The Making of The Lords of Midnight
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Singleton's vision was ambitious, and he would have to apply his programming skills towards organising and calculating vast armies across a map consisting of 4,000 independent locations with 32,000 separate views. Though movement commands were simple enough (typing NE, E, SW, and so on), the player would have to consider when to rest, when to recruit and which terrain to attempt to negotiate. Each had a significant effect on the player's forces status. Interestingly, the adventure game The Hobbit provided the motivation for the technical intricacies. (It was one of the very first adventure games to include pictures, and I was suitably impressed by it,) says Singleton. (But two things struck me about the graphics. Firstly, although the cameos and landscapes were nice, they were purely decorative they had absolutely zero function in the game. Secondly, it took ages for the graphics to be drawn, and I mean ages not half a second or maybe a whole second, but one minute, maybe two.)
The limitations of the Spectrum's 48K memory and difficulty in displaying colours would actually define Midnight's stark visuals and gameplay mechanics. (I described [to Beyond Software] my idea of '˜landscaping' 3D panoramas which would be composed and drawn realtime by scanning a map of the game world and using scaled graphics for each of the landscape features. The graphics were all drawn directly to screen using the graphics utilities I had written and were largely dictated by the limitations of the medium. I wanted all of the characters to be bright and colourful, in contrast to the uniformly blue-and-white landscape. But on the Spectrum, you can't colour individual pixels, you can only colour whole 8x8 pixel cells a maximum of two colours per cell. This means that the characters had to be designed so that their colours fit to the cell boundaries, but also so that they don't end up looking like Lego bricks.)
