OLIVER It all started for me at a Christmas party at Starbyte Software. It was a remarkable event. I never met so many talented people at one place before. The developers showed the games they were developing including the Amiga version of Rolling Ronny. We got the offer for converting the game and if I remember correctly, we agreed almost instantly. Previous projects of Bones Park were economic simulations, which was… how to describe… rather static stuff. I usually call those games Excel-pushers. A jump-and-run is way more interesting and it is action we wanted to create.

MARIO Back then, in the C64 era, most games took only a few weeks or a couple of months to develop. So we had to keep a constant flow of new contacts and projects. One project we did in late 1991, Trans World, for German publisher Starbyte, went pretty smooth and even became our first #1 in German sales charts, so we were invited and offered to work on other titles. One concrete offering was the C64 conversion of Rolling Ronny. Even though most of the first games I programmed were simulations, I still had spent a lot of time on developing action and real-time oriented games. So it was a perfect moment to put all the learnings into a concrete game – and that would have been Rolling Ronny.

OLIVER Being a pixel guy – the tools were remarkable. We did not have devkit like the Katakis tools or something specified for creating game graphics. I used the editor that came with the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit for sprites, which turned out extremely practical. The Ronny-sprite was created with an C64 editor called Mob-Profi, which provided overlayed hires and multicolour-sprites. The pictures in the intro and end sequence were pixeled in Koala Painter with a joystick, but everything else was more like hacking. I edited the charset with a font editor. The level backgrounds were tile-based maps, so a friend of mine coded one tool for combining 2×2 chars to tiles including the colour – and a second tool for assembling the levelmap like a puzzle game. As setup I had a C128 and Amiga 500 side by side. By the way – there was a TV and a monitor connected to the C128 at the same time, because of the the different video quality and I wanted to be sure that the graphics  looked right on both display types. With our modern mouse or stylus driven tools and those workflow-trimmed programs it is hard to believe that we got things done at all back in the day when we were even lacking fundamentals such as UNDO functionality. However, I have to say that you had full control over the technical specs of the graphics and as a graphic designer you started to think like a coder.

Otherwise, I hardly remember details of the project. At least for the first month, Mario and I were working alongside each other. The intro and the end sequence were finished first. Then it was very intense and determined by crunchtime, the process was sort of first-in-first-out. The progress in code was tied to incoming graphics. Markus composed the new tunes at home far away and we had some issues with the delivery. Nevertheless the whole soundtrack reached us in time and its implementation went smoothly. Still there was no free time at all. In the final weeks weeks it became a kind of competition – like, who needs the least sleep! I also remember that the editing of the levels was pretty chaotic. Three of us worked in shifts and it took much longer than planned.

Oh I almost forgot about the  communication with Virgin. That was the horror for me because I hardly spoke any English back then. David Bishop and I talked English and German mixed, which worked surprisingly well.

Rolling Ronny was looking decent, too. Commodore Format had featured a well-received demo in the Autumn on Power Pack 13, and it gave a fairly typical taste for the game. You’re cast as the hero of the title, a delivery boy in the fictitious town of Fieldington who secretly works for Scotland Yard on the side. When the town’s crown jewels are stolen and scattered across town by the careless robbers, Ron’s the obvious one to call. It’s at this point you’re plummeted into the first level. At first glance, it’s straightforward left-to-right stuff. Sure, you’re wandering the levels in search of the treasure but you also need to earn enough money for your bus fare to get to the next stage. This is where the errand boy stuff comes in: as you dodge cars and the mutated animals of Fieldington (in a surreal plot twist, the local magic circle turned everything fluffy a bit demented), you’ll meet some of the town’s inhabitants. By doing them a favour – for example delivering a package – you’ll get coins. Pocket enough, and you can level up. Here’s the whole game: