| ★ GAMES ★ GAMES - MAKINGOF - WILD WEST SEYMOUR (BIG RED SOFTWARE) ★ |
Read about seymour (1/5) (Amstrad Action) | Graphics detail (2/5) (Amstrad Action) | Taking shape (3/5) (Amstrad Action) | Code & chips (4/5) (Amstrad Action) | Finishing touches (5/5) (Amstrad Action) |
The second instalment of the Seymour in the Wild West story is all about graphics. Once again it's ADAM PETERS spending most of the AA travel budget on train fares... Flaunting designer scruff and skate punk cool, Pete Ranson reluctantly tidies the ton of design notes, invoices and sketches covering most of his desk into nice neat piles, and places these beside his computer. Photographer Ian Fox jams his tripod between two tables, does something with a light meter, and starts snapping away. It's month two of our How a Game is Made series, and the AA tour bus has landed in Macclesfield, the home of Big Red Software. Big Red, as anyone with nothing better to do than read the title screens of games will know, are the dudes responsible for the development of many of the big Codemasters games; various Dizzy games, all the Seymour games, and so on. One of the many projects they are working on at the moment is our adopted game, Seymour in the Wild West. I asked Pete how it was going and he looked a bit philosophical. “Usually we get the whole plan of a game in advance, but with this it's just a small trickle of things as they come in,” he reveals, struggling to find the items in question on his now cruelly tidy desk. “What we've got at the moment is a typed-up plot for the first act and a sketch of the map for the act, which Paul has done."
“Basically I'd go through this," says Pete, moving his pen down the plot sheet like a maths teacher going through your homework with you, “circling any characters or objects that we'll need sprites for. If we've done any similar games in the past, we can use the graphics from them, in this case Seymour Hollywood and Super Seymour, as a starting block.” It's not just a case of digging up the old Seymour sprite and chucking that straight into the new game, though. Whilst Dizzy looks the same throughout his adventures, the intention is for Seymour to don a different 'costume' for every jaunt. Here, as Pete explains, lies one of the first problems to be encountered in doing the graphics for Wild West. "Seymour is going to be wearing a cowboy hat throughout the game, which would normally simply involve adding one to the sprites from the first game. Unfortunately, the sprites are of limited size, and there isn't room in some to fit on the hat. It may be a case of doing the hat as a separate sprite, like we did with the cloak in Super Seymour." << Look, it's a CPC. Over there. In the corner. And it's attached to that PC. They're probably, erm, interfacing... Pete talks with glee about how much he is looking forward to Wild West, being a great fan of the whole western genre. “There's going to be all the expected stuff in it; tepees, wagon trains, everything," he says. No doubt he'll be watching plenty of westerns with a checklist by his side, if the embarrassment he says he feels when recalling an object that was missing from Seymour Hollywood is anything to go by.
“It wasn't till later," he confesses, “that I realised there weren't any cameras in it anywhere - a game that was supposed to be set in Hollywood with no cameras to be seen! So we did Seymour Take One (a mini-game featured on the AA77 covertape) and made sure it had a camera in it!" Throughout this confession, as indeed throughout the whole interview, partner in design Fred has been silent. He's been sitting in the corner fiddling about with the 16-colour graphics for the CPC version of Grell & Fella. He's on his feet now though, gathering his things in preparation for the long commute back to his Birmingham abode. Pete wants to go home too. Time to leave, I guess. Macclesfield has something of a reputation as the archetypal northern smalltown; grim, grey, grimy, a little narrow-minded, a bit depressing, and possibly a tad too resentful of the outside world. But in amongst all the sullen and the smoke, on a computer screen on the ground floor of a small office block, a new world is starting to take shape. It's a world full of brightly-coloured wigwams, saloons and three-pointed cactuses. A world where every problem is approached with a smile, and every discovery is met with a “gosh!” It's a big, brash, cute and challenging little devil of a world, and we'll be taking you back there in four weeks time. Don't be late. ADAM PETERS , AA |
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