Miscellaneous Sketch Archive

Amaurote control panel layout, 1986

John had an idea for a control panel which overlapped the play area, rather than the usual box at the bottom or side of the screen. This was quite difficult on a ZX Spectrum, as each overlapping bit would have to be redrawn over the top of the play area as a masked sprite every frame, which was a lot for the poor Speccy to handle. To make the most of this I had to make sure that each overlapping section fitted neatly into byte wide character squares (represented by blue squares on the paper), while at the same time trying to disguise this by designing a non-square, perspective layout.

Before the days of scanners, or even decent graphics software, this sketch was just used to mark out the position of each line of the panel in character square postions, then I had to manually redraw the whole thing, pixel by pixel, in Melbourne Draw.

Feud map, 1986

Remakers! At last your prayer's have been answered! Here is the original map used in the design of Feud.

The two scrolls marking Learic and Leanoric's starting cauldrons are empty, which would suggest that we hadn't thought of names for the two wizards when I drew this map, likewise for the name of the herb garden guy.

Note: This map is only applicable to the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad versions of Feud, due to the C64 programmer completely ignoring the design and randomly plonking trees and rocks willy-nilly around each screen on his version...

Sketches

I found this in at the bottom of a pile of folders, undated. Careful detective work leads me to think that it must have been from Christmas 1988, but I'm not 100% sure it wasn't 89...

As our company Christmas card that year (whichever year it was) we decided to send this drawing via fax to all our friends and clients. Via fax! How crap is that? Faxes were fairly high tech still, so maybe it was ever so slightly cool... nah, probably not.

I'm sure this was the year we received a beautiful, expensively printed, classily designed christmas card from Thalamus, and we just faxed this to everyone, on that awful thermal paper most likely, becuase we thought it was clever.

Prix Nebula sketch, 1988

This was a concept sketch for an NES game idea we had at Zippo Games called 'Prix Nebula'. The idea was for a 3D space racing game where the track was made up from markers which were single sprites, which I think was something which the unusual (to us at the time) NES architecture of lots of small 8x8 pixel sprites suggetsed. The game screen would have looked awfully plain though, despite the thrill of 3D on the NES, so we planned to cram the launch screens and front end with the most detailed graphics we could manage to compensate. I think we got this game to playable demo stage, but no further.

Portraits, 1991

A couple of rough sketches of John and I, drawn around the early days of Software Creations I think. I look pretty miserable there. Probably hung over. And John looks really skinny!

I've no idea how I found the time to draw stuff like this during the working day. No wonder our games were always late.

Park Place office sketches, 1992

A sketch of the room we worked in at Park Place, the dingy little building in Cheetham Hill which Software Creations moved to from Oxford Road soon after John and I joined. This was during the development of Equinox. You can see the back of John's head (with pony tail) in the top left, and that scribbly mess in the bottom right is the Sony 'NEWS' Unix box based original SNES development kit we had to use at the start of the project, before we got usable ones.

You can see my sketches for the Equinox bosses sellotaped to my wall here, with the last boss being worked on, in Dpaint, on the screen.

I still have the CSG Imagesoft coffee mug which you can see on my desk in the first sketch, but sadly the smiley face mug in the second sketch hasn't survived.

Baseball players, 1993

I found this flicking through an old sketchbook. I guess I was 'getting in the mood' for Ken Griffey Baseball, as I'm no fan of the sport, and there weren't any in-game graphics which looked anything like this.

John sketch, 1994

I think this sketch was either of John at work, or at the pub after work, during the days when we seemed to get to the pub at least 5 days a week, not counting weekends. Not especially work related, this sketch of John really reminds me of the busiest days of Software Creations when we seemed to work 12 hours a day, and John was the producer of about 15 projects, and we still had time to get drunk every night.

Skint sketch, 1997

Not strictly video game related, this is a sketch I did while we were getting Zed Two off the ground, about 10 months after I'd had my last pay cheque. It went up on the wall at Zed Two when we moved into our offices, and stayed up there more or less until we were closed down, so its a little piece of Zed Two history.

The lost logos

I've always loved messing about with lettering, and designing fonts and logos. I often find designing a logo to be a useful starting point for a big project. Here a are a few forgotten or abandoned game logos, mostly done with a good old fashioned pen and paper, from before I had any decent design tools on computer.

Doodlebug Designs

I drew this logo around 1985. It was the name of John Pickford and Paul Ranson's development studio for the Guy Manley game they were planning - the sequel to Ziggurat.

I think John and Paul's idea was to get everyone involved in the design (in contrast to John's completely solo work on Ghost Town) I drew a three page comic strip, which formed a prologue to the game's storyline, and I'm sure Paul's younger brother and girlfriend were involved somehow as well.

Zippo Games

The original design for the Zippo Games logo, our studio from 1988 to 1991. I don't think the Zippo logo ever made it into any of our games of the time, or onto any of the packaging. It was harder to get credit as a developer in those days, and all the NES work we did was subcontracted through Rare, so there's was the developer name on Ironsword, Solar Jetman etc. It was probably only ever seen on our business cards and letterheads.

Prix Nebula

This one never got beyond a sketch in my notebook, probably because the playable demo never got to the point where it needed a title page or any kind of front end!

Fleapit

This was the on-screen logo for the Fleapit coin-op, which was never released. Its an awful Roger Dean rip off, and I think this was around the time of all that Roger Dean Psygnosis artwork. I think I planned to do a bit more work on the logo - it looks a bit plain.

RoboTrix

This was an alternate title we came up with for Plok. I can't remember the exact circumstances, but I think maybe Tradewest (the US publisher of the SNES version) were worried that Plok didn't mean anything, so wanted a slightly more descriptive title. I'm not sure Robotrix would have been that much better, and would have meant that Plok was a robot. An early echo of the 'Wetrix' title.

Atomic Robo Cat

I think we saw a similar title (maybe even identical) in a Japanese games magazine, and thought it sounded great. We didn't have a game idea, we just loved this name, and we were knocking it around for a few years. Since hijacked by those three minging scousers...

Brute Force

I've absolutely no idea about this one. I don't remember if it was just a title we came up with on its own, without a game, or if it was an alternate title for Venom Spirit, or if I was just messing about with lettering for its own sake. This was done in the early ninties. Has there been a game called Brute Force since?

Venom Spirit

Venom Spirit was a title which John came up with, and which we both loved. We got quite far with the associated game design (playable technology demo, and pretty complete spec), but it was never completed. The first logo was knocked up for the title page of the spec, and didn't match the game at all, the second sketch was my early attempt at a more appropriate logo, before the project was shelved. I think this is a name we might get around to using one day.

Spiral Saga

This was from the title screen of Spiral Saga, and the cover page of the specification documents. I was really pleased with the S being made out of celtic spirals, as this matched the setting of the game perfectly, and I think this was the first thing I ever drew in Photoshop.

Aqua Panic

I love this one! This was designed by Warren Lancashire at Zed Two. Aqua Panic was the name Sega came up with for the Japanese release of Wetrix+ on Dreamcast. Warren did a wonderful animated sequence with this logo. Sadly the game was never released in Japan due to Sega dropping the Dreamcast just as we completed the conversion.

Pillage

This was a logo we lived with for a long time. It was designed by Head First (in fact, they came up with the actual title as well), who also designed the Wetrix and AquaAqua covers and logos for us. We switched to a 3d version of this logo midway through development (which I no longer have), but all of us at Zed Two probably saw this red and yellow logo every day for over two years. Only at the last minute was the title changed to Future Tactics at the request of our US publisher as, like Plok, our title wasn't descriptive enough.