Amaurote Control Panel

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Thu, 04 Dec 2008
Subject: Amaurote

To follow up the scan of the source code from last week, here's a rough sketch I kept of the control panel for Amaurote on the Spectrum.

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 positions, then I had to manually redraw the whole thing, pixel by pixel, in Melbourne Draw.

» Amaurote softography page

Tags: concept art, sketch, ui, control panel, 8-bit

Follow up post: Amaurote Eyes

Predecessor post: Amaurote Source Code

View the softography page for Amaurote »

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