A Piq Quest Special
NOTE: This article started planning in February 2023 with a Google Doc shared with Piggy 18 team. It was due to be published in April 2023, but my personal health meant it was postponed twice. The interview was completed in May 2023, when Antonio Savona gave a separate interview to the FREEZE64 fanzine. Several of his answers from the existing RG interview were reproduced in the answers Antonio gave to FREEZE64.
The end result was that this special article in issue 250 was published after the interview appeared in FREEZE64. That meant that editor Darran Jones had to rework and re-word much of the second spread interviewing Antonio.
Below is presented the full original text from the Google Doc, as completed before the FREEZE64 interview took place. Scroll down for the NEWS BYTES.
Q1. What inspired the idea of the game, and any games you took inspiration from?
Antonio:
A Pig Quest is the brainchild of Mauricet, so all the ideas for the game, including the very original concept, are his doing and, in a way, his gift to me as he trusted me to be the one to program his vision. From a coder’s perspective my dogmas, more than inspirations, are the invaluable lessons taught by the great masters of the British gaming industry, specifically Jeff Minter: “Get the controls right,” he once said. And what an enlightening piece of wisdom it is! You might code the best-looking and sounding game ever, but if the controls are not tight no one will play it to the end. A simple yet too often overlooked message.
Alain:
At the time I was drawing a graphic novel about evil pigs for Humanoids publishing. I discovered Antonio’s skills by trying out his Fix It Felix JR game. It was so good and fun that I had to get in touch about a possible collaboration for a C64 game. He immediately agreed! I pitched him the idea of a game in a multicolour bitmap with a little pig as the hero. It started really small with a crude little piggy sprite and some soso backgrounds to become this giant production. Hahaha! I guess it’s my love letter to the C64, my most beloved computer.
As for inspiration, there are too many: comics, animation and video games of course. My favourite games are Dig Dug, Bubble Bobble, Ghosts’n Goblins and Zelda, a link to the past.
Q2. How were the graphics designed and created?
Alain:
I start with lots of doodles and script notes for the story and puzzles on paper and then I jump into Photoshop mode. Then Antonio kicks in… That’s about it.
Antonio:
Alain would send me all the assets in PNG format, obeying the C64 bitmapped mode limitations for the backdrops and sprite limitations for the game characters. By accepting graphics in this format, I didn’t have to ask him to work with this or that specific cross-dev tool and he could unleash his creativity with the illustration software he is used to (and I guess it shows!). I spent some time creating automatic conversion tools that I integrated with the build script, so the aforementioned PNGs were parsed, dissected and assembled straight into the code at compile time and I didn’t have to manually create the sprites or bitmap data every time. It took a bit to put together this build-process but I consider it a good investment, given the incredible amount of graphics that Alain provided all through development.
Q3. Are there any special tricks or techniques used?
Alain:
No special tricks or techniques, no. Just mentally apply the C64 restrictions to what I draw in Photoshop. It was a bit tricky at first. I also work with an 8x8 grid applied on the screen and a two-pixel wide pencil brush. That´s it really. For the sprite animations, I also use the animation tools provided by Photoshop.
Antonio:
There are many tricks, and many headaches really, probably too many to list here, but let’s just say that most of the special techniques were made necessary by the large amount of graphics and the unusual choice of graphics mode: untiled bitmap. This mode was never massively used in a game to the best of my knowledge (while tiled bitmap mode was) and it grants APQ its unique look because it allows for many colours on screen and maximises the variety: basically, the artist doesn’t have a limited number of tiles that he must reuse over and over, and can just consider each level as a large canvas he can illustrate as he wants.
This is nice to look at but it also means that there’s a lot going on under the hood for the poor 1Mhz CPU of the Commodore 64. So, for instance, entering a room doesn’t blank the screen to allow the CPU to decode the assets, because the “blackness” would last too long and affect the gameplay: instead, the game engine tries to anticipate the next room Frank will enter and speculatively decodes it in parallel with the gameplay, so upon actually accessing the new area the memory buffers are just swapped and the action flows uninterrupted.
Another subtle optimisation was needed to allow bitmap objects to move on screen, which would have been impossible with everything else going on. The way the heavy animations are managed is through the combination of delta-frame intercoding (a technique used in video compression to only store the difference between consecutive frames) and a novel approach that we named “gfx as a code”, which consists in not storing the graphics as pixel values but rather with specific code that draws them. It’s a bit like the shaders on modern GPUs but on our beloved breadbins.
Q4. The soundtrack is incredible - what inspired the tunes, and how did you make so many?
Gaetano:
The first thing we did was ask Mauricet about what was the game about, and what kind of soundtrack he wanted us to compose (June/July 2020). He asked something "that starts a bit pompous and serious that quickly turns into something funny and joyful"; then he pointed out some movie scores for reference, but he also told us to feel free to go our own way as well. I listened to and studied the pieces he chose, and I came up with two "drafts", which I sent to Aldo (and he did the same with his works); one of them was left unfinished, while the other one became the piece named "The Tree of Woe". The hero theme was composed by Aldo (it's the title tune).
In general, when I was unsure if a song would fit the game, I used to submit a first draft to the group and ask for their approval. Before submitting the finished works I was always asking Aldo (and he did the same with me!) if he noticed something strange or even wrong in the music.
The game became bigger and bigger as we went on; the levels were very long, and we didn't want to annoy the player with the same tune playing over and over! So we tried to split the levels into smaller "sections" and compose an appropriate piece for each of them. I also tried to have a "main theme" for each level I worked on, that would set the mood; a small and recognizable riff that would return now and then.
Antonio did an amazing job in compressing the data on the cartridge, so we could add all the music we wanted!
Aldo:
Most of the inspiration came definitely from the graphics. For example, I decided to "cover" Tchaikovsky's "June - Barcarolle" after watching the Lake of Blekksprut's section on level 4, with the boat sequence and the huge full moon in the background. Also, the pace of the gameplay helped us decide what kind of tune fitted each section.
Like Gaetano said, in a few cases Mauricet sent us some music just to help us create tunes that matched his vision, and that's how the "Hall of Heroes" and "Porchetta's theme" tunes were born.
Sound-wise, I always try to stay away from "SID trademarks" like fast arpeggios, square wave-based snare sounds, etc. I think they're good for demos, but not for games. In games, I usually try to achieve something that sounds more like 8/16 bit consoles than Commodore 64, and in this case, I had JRPGs (like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger) in my mind.
Antonio:
Aldo and Gaetano did an incredible job. It’s not just about the technical quality of the SIDs (which of course is also there) or how nice the melodies sound, but also, and most importantly to me, in the way they accompany the game. It’s indeed a proper soundtrack, not just a set of tunes: all through development Aldo and Gaetano would wait for an area to be playable before they wrote music for it. They also came up with the idea of making the soundtrack “dynamic”, so that the track changes multiple times in a single level, according to the different situations, which helps enormously to set the right atmosphere. I think that this approach of experiencing the game before they composed for it really paid off and I couldn’t have wished for a better score for A Pig Quest.
Q5. What were the biggest challenges in coding the game?
Antonio:
The size of it. When Alain contacted me with his idea for the game and the first sketches he had put together, he was like, “Can you do this?” I said yes because I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to code what I immediately realised would have been a unique-looking game, but to be honest I was not really sure I could pull it off. Regardless, I was so over the moon with what I saw that I was always hungry for more and kept challenging him to keep going.
At some point, there were large bitmap enemies, like the skull at the end of the third level, that I was not even sure I could display let alone animate at a decent pace, and yet I kept saying to him (and to myself) that everything would be fine. I’m not really sure how everything came together in the end, but I’m really happy it did.
Q6. Was there anything cut out or changed for the final release?
Antonio:
Not really. When we put the team together we solemnly swore on what would eventually become our motto: “Ready when it’s ready”. Personally, when I saw Alain’s preparatory sketches and listened to Aldo and Gaetano’s first tunes, I knew they were up to something really special and I didn’t want to be the one to mess it up. We took all the time we needed and we never had an “enough already!” moment. We only released the game when we were certain that we had done everything we had to do. No corners were cut.
Alain:
I have some enemy sprites left over. Some were left out on purpose. One (a big one) was forgotten and when we remember it, we couldn’t fit it in anywhere. I also have 2 or 3 unused/prototype versions of the big red demon boss of level 5.
Gaetano:
Not at all; we made a lot of changes here and there, if we noticed something wrong in the previews Antonio would send us. I just remember that the filters in the "End of Piski" tune gave me a lot of trouble!
Aldo:
We didn't cut out any tunes: every section has the tunes and the sound effects it needs, but I did work on a few musics that weren't used. I felt that one of the first tunes I was doing for the game didn't really fit it and, maybe because of that, I got stuck at some point. That's why I decided to leave it unfinished, though I had put a lot of work in it.
Moreover, initially, level 5's boss tune was different: I struggled a lot with it and, again, eventually I got stuck. Then I decided to make it shorter and in the end I was really proud of the final result. But when I saw the boss in action I realized that the tune didn't fit it all. So I wrote a new one, and the old one remained unused.
I quote Gaetano on the filters. Unfortunately, I had to get rid of them in most of my tunes because they sounded awful on 6581 SID models.
Q7. Is there anything you would have changed/done differently?
Alain:
The game was well thought out. We took the time to make it good. Looking back I would probably redo some of the first-level background screens. But all in all, I am really proud of what we have achieved as a team. Really proud.
Antonio:
Again, not really. The “ready when it’s ready” philosophy ensured that A Pig Quest didn’t turn out to be a game I look back at with any regrets. I’m proud of what we have achieved as a team. I’m under no illusion that this game would have been any less impressive had someone else coded it, as the outstanding audiovisual component is by far its greatest selling point, but I’m very happy that I was given the opportunity to put it together.
Gaetano:
Everything! In my mind, a song is not finished until it's released. When I submit a tune, I always say: "This could be the final version". That's the reason why I don't want to listen to my tunes after the release: I would always find something that could be changed or improved! Joking apart, I was just unsure if we should let the music play continuously during the action (I feared that someone could find it annoying); that's why I had the idea of putting some environmental sounds at the beginning of levels one and three.
Aldo:
Like Gaetano, I would never stop working on my tunes, because I'm never satisfied of the final result. When I finish composing and arranging a tune I can spend a lot of time tweaking every single note, and I would go on forever. For example, in level 4's boss tune and in level 2 cave's tune I could never get the right length of the notes. Besides, I think I used too many unnecessary portamentoes in some tunes.
Anyway, there are a few tunes that I really wish I would have done differently: the first one is the level 2 ending tune: it's too short, too simple and maybe too generic, but I really wanted to make the sound effects for the guy and horse's footsteps, so I decided to sacrifice the music. But, again, I wish I made it different.
The second tune I wish I had made better is the "Caves of Mount Inget Hopp" one. Sometimes the melody is not very clear, mainly because the counter melody is too loud, and I'm not really satisfied with the last few patterns of the flute part at the beginning of the tune, as well as the ending (maybe it should have looped skipping the initial flute part).
And, speaking about endings, I probably messed up the "Hall of Heroes" tune's one with the final modulation that leads to the very last notes: I wanted it to go back to the key at the beginning of the tune, but the modulation I used doesn't sound very natural, and actually it wasn't really necessary because the tune doesn't really loop. It ends and it starts again after a short while. Et cetera...
Q8. How much playtesting was involved?
Antonio:
There was a lot of playtesting involved, and of course, we all got very good at it, so when we extended the playtesting circle to a dozen of testers with different playing skills, we started to get feedback that some areas needed to be a bit easier and I had to tune down the difficulty curve in general. Which I reluctantly did (I have a reputation for making difficult games that I want to preserve), only to get more feedback from the same testers, who in the meantime had gotten better, that maybe it had to be tweaked again, to make it harder this time. We went back and forth for months and by the time we released a preview version to magazines for the reviews we had put many hours of playtesting into it. Then the reviewers also shared their feedback and it all started again!
In the end, we were really confident that we had reached the sweet spot. Upon releasing the game we still got the occasional remark that the game is too easy and some ace players could complete it on day one, while a few think it could be a tad easier. But that is in the nature of the beast, I guess, and every game developer gets a bit of that.
Q9. Are you pleased with how the physical version has been put together?
FOOTNOTE: At the time of publishing this blog post, the final cartridge games have yet to be released by Protovision. The huge game demanded a new 2Mb cartridge design - and this was delayed by certification testing (for electrical safety and radio interference).
Antonio:
At the time of writing, I haven’t put my hands on it yet, but Protovision is known for the quality of their releases and we are sure that they’ll do a great job, as usual. For me, the stunning illustrations that Mauricet created for the manual and the box art alone are something to look forward to, even more than the game cartridge itself. The premium edition will also contain a CD with the soundtrack of the game, and the 36 beautiful tunes that Aldo and Gaetano composed. You can tell I’m very excited and I can’t wait to hold it in my hands.
Alain: I am pretty confident the final physical product will look great. I would have loved to have a little Frank sculpture as a plus but I never mentioned the idea… I am glad there’ll be a CD with the soundtrack. Aldo and Gaetano brought so much to the atmosphere of the game. I am lucky to be a part of Piggy 18.
Gaetano and Aldo:
Though we haven't seen it yet we can say that with Mauricet's art, it will surely look really professional. The colour manual with his original drawings is a real work of art, and also the print on the CD is amazing, not to mention the cover, of course!
Any other thoughts/comments/topics you want to mention?
Antonio:
It’s been a long journey, and the game has been really well received, which makes us very happy, so thanks, reviewers! Even more importantly, gamers are playing the game: this is our ultimate reward, and they have my utmost gratitude. I also want to say thanks to Alain, Aldo and Gaetano for trusting me to develop A Pig Quest. I think they have produced some of the best graphics and sound to ever grace the Commodore 64 and for me, it was a privilege to witness their creative process all through the two years it took us to complete the game. I had a blast!
Alain:
Two years well spent! I am finally part of the C64 history… hopefully. A bit late certainly but better late than never. And most of all, I got to meet Antonio, Gaetano and Aldo and this is priceless, really. I still have to meet them in real life though but it will happen eventually.
Gaetano:
First of all, we feel very grateful to Antonio and Mauricet for involving us in this project and for being such amazing teammates! Since we saw the first screens of the game, we knew that we were being involved in something special, so we had to work hard to compose the best music we could.
Actually, sometimes C64 people expect the SID to be squeezed to its limit (whatever these limits are), but we tried to focus on the compositions instead. One of our main concerns was that the songs could also be played by actual instruments and that every note was in the right place (especially in the countermelodies). The main lesson we learned is that the more we study (music, in our case), the more we realize how ignorant we are about it!
Aldo:
Players usually overlook the music and in the worst cases find it a bit annoying, but I really hope that the people who will play the game will appreciate our work. We really put a lot of energy and time into it, as usual: just multiplied by the huge size of the game! "A Pig Quest" is an arcade/adventure game, but you don't just pick an object and use it somewhere while defeating enemies: it features a very well-written epic story, and we did our best in order to make the music as epic as the story and the characters required. I hope we succeeded!
Antonio, I noticed the little cameo from L’Abbaye Des Morts - was that easy to pull off?
Antonio:
That’s Mauricet’s idea. The third level of the game needed a large section set in a church to create an entry point for the catacombs, and he decided that a nod to L’Abbaye des Morts would have been a nice touch. He even recreated the “A Prayer of Hope” room, where the player restores his soul. Only this time I thought it would really restore Frank, so he gets his health back as he stares at the beauty of nature.
It wasn’t more or less difficult to pull off than the other areas in the game, with the exception of the rain effect that required some more fiddling with the multiplexer to allow all those sprites on screen.
Aldo/Gaetano/Antonio: how did you achieve music and sound effects at the same time? And what are your favourite sounds in the game?
Antonio:
The music uses all the three voices of the SID but one of them is momentarily suspended whenever the game has to play a sound effect and for the duration of it. This trick is used by other games too, although the choice of the voice that is sacrificed to play the effect is predetermined, which leads to unpredictable results, the worst-case scenario being that the main melody is abruptly interrupted (if you ever played Commando you know what I mean).
In A Pig Quest, we tried to minimise this problem by selecting the voice in accordance with the type of effect that must be played. So, for instance, if it’s an explosion and the tune has drums, the voice playing the drums will be temporarily suspended, whereas if it’s a bass sound, like that of the health potions, the bassline is the one that will be sacrificed. We found out that by doing so your brain still picks up on the effect but doesn’t perceive the interruption. In a way, it’s as if the sound effects became part of the music. It’s one of those little touches that hardly anyone will notice (except… you just did!), but to know it’s there makes us happy.
I like all the tunes, please don’t make me choose one.
My favourite effects are the environmental ones: the insects buzzing at the very beginning of the game, the storm in the third level or the fire crackling at the beginning of the fourth level, to name a few, really add to the atmosphere. Also, the sound the skeletons make when they fall down in pieces is quite rewarding. If only they stayed dead!
Gaetano:
We used GoatTracker for composing: this wonderful software has got a "player" which allows us to play sound effects together with music (the sound effects can be made more or less the same way as the instruments of the songs). Usually, when I compose a song that would play together with sound effects I try to make a 2-voices piece, and lower the volume of the instruments (by ADSR); but this time we just decided to give more relevance to the music (actually, the sound effects were the last thing we did for the game!). All three voices of the SID are always used for the music; the sound effects are triggered, when needed, on the most expendable channel.
The thing I like the most is the environmental sounds in level 1, and how the soundtrack builds up later on. The best song in the game is "The Broken Bridge" by Aldo.
Aldo:
Antonio encouraged us to make use of all three voices of the SID for the music in order to make better arrangements even though sound effects would play along with the music, and it was the right choice because the sound effects don't bother the music too much since they're very sparse and, when they play, only the accompaniment voice is silenced.
Speaking of sound effects, my favourite ones are the ambience ones, the bell sound and the armours/weapons picking up sound, which use a ring modulation (they play differently, according to the waveform played by the second oscillator) and the potion one (unfortunately it's very low in volume because it uses a triangle waveform, which is the quietest one). I also like the ending sequence sound: we struggled a lot (but had a lot of fun as well) to make all those night birds' sounds and to coordinate the sound to the on-screen action.
Speaking of music, my favourite tune is "Porchetta's Theme", but I'm also proud of my rendition of "June - Barcarolle": I tried to give the impression that a human pianist was playing the piece, tweaking every single note to get the right dynamics and slowing down/speeding up the playing when necessary.
NEWS BYTES
Issue 250 contained the usual News Bytes columns, so here are the links to the games mentioned.
MSX: Important news – the MSX GOTO40 celebration in December has changed venue, to t’Zonnehuis in Amsterdam. https://bit.ly/msx40-location
ZX SPECTRUM: The Primary 6 pupils at Bearsden Primary School have once again been making new Spectrum games, with the help of Dougie McG. This year’s selection is at https://bit.ly/bearsden-2023
VIC-20: Tynemouth Software’s conversion of 3D Monster Maze is one of the exclusive games available on the new Penultimate +2 Cartridge from The Future Was 8-Bit. https://bit.ly/penultimateplus2-vic20
AMIGA: Jotd’s latest arcade ports to 68000 include Galaxian, Xevious and Pengo. https://jotd666.itch.io/
AMSTRAD CPC: Roland Goes Demining in this Minesweeper clone from SagaDS. https://bit.ly/rgd-cpc
ATARI 2600: Imagine Metroid for the VCS and that’s what Mathan Games have created with Xanthiom. https://bit.ly/xanthiom-2600
BBC MICRO: Shaun Lindsley has converted the Llamasoft classic Laser Zone. https://bit.ly/laserzone-bbc
NES: Pre-orders are open for Sam’s Journey, with merchandise including vinyl and a themed controller from poly.play. https://bit.ly/samsjourney-preorder
PET: Recent PET games include Jimbo’s PETSCII Kong (requires 32K) at https://bit.ly/petscii-kong and Milasoft’s Rally-X inspired Hey Taxi (for 4032 models) at https://bit.ly/hey-taxi
PLUS/4: Javier Gonzalez created the Snake-style puzzle game Tomato Worm with 65 levels to eat through. The disk download includes the VIC-20 version. https://bit.ly/tomatoworm-plus4
VARIOUS: Yandex Retro Battle v3 resulted in some great titles, including Zoysa’s winning Spectrum entry Seraphima. https://rgb.yandex.ru/?lang=en
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