http://www.terrygreer.com/adventuregames.htmlTo fit lots of graphics into a console however meant that the graphics had to be programmed. I designed a graphic language to enable me to hand encode complex graphics. For example a line draw and a flood fill would give outlines and solid colours, while a character draw routine would draw dithers and bitmap graphics. The language was recursive so that you could even write subroutines in it. I'm not a programmer though – so I had to get the adventure game’s programmer (Dave Banner) to write the code to interpret this script.
But the results were efficient. For example we could get 10+ pictures AND the game itself into a 48k spectrum simultaneously!
Doing graphics for these machines was more akin to tapestry than drawing, but despite the crudity (especially compared to modern graphics) they did get some great reviews at the time.