DEVELOPER Q&A
MARTIN WARD DEVELOPED THE ATARI ST VERSION FOR ELITE SYSTEMS
What was your opinion of the Buggy Boy arcade game?
Elite loaned me its arcade machine and I became quite a fan while I was developing the Atari ST version. This was due to the need to master the game in order to record the complex layout of all the courses. The ST game needed to be the flagship computer version and closely match the arcade game. So, I opted for copying the arcade game’s courses as precisely as possible, rather than taking the easier option of generating new course data from scratch. The race courses are actually very skillfully designed, with just the right amount of tempting traps to avoid, and strategically placed bonuses required for progression. There are a lot of fun elements too, I particularly liked the footballs.
How did you manage to replicate the courses so closely?
Once I had mastered the game sufficiently, I hired a video camera for a day and videotaped each course. I then started the painstaking process of stepping through the video using freeze-frame and copying all of the object positions onto paper. It was then just a matter of converting the object layout into a data format that the game could use. Freeze-framing the video also allowed me to pixel-draw the game’s sprites as accurately as possible.
Which was the lead version, ST or Amiga?
I was only contracted to develop the ST version. By the time it was completed, Elite decided that it wanted an Amiga version too. I could have done this, but by then I was assigned to develop the 16-bit versions of Aquablast (see the Buggy Bond panel]. The Amiga version of Buggy Boy was converted in-house at Elite using my ST source code.
What would you say was the biggest technical challenge you faced?
The framerate on the ST game was never going to reach 50 or 60 frames per second, but I was quite proud of my roaddrawing code, which was almost as fast as filling the screen with a solid colour. The code also negated any need for erasing sprites before they were re-rendered on each screen update. There wasn’t enough room in memory for the huge sprites of the arcade game, but I did manage to make them as large as possible within the memory available.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
The perfectionist in me would have loved to have been able to revisit the game after its release and improve it further with some of the techniques that I used on Aquablast. The framerate could have been a bit quicker by using a triple-buffered screen, and palette switching in the horizontal blanking interval would have enabled some nice colour gradients to be used for the skies. But overall the game’s technical performance was already favourable compared to similar games.
“I HIRED A VIDEO CAMERA AND VIDEOTAPED EACH COURSE…” MARTIN WARD