Chris Crawford on Game Design

Artwork

The artwork used in the game was unorthodox. In those days, floppy disks were the only distribution medium available, and artwork quickly filled up floppies. To make matters worse, the user community was divided between the color haves and the black-and-white have-nots; in order to sell, the game had to satisfy both groups. Moreover, I needed 156 different images, one for each variable. My solution was to break each image up into a black-and-white bitmap and a color overlay. The color overlay was built up out of triangles; I had to build a special tool for my artist to specify the triangles and their colors. The system worked: The average image required only about 60K of floppy space. Black-and-white images looked good, and so did the ...