It's been a month since the relaunch of our web site, yet to me it seems
like much more time has elapsed. The reason for that is a very special
project that's been quite time-consuming for me.
First, a quick introduction: About a year ago, I bought a copy of
Steamroller on eBay, a ColecoVision game that was designed and coded by
David Rolfe back in 1984, but was released 16 years later as a homebrew
release, with permission from Activision. The game itself is lots of fun,
but I hate the box it came in. You could even say I hate that box with a
passion! Here's a picture of it:
Pretty cheap, wouldn't you say? Surely a good game like Steamroller
deserves a better box than that! I vowed to make my own box one day, but
up until recently, I had no idea how I was going to do it. Making a box
like the ones produced by Opcode Games is too expensive to be a viable
option, especially in very small quantities.
Then, back in November 2006 on the AtariAge forums, Atariboy2600 posted
some custom-made box artwork for the Atari 7800 homebrew version of Pac-Man
Collection (no direct relation to our upcoming release on the ColecoVision,
by the way). Soon after, another forum member, Marc Oberhäuser, printed out
this box artwork and made an actual box with it. It looked great, and the
opportunity to make my own box for Steamroller was right there in front of
me.
I contacted Marc and he was quite willing to help me, but I couldn't get
started on this box project right away, because I had other projects to
complete, such as Eduardo's 2006 birthday present (the sprite and tile
artwork for Donkey Kong Deluxe) and also the revamp of this web site, just
to name a couple. But once all those projects were behind me, I got started
on the full box art layout for Steamroller, at the beginning of February
2007. A couple of weeks later, it was finished, and I must say I'm pretty
pleased with the results. Here's a shunk-down image of my box artwork (the
actual image used for making the box is eight times larger):
I sent the box image to Marc and after some test prints and a few
adjustments, the box is now a reality:
I ordered 3 copies of the box, and I'm currently waiting for them to arrive
by mail. One of these exemplaries will go to David Rolfe, as a gift.
But what about the manual, you ask? The original black-and-white manual that
came in the box with the Steamroller cartridge is indeed pretty cheap in my
opinion, and although it generally looks okay, I think it deserves to be
remade in full color like the box. I'm planning to do this manual myself
later this year, after I've learned my way around Adobe Illustrator.
SOME MORE BOX ARTWORK
Earlier this week, I came across some poster images that I found rather
interesting, in terms of how they could be used for our future Opcode
releases. With these images, I made some box mockups which are displayed
below. Please keep in mind that I just did this for fun, and that the
actual boxes will probably look different than these.
LATEST NEWS
So you want to know what's been going on with us lately? Well, Eduardo just
received his EPROM burner by snail mail (with big emphasis on "snail"!),
and with it, he will now be able to produce new ColecoVision cartridges.
(That's good news for you, Opcode fans, if you can read between the
lines...) ;-)
On my side, I've begun working on a new project, namely a program called
"RLE encoder". It's something Eduardo needs to encode graphic data more
easely in his upcoming ColecoVision games. It's a tricky algorithm to
implement so it should be an interesting programming challenge for me.
I'm not exactly happy about the fact that it took a month for me to finally
post a new blog entry, but to be honest, I'm a busy guy and writing blogs
is not exactly at the top of my priorities. But I do have lots of ideas
for blog entries, so I will definately try to invest a little more time
over the next few months to update the blog section more often.
