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Description
When I first started on this challenge, I had a very clear vision of what I wanted the screen to look like, particularly the use of the silver 'STAR WARS' brand frame around the outside of the entire screen. I also started out thinking of using a lightsaber to indicate the player's health... but quickly realised that wouldn't be appropriate to non-Jedi characters, and the whole point of my design was that the player would control several characters throughout the game, not just Luke Skywalker.

While considering play styles and game mechanics, I briefly considered a top-down perspective - ideal for some levels, not so much for others - and created a vertical panel with a squarer play area. Since I was still using the idea of a lightsaber as an energy bar at this point, and included a handgun image with ammo counter (eventually ditched as an unnecessary complication), not to mention the need for an 8-digit score readout and the ESB logo, the panel ended up a little too wide for the play area to be perfectly square, but it's not far off.

Since I'm a bit of a font nerd, the first thing I did once I'd planned out a first draft of the panel was create a font to go with it. This is based upon Anakin Mono by font designer Opipik, and comes across reasonably well within 6x6 pixels, albeit with some loss of clarity on some lowercase characters and the ampersand. Some of the uppercase characters are little different from the default ZX Spectrum font - the main difference being the larger upper halves - while others, such as 'cee' and 'dee' are identical, since the low resolution of the Spectrum character set gives the more rounded characters a squared-off appearance. Additionally, since there's no practical difference between and uppercase 'oh' and the number zero, I added a diagonal inside the numeral. While I'm quite happy with the original set of numerals, I ended up designing a new set, based on the numbers seen on the X-Wing targeting computers in the first movie. It was tricky to get the feel for those stencil-style characters within the Spectrum's 8x8 pixel characters, so, while the original font sits comfortably in 6x6 pixels, the numbers are 7x7 pixels.

Description
When I first started on this challenge, I had a very clear vision of what I wanted the screen to look like, particularly the use of the silver 'STAR WARS' brand frame around the outside of the entire screen. I also started out thinking of using a lightsaber to indicate the player's health... but quickly realised that wouldn't be appropriate to non-Jedi characters, and the whole point of my design was that the player would control several characters throughout the game, not just Luke Skywalker.

While considering play styles and game mechanics, I briefly considered a top-down perspective - ideal for some levels, not so much for others - and created a vertical panel with a squarer play area. Since I was still using the idea of a lightsaber as an energy bar at this point, and included a handgun image with ammo counter (eventually ditched as an unnecessary complication), not to mention the need for an 8-digit score readout and the ESB logo, the panel ended up a little too wide for the play area to be perfectly square, but it's not far off.

Since I'm a bit of a font nerd, the first thing I did once I'd planned out a first draft of the panel was create a font to go with it. This is based upon Anakin Mono by font designer Opipik, and comes across reasonably well within 6x6 pixels, albeit with some loss of clarity on some lowercase characters and the ampersand. Some of the uppercase characters are little different from the default ZX Spectrum font - the main difference being the larger upper halves - while others, such as 'cee' and 'dee' are identical, since the low resolution of the Spectrum character set gives the more rounded characters a squared-off appearance. Additionally, since there's no practical difference between and uppercase 'oh' and the number zero, I added a diagonal inside the numeral. While I'm quite happy with the original set of numerals, I ended up designing a new set, based on the numbers seen on the X-Wing targeting computers in the first movie. It was tricky to get the feel for those stencil-style characters within the Spectrum's 8x8 pixel characters, so, while the original font sits comfortably in 6x6 pixels, the numbers are 7x7 pixels.