Zzap! Italia interview

Here's the English language version of the interview that appeared in Zzap! Italia. Many thanks to Antonio Bianchetti for the great questions and for handling all of the translations.

Zzap.it: Hi, John! Thanks for your time and for being interested in being interviewed by Zzap.it!

We’re big fans of the Retrospecs app you created and update with so much love and craftsmanship. We'll talk about it in more depth later, but before we get to that we’re curious to discover when and how your passion for pixels developed?

John Parker: Thanks for the kind words.

I think I’ve always been interested in the intersection of where technology and creativity meet, and pixel art is often a great example of that. I was born in the seventies, so I’ve been lucky enough to be around during the period when things changed from moving a few black and white rectangles on the screen to being able to throw hundreds of scaled and rotated sprites around without blinking an eye and that’s before you even begin to consider what’s possible with modern 3D hardware. As such, it’s been fascinating to see how the technology and what was possible has advanced over the years.

Even from a young age I was amazed at what the pixel artists and chiptune musicians of the time were able to create, especially considering the constraints they were working within. This was particularly evident on machines like the ZX Spectrum where the limitations were especially visible, but it’s equally true for other systems of the time. What later became possible on the 16-bit machines was simply stunning - I was a big fan of companies like The Bitmap Brothers, as well as the Amiga demo scene at the time. More recently, I used to follow the PC demo scene on Pouet.net, but my PC is way too old for such things now.

I still think a lot of the best hand-crafted pixel art produced to this day benefits from working within constraints though, whether it’s using a limited number of colours, a fixed palette or just a low resolution.

How were you introduced to programming? Have you ever tried to develop a videogame or join a demo scene group?

My first steps were with BASIC on a VIC-20 which my parents bought for my brother when I was about nine, although I didn’t really create anything myself until I had my own Spectrum+ a few years later. Like many, I’d spend hours typing in games listings from magazines, but I also used to create simple animations using User Defined Graphics in BASIC, which was enjoyable if a little time consuming. On balance, it was probably a lot more fun playing Tau Ceti or Elite though.

Jumping ahead to the 16-bit era, I tinkered with 68k assembly and C on the Amiga, but it didn’t really materialise into anything interesting as I was too busy with college work and being repeatedly beaten at Kick Off. As far as games are concerned, I’ve never made anything beyond a few tech concept demos although whilst I was at university I created my own variation of Hextris for MacOS, but I lost interest in the project once I’d solved the bulk of the problems involved.

It's often the availability of tools that provides the opportunity to try something creative. Commodore 64 users had SEUCK, the Amiga had Deluxe Paint and the ST had MIDI support. Which tools did you play with during your early years with home computers?

I was lucky enough to have an Amiga, so the main ones for me were Deluxe Paint II (the joy of colour cycling!) and the various Soundtracker variants, but I used to love playing around with things like Mandle Mountains and Sculpt 3D as well – there’s nothing quite like leaving an A500 on overnight in the hope that it manages to produce a raytraced image before it throws a Guru Meditation. I didn’t really use any of the game creation tools, although I did play around with AMOS a bit, but it never really caught my imagination for some reason.

As I was at college at the time, I was also trying to do bizarre things like getting dBase III and Pascal compilers to run under software DOS emulation on an A500 – possible, but painfully slow. :-)

Do you still have any real hardware? (Modern mini consoles are permitted as well.) ;-)

I’ve recently sold most of my real hardware as I needed the space, but I used to have a nice little collection ranging from the Atari 2600 through to the SNES, with most of the common machines and consoles in between. Thankfully I managed to pick up a lot of them when they were cheap, as the prices people are asking these days are just silly. I only really have a SNES Mini left, which is pretty good fun once you… err… “customise” it.

I sometimes think it’s a little odd that people seem to collect old machines and games just for the sake of it these days, rather than actually using them. Although to be fair, some of the product designs still stand out – especially systems like the Oric Atmos and the Alice 90.

After years of emulation being the sole preserve of techies and nostalgic geeks, the retrogaming phenomena is now part of modern pop culture and the 8-bit aesthetic is a selling point in modern games and even in some mainstream movies. Was this something you considered when you were starting development on Retrospecs?

To be honest, I didn’t really examine what was popular at the time when I first started working on it – if I’d sat down and considered what would sell I’d have created a very, very different app. A few years before I started work on Retrospecs I created a web script that converted images into something that could be displayed on a ZX Spectrum, so Retrospecs was initially just an extension of that.

I remember trying to find what was available on the App Store at the time - there were a few photo to pixel art converters already, but they were either very limited or tended to go for a more fluffy, fun approach with stickers and overlays. I’ve always tried to make Retrospecs focus more on accuracy – a lot of what I was trying to initially achieve was about preserving at least some of the aesthetic of each machine, as the actual hardware itself is going to become increasingly difficult to source and maintain as time goes on.

I also knew that Retrospecs obviously wouldn’t be able to create pixel art on a par with something that’s been hand crafted by an actual pixel artist, so that’s never been something that I’ve particularly chased – it’s more about providing a toolbox that lets people explore.

Being from the seventies, my personal feeling is that the nostalgia of my carefree childhood moments plays a big part in my love of the pixel aesthetic. However, from a more general point of view maybe those pixels represent a safe place in in our contemporary culture where the technology is simple enough to be understood – far from concepts like artificial intelligence and surveillance. Could this be the reason for the modern love of pixels and synthesisers?

I’ve no doubt that for some it’s about trying to return to simpler times, or perhaps a statement that you don’t need 3D models with a virtually infinite number of vertices to create something that’ll capture people’s imagination. Pixel art is also one of the few areas where tools and tutorials are freely available, so anyone with the aptitude and access to a computer or smartphone can try it out and hone their skills over time.

As for synthesisers, I guess there’s something very compelling about being able to directly manipulate how something sounds by turning a dial or changing a few parameters – there’s such a thin level of abstraction between the player and the performance, despite the complexity of the underlying synthesis. Perhaps that applies to pixel art as well.

Retrospecs is now a solid, feature rich iOS app, but all projects start with just the initial kernel of an idea. What was your original plan for Retrospecs and how did it grow after the first release?

Whilst I’d created a few simple iOS apps before, Retrospecs was the first one I wanted to publish in the App Store, although the original release was a bit of a rush. At the time I’d taken a career break to learn Objective-C/Cocoa and iOS development and I was due to start at a new permanent job, so after spending months working on Retrospecs every day I ended up submitting it late one Saturday evening. I was starting a new job on the Monday, so I thought I deserved a day off. :-)

The first version only simulated a dozen or so 8-bit systems and was limited in terms of tools and options, but simply getting it finished and onto the App Store was enough of an achievement at the time. The desire to improve it kept nibbling away at me though, so I continued working on it in my spare time. Over the course of three and a half years and thirty-five updates it grew to simulate most of the commonly available systems and I added an editor which exposed the underlying engines, so people could create their own virtual systems.

A pivotal date is March 2018 with the release of Retrospecs version 2. By that point a multitude of systems and video modes were already supported – presumably because you’d created a modular architecture and graphics engine. How far in advance did you plan it and what goals did you have in mind?

I’d like to pretend that it was that way since day one, but in truth I spent quite a lot of time refining things during the 1.x era – a lot of the later updates only had a few new features but involved significant changes behind the scenes. From the very beginning there was a core graphics system which was extended to provide the per-pixel and attribute engines, so I’d planned for that. However, the user interface was another story – there were an awful lot of tweaks and changes that have resulted in what’s there now.

In terms of goals, these were always driven by the sort of systems I wanted to add. I knew that I’d need to use colour quantisation to cater for the 16-bit systems which displayed a set number of entries from a much larger palette and as I’m a big fan of PETSCII and character set artwork I also wanted to tackle that at some point. These two goals directly led to the creation of the palette and character engines, so that was quite a logical progression.

Of course, as with all these things, if I was to start again from scratch today I’d do things slightly differently from an architectural perspective, but that’s always the way with software development – you can only plan for so much, otherwise you’d spend all your time creating the perfect architecture rather than actually implementing anything.

John, let's keep this between you and Zzap! Is it legal to use multi core processors to simulate the Spectrum’s primitive colour clash limitation? :-)

It’s legal, but is it sensible? Probably not. It does seem foolish to throw so much computing power at such a trivial thing, but if you’ve spare processor cores just sitting around doing nothing it would be a shame to waste them. ;-)

There’s a carefully curated list of all the contributors to Retrospecs. How does a pixel artist end up with their palette or charset included in your app? Mutual esteem I suppose? :-)

As I’m a fan of pixel art, I tend to follow a lot of creators on Twitter so I generally just ask for permission if I see a palette or set of colour combinations that I like. More recently, Sam Keddy created an amazing website called Lospec which houses a fantastic collection of palettes as well as tutorials and an online pixel art editor – I’d highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in the medium. Thankfully this makes keeping track of the newer custom palettes a lot easier than it was initially.

Whilst we’re talking about contributors, I’d also like to mention the people who’ve helped localise the app into French, Japanese and Latin American Spanish – Eric, Hideki, Kevin, kaztah and Aurélien have all given a lot of their time and energy to the project and it simply wouldn’t be the same without them.

We were really looking forward to the update with the Ray Manta / DataDoor custom charset. The pictures he shared on social media before the official release were real pieces of art. What's the story behind this fruitful collaboration?

I *think* I initially reached out to him on Instagram after he posted one of his custom CBMSCII creations, and we simply took it from there. The two DataDoor character sets we’ve added to date (“Filament” and “Circlex”) are stunning and the images he teases out of Retrospecs often amaze me – he has a brilliant eye for design as well as being a talented musician and coder.

He’s a bit too good really – we should probably try and stop him before he becomes too powerful. ;-)

As Retrospecs is a creative tool, are you in touch with or are you supporting its use among artists? Have you attempted to go beyond pixel art connoisseurs into mainstream productions like Jeff Minter did with the custom version of Polybius used in the Nine Inch Nails music video?

To be honest, no-one mainstream has ever asked, but I’d absolutely love to be involved in something like that - my DMs are open. :-)

On the slightly less mainstream side, before the “real” version of Retrospecs supported video I created a custom build to help produce some assets for the “Church” video by Mega Ran, but other than a few animated head shots, everything in the video is the work of the very talented BluChu/Daniel Fyigin. (You should check the video out, as it references an impressive number of classic games and it’s a damn fine tune as well.)

Speaking of video, the video processing feature added a whole new dimension to Retrospecs’ creations. How much impact has this feature had in terms of success and sales?

It sadly doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference so far, which is a shame as I spent a lot of time and energy adding the video processing and animation effects features. I think a big part of the problem is trying to spread the word and getting any press coverage has been especially difficult, perhaps because the app has been around for over four years now. Thankfully, one exception to this is Craig Grannell who’s really helped to get the word out in various publications over the years, so if I could just clone him a few times and make everyone publish what he writes I should be sorted. :-)

To be honest, Retrospecs has never generated a lot of money (about 120 € a month if I’m lucky), so it’s always been a labour of love. However, as it stands it’s becomingly increasingly hard to continue justifying the amount of time I spend on it, although there’s still a lot of features I’d like to add. I suppose in an ideal world I’d make Retrospecs completely free and try to get people to support the development work on Patreon or similar, but I don’t think that would work in reality.

I think I’ll be taking a break for a while though, as there’s been lots of updates recently and version 2 is pretty stable.

I noticed that you recently picked the minds of your Twitter followers about ways to increase the conversion rate from the free to the unlocked version of the app. Was any decision taken that could benefit your business and maybe your new and old clients?

I generally try and get as much feedback as possible, so whilst I experimented with pricing for a while I’ve now set it to 2,29 € based on feedback. This unlocks all the system and dither modes, video clip processing, image animation effects and the editor so hopefully it gives people the opportunity to try the basic version for free but also provides a good incentive to unlock the full version for a reasonable price.

One thing I’ve never done is charge for any upgrades, so even people who bought the very first version of the app can make use of all the latest features. There is however a tip-jar in there if anyone is feeling generous. :-)

Are there any plans to port Retrospecs to Android or other platforms?

Ahh, yes… I’m often asked about an Android version. I’m afraid not, as the whole user interface and some of the internals make extensive use of Apple’s frameworks, so I’d have to re-write a lot of it. (There’s also already a great Android app called 8bit Photo Lab – be sure to check it out.)

I’ve been thinking about creating an enhanced version of Retrospecs for macOS called Pixel Processor, but it’s still very early days so there’s nothing to share just yet. Hopefully it’ll see the light of day at some point though. (Feel free to follow Pixel Processor on Twitter for updates.)

Finally, who are your favourite pixel artists?

Ooo… there’s far too many to mention, but a few that spring to mind are Gary Lucken and Craig Stevenson. As well as DataDoor’s character art, I also really like what Cal Skuthorpe has been doing with his recent PETSCIIBOTS project and Raquel Meyers work never disappoints.

Thanks for your time John, it was a real pleasure having you on Zzap.it pages - we all hope for a bright future for Retrospecs, either with or without dithering :-) It's a lovely yet powerful app that every retro gamer should have - definitely a must for us and a great creative tool for everyone else.

My pleasure – I hope Zzap.it continues to carry forward the proud legacy of the name for many years to come!