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'Head Over Heels' Game Cover Artist Quizzed
Thanks to Redkeyreddoor for its interview with former Ocean videogame cover artist Bob Wakelin, known for his airbrushed game covers for classic '80s UK titles including The Great Escape and Head Over Heels. Wakelin explains the creative process: "I'd go over to [Ocean's] offices and down into their basement, where one of their 'slaves', as I called them, would show me the games. At that stage they were just bits and pieces of code, full of bugs. They'd show me 20 pixels that were supposed to represent a mighty warrior", before concluding by noting of the Wizball cover art: "I think I was very stoned when I did it."
Yeah, Wizball was relatively sensible gameplay under its mad exterior.
Shoot stuff. Stuff drops ink, with different colours from different enemies. Pick up the ink. Once you've got enough of any one colour, you can use it to fill one of the background colours of a level (there were three, I think, per level to do). But the level with the right colour isn't necessarily the level where you need to use it, so you have to switch back and forth between them by diving through the wells.
Great game, I thought, though because there were stacks of powerups to pick up, the game was most difficult by far early on, and cleaning up the last few levels was really simple.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Back then memory was quite limited, so it explains the low number of frames per sprite.
...and most important yet, use graphics artist instead of programmers. :)
Graphics tools have gone a long way. Back then one had to draw sprites pixel by pixel where as nowadays you would probably draw it on paper first, scan and then paint it in Photoshop or whatever. Or even more frequently they just render 3d models into sprites. Usually those hand painted ones look much better, IMHO. (Yesh! I've always wanted to use "IMHO" in my writings!)
So in a way drawing sprites in higher resolution is much easier.