Steve Wetherill

Video Game Developer

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February 15, 2008

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Nodes of Yesod : ZX Spectrum Next : Update #4

May 25, 2022

A Big Change Of Plans! Astro Charlie has a close encounter If you have read my previous updates, you'll know that Nodes of Yesod for the Speccy Next is based on a C codebase. I've discussed details of my progress in that direction in previous posts, tool selection, and various other considerations. I have to share with you that I've had a rethink and there's a big change of plans! As I intend to make this version of Nodes freely available, and since it follows that there's no direct benefit to me financially, building the game has to be a fun and enjoyable endeavor. While I've enjoyed certain aspects of getting a C codebase to compile and run on the Next, I've had a few nagging doubts. C was always going to be a 'heavy' way to do things on an 8-bit Z80 (even with a faster clock), and paging code in and out of 8K or 16K banks does not make things less complicated; however, more than that, I need to personally get something out of this, it needs to be

Denton Designs : 1988

March 02, 2022

"Colin, let's take a day off from Denton Designs, get the train from Liverpool to London and clear up this Crosswize situation with Telecomsoft, face to face." Crosswize was late. It was supposed to be completed in time for a Christmas 1987 release, but here we were in January 1988, and it wasn't finished. Not quite. It needed to be finished. For one thing, I needed the final payment from Telecomsoft. I was running on fumes, financially. For another, I had, with Colin Grunes, started work at Denton Designs in January and was working double time trying to wrap Crosswize at night and be present for my new job at Denton's during the day. I had poured everything into Crosswize, I tried to make something special. The systems I had developed to deliver the smooth graphics and fast action were technically the best thing I had ever done. This came at a price though, and the ridiculous number of hours I had spent at the keyboard, eking out incrementally more and more per

Odin Computer Graphics Part One : 1985

February 01, 2022

"Why don't you come over to the Odin office and see what we're up to with this Nodes of Yesod game?" said Stoo Fotheringham. And so I did. Nodes of Yesod "Welcome to Nodes of Yesod, from the Odin Computer Graphics team!" As I read that, I hear the Nodes of Yesod music (by Fred Gray) start to play in my head! When I started at Odin, the game Nodes of Yesod was already underway, plenty of the cool graphics (Astro Charlie, etc) had been created and there was a playable demo (on Spectrum, possibly on C64) already. I have an indelible memory of that somersault animation on that bright blue moon surface. I think Marc (Dawson now Wilding) was working on the title Stairways on C64 (released under the Thor label), which was actually the name of a heavy metal club we frequented in Birkenhead. I'm pretty sure Marc cranked the game out very quickly and if nothing else that

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Nodes of Yesod : ZX Spectrum Next : Update #4

May 25, 2022

A Big Change Of Plans! Astro Charlie has a close encounter If you have read my previous updates, you'll know that Nodes of Yesod for the Speccy Next is based on a C codebase. I've discussed details of my progress in that direction in previous posts, tool selection, and various other considerations. I have to share with you that I've had a rethink and there's a big change of plans! As I intend to make this version of Nodes freely available, and since it follows that there's no direct benefit to me financially, building the game has to be a fun and enjoyable endeavor. While I've enjoyed certain aspects of getting a C codebase to compile and run on the Next, I've had a few nagging doubts. C was always going to be a 'heavy' way to do things on an 8-bit Z80 (even with a faster clock), and paging code in and out of 8K or 16K banks does not make things less complicated; however, more than that, I need to personally get something out of this, it needs to be

Denton Designs : 1988

March 02, 2022

"Colin, let's take a day off from Denton Designs, get the train from Liverpool to London and clear up this Crosswize situation with Telecomsoft, face to face." Crosswize was late. It was supposed to be completed in time for a Christmas 1987 release, but here we were in January 1988, and it wasn't finished. Not quite. It needed to be finished. For one thing, I needed the final payment from Telecomsoft. I was running on fumes, financially. For another, I had, with Colin Grunes, started work at Denton Designs in January and was working double time trying to wrap Crosswize at night and be present for my new job at Denton's during the day. I had poured everything into Crosswize, I tried to make something special. The systems I had developed to deliver the smooth graphics and fast action were technically the best thing I had ever done. This came at a price though, and the ridiculous number of hours I had spent at the keyboard, eking out incrementally more and more per

Odin Computer Graphics Part One : 1985

February 01, 2022

"Why don't you come over to the Odin office and see what we're up to with this Nodes of Yesod game?" said Stoo Fotheringham. And so I did. Nodes of Yesod "Welcome to Nodes of Yesod, from the Odin Computer Graphics team!" As I read that, I hear the Nodes of Yesod music (by Fred Gray) start to play in my head! When I started at Odin, the game Nodes of Yesod was already underway, plenty of the cool graphics (Astro Charlie, etc) had been created and there was a playable demo (on Spectrum, possibly on C64) already. I have an indelible memory of that somersault animation on that bright blue moon surface. I think Marc (Dawson now Wilding) was working on the title Stairways on C64 (released under the Thor label), which was actually the name of a heavy metal club we frequented in Birkenhead. I'm pretty sure Marc cranked the game out very quickly and if nothing else that

Chasing the raster on the ZX Spectrum in Sidewize

February 20, 2022

How did Sidewize accomplish the "raster-chasing" required to update the display 50 times per second? Read on! [note: jump down to The Results to see the videos, otherwise let's dive in!] Twitter user Ville Krumlinde mentioned in a Twitter comment that he had captured the screen draw update sequence for a number of Spectrum games and recorded the updates to video. He mentioned that he had hacked an existing Spectrum emulator to do this, without going into specifics. This got me thinking about how I might do that for the "raster-chasing" games I've developed, specifically Sidewize and Crosswize. I do have my own Spectrum emulator, it runs on Windows and Pocket PC (and PalmOS, but that is another story). It has not seen the light of day for over 15 years (and my Windows-foo is rusty), so the prospect of compiling it again was a bit off-putting. Then it occurred to me that the Spectrum emulator I have been using for the ZX Spectrum Next version of Nodes of Ye

Software Projects : 1984

January 23, 2022

SOFTWARE PROJECTS The first games I developed were for a British computer system produced by the ubiquitous (if you're British, anyway) Amstrad plc : the Amstrad CPC-464. The games were " Manic Miner " and " Jet Set Willy ", both "ports" from the original Sinclair Spectrum versions. I had spent the second part of 1983 without gainful employment after discontinuing my Electronics & Electrical Engineering studies at Manchester University after the second year. I was putting the Z80 programming I'd learned at college to use in an attempt to create machine language games on the Spectrum. Actually, I had obtained the Spectrum initially to pursue my interests in electronic music (it was easy to cobble various hardware bits onto the Spectrum expansion port), but the availability of games for the system was too tempting, and inevitably I ended up spending more time playing games, disassembling games, etc. I burned many, many midnight hours poking away

Odin Computer Graphics Part Two : 1986 - 1987

February 09, 2022

Continued from part one . That Telecomsoft Deal On the strength of the commercial success of Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood, Odin Managing Director Paul McKenna had convinced British Telecom (in the shape of Telecomsoft , aka Firebird - I've used the names interchangeably in this post) to pay us a (middle, UK pounds) six-figure fee in return for 10 games (or equivalents, with ports counting as half a game), which were to be delivered over the space of 1 year. It was a lucrative deal for us, but very aggressive obviously. That's about all there is to say about this deal right now, but it was to flavor just about everything Odin did from this point out. Heartland Spectrum Notch number one for Firebird. Heartland was created by Colin Grunes (who had done the animation for Astro Charlie in Nodes) and myself, with others pitching in here and there. The gameplay was very simple, and I su

Firebird : 1987

February 27, 2022

Cockneys Die!!! After Odin's demise, I was left with decisions to make. After months of running on financial fumes to complete Sidewize, I had no significant monetary reserves; not to put too fine a point on it, I was skint. I did have an idea for a follow-up to Sidewize however, and I didn't feel inclined to go into a full-time employed position again. There were a couple of local options. Gary Bracey @ Ocean pitched Colin and me on the Platoon movie license, but we declined because they wanted us to move to Manchester. I didn't drive, commuting was out of the question, we couldn't consider this option on the terms offered. We talked to Elite in Birmingham, who immediately offered us a deal when they saw the Sidewize demo, but like Ocean, they wanted to do licensed titles, and that didn't appeal at the time (the schedules for licensed titles tend to have zero leeway, which is bad enough if you're *not* being paid on milestones). A local company, Reptile Industr

Eldritch The Cat Mk I : 1988 - 1989

March 18, 2022

Steve Wetherill and Marc Wilding, the Eldritch Cats Eldritch The Cat Mark I part 1 After Odin , Marc Wilding contracted with Ocean to create the Amiga & Atari ST versions of the Army Moves game. Next, he successfully pitched Hewson Consultants with an original game of his own design called Astaroth for the 16-bit platforms. It was while Marc was completing Astaroth, and after I had left Denton Designs , that he and I decided to set out together and form the Eldritch The Cat dev studio. Initially, the two of us worked out of my house on Crompton Drive in Croxteth Park, Liverpool 12 , with graphics work contracted out. Marc brought Astaroth in under the Eldritch umbrella, and the next task was to find a project for me. Projectyle Projectyle During that initial period at Eldritch, I used the experience gained while creating the scrolling tech on Sidewize and Crosswize, coupled with the experience gained at Denton's building the Gargantuan prototypes, to create a demo showing smo

Nodes of Yesod for the ZX Spectrum Next

February 06, 2022

The ZX Spectrum Next in the flesh! How it started In May of 2017, I committed to deliver a remade version of Nodes of Yesod as part of a £620K stretch goal for the successful (the campaign raised £723,390 in total!) first ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter campaign, something Victor Trucco (originator of both the ZX Spectrum Next design and the TBBlue predecessor) tweeted about: How it's going Let's talk about that. In between May 2017 and the date of this post I have made not one but two major job changes, entailing moving between cities hundreds of miles apart. Twice. Perhaps understandably, the side-project of creating a remake of Nodes took second place to these new IRL priorities. Yeah, excuses. Pretty good ones though, as these things go. That said, some progress has been made, and the update is that I have recently picked up the project again and will start to post the occasional update here (and on my @stevewetherill Twitter) as and when there is progress to report. For

The Making of Heartland for the Sinclair Spectrum

January 09, 2022

Note: this article expands upon material I provided for the RetroGamer #129 article on Heartland. In 1986, Odin Computer Graphics Ltd published the game “ Heartland ” for 8-bit platforms such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. Colin Grunes was responsible for art, level design & background lore. I did the coding on the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions and contributed to gameplay design. Keith Robinson coded the Commodore 64 version. Initial Development Heartland development was commenced around the time of the Odin deal with TelecomSoft to create 10 new games, and Heartland was the first title released under that deal. As it happened, Odin moved office in the middle of the development of Heartland, though it was not a very big move (it was across the courtyard in Canning Place to another unit – the old Bug Byte office, as it happens). The new office was much bigger – we needed the space for the additional developers we would hire for the TelecomSoft

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