This was the second game I worked on where I had to create the artwork simultaneously on the Atari ST and the Amiga. One of the most notable differences when creating art on the original ST to working the Amiga is the number of available colours. The ST has a palette of 512 colours, whereas the Amiga (OCS) had a whopping 4096 to choose from. Coming from the C64, this was an incredible amount of colours on offer.

I was particularly pleased with the little graphical scenes I knocked up which illustrated certain key moments in the game play. Memory , as always was a factor in keeping things tight so I had to create them to fit quite snuggly within the GUI space.

One are of the game which I felt could have been better is the battle section. For this I was asked to create static strips of soldiers, in predefined positions. I think it would have been far better if these had been animated and clashed 1 on 1 like in a real battle. It didn’t really make a difference to the gameplay as such but for an old arcade gamer like myself, this interaction would have been a nice touch!

As with a lot of my earlier work, these were created for TVs and CRT displays and look quite chunky when viewed today on our crisp ultra high resolution screens.

Looking at these files, I’ve just been reminded of another thing I had to do. On the map screens I had to make sure the dividing lines between each region was thick enough to accommodate a flood fill as the programmer was using this technique to change the colours of each region. I remember being a bit disappointed with not being able to anti-alias the lines as I would normally expect to do!