything from small tape inlays to A2 promotional posters from the artwork. This meant I had to export 600dpi bitmap images from my work, so vector artwork seemed the best way to go. I chose Inkscape as I’d heard it’s the best vector artwork package available, it runs perfectly on Ubuntu Linux and because it saves artwork as, svg, a completely free format.

The original Repton artwork was done by Ellis Ives Sprowell Partnership in Wakefield. They gave Repton a very strong brand image so all I had to do was follow their lead and not mess it up. The REPTON logo was traced in Inkscape from a scan of the advert for the original REPTON release to get it as accurate as possible. The subtitle was in the font Eras, just as it was in the original releases.

As this was my first major project in Inkscape I started simple. Just outlines and solid, non-gradient fills. I drew Repton, a couple of doors and a transporter and then sent it to Dave and Paras.

Start off simple

Paras’s wife seemed fascinated by Repton’s bum, but apart from that everyone was happy so I decided to explore flood fills and shading.

Gradient fills gave me endless trouble in Inkscape for a long time. This is because having been so used to the way Adobe Flash handled gradient fills: creating them in a dialog box. Therefore I simply assumed I was supposed to use them the same way in Inkscape and it gave me endless headaches – creating gradient fills using the dialog in Inkscape is for masochists. It wasn’t until after I created the botched artwork for “Zap!” I finally worked out the “Inkscape” way to handle flood fills – using the gradient tool and the mouse – and never had a problem with them again.

Anyway, taking about three times as long as I needed to, I finally created a shaded image. I also tried some blurring and glowing too, and was happy with the results so far. The idea is that Repton is in darkness but lit by light coming from the transporter. I had to fight a bit for this with Dave as he understandably wanted everything light and bright to make his posters and packaging eyecatching, whereas I wanted the lighting to be more moody.

I wish I had known what I was doing…

I chose cartoony black outlines for the poster, to match the original Repton artwork, and also tried hard to make my Repton character look like the Repton in the original artwork.

Next, I needed to create all the other game characters eminating from the “lost realms” doorway. Because of the need to create cover artwork of varying aspect ratios for cassette, disc, posters and in order to make life simpler I created each of the game characters in a separate Inkscape file. That meant I could put the picture together at the end. This saved me hours and hours of work in the end, as the final composition was a result of a lot of too-ing and fro-ing between Dave and myself.

The individual characters took between an hour and four hours to create, the crown taking the longest. Many of them are deliberately based on the original artwork for the Repton games – for instance the diamond, safe, boulder and cage. I did this to underline the fact that the game is part of the same family as the rest of the Repton games. I’m particularly pleased with the way the safe turned out.

Bunch of dodgy characters

The spirit gave me the most trouble as it’s a very difficult thing to portray in a “cartoon” like way. Look at the spirits in the previous Repton artwork to see how tricky they are to do justice too. In the end I based the spirit on Matthew Atkinson’s Repton 3 design. I also had trouble with the egg – my first attempt looked like “a yellow finger nail” according to Paras! Incidentally, you may notice a fly agaric – I’ve always liked toadstool fungus in Repton, but Paras and Dave vetoed the idea.

After abandoning my idea of a brick wall (like the one in my pencil sketch), I’d originally intended the artwork to be on a black background, but Dave Moore suggested a green gradient fill, which worked out very well indeed. And with that, it was finished.

The end result

The final artwork worked out very well – as a first major project in Inkscape I’m quite proud of it. It has the Repton feel that I was after and also shows off the new features of the game prominently. Dave Moore told me he asked Richard Hanson of Superior Interactive if he would have used my artwork at the time. He said “Yes”, which put me on a high for a week.

Contributing to an officially sanctioned Repton project of any kind makes you part of BBC Micro history and I’m very proud to have contributed to a real Repton game – it’s a long standing ambition fulfilled.

Repton: The Lost Realms is currently under development by Retro Software. Repton name used with permission from Superior Interactive.