Steve Wetherill

Here’s my entry for a Z80 coding competition I entered just a few years ago, in 2016! The challenge was to come up with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum game in 256 bytes without using ROM routines, so the entire game is self-contained - input handling, rendering, data, code, everything. For reference, 256 bytes is about the size of this ray gun sprite, which is 16x16 pixels at 1 byte per pixel (256 colors): Here’s my entry, “Infinite Blocky Runner“ (see below). I've posted the source code for this on my Github  here . At the very least, this effort fits in (exactly) 256 bytes. I know of a couple of issues (the progress bar at the top will probably wrap in odd ways, should you progress far enough). There’s no audio, no difficulty progression, but you can at least die and restart. The code was developed using the ASM80.com site and is formatted using the somewhat quirky code formatter there (so I make no apologies for the layout). I was able to develop and debug entirely using the site. The ...

Manic Miner Amstrad CPC - Title Screen A quick follow-up to my  Software Projects  post - in January 2021 Retrogamer Magazine published a brief Q&A I did with  Graeme Mason about Manic Miner on the Amstrad CPC. The Q&A, reproduced below, largely correlates with my previous post and  mentions a couple of specific details not covered there. Retrogamer: How did you come to work on Manic Miner? Steve: I was nominally working on Manic Miner from the day I was hired; however, Software Projects couldn’t figure out which platform. We looked at the Tatung Einstein, the Spectravideo, and MSX, but for whatever reason, those did not get off the ground. When the Amstrad CPC came out, tools and documentation were readily available (I spent hours poring over the Amstrad technical docs) and I was finally able, along with partner in crime Derrick, to get started. Retrogamer: Had you worked with Derrick before? Steve: No. This was my first job in games and I met Derrick at ...

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. 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). Still, 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 at th...

Nodes of Yesod on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum ca. 1985 This is an interview I did with El Mundo Del Spectrum  (original link in the Spanish language) in 2012. The interview mostly discusses my early Sinclair Spectrum career and goes into my then-current (circa 2012!) work toward the end of the article.

Eldritch The Cat team circa 1990. Left to right, Dave Collins, Mark McCubbin, Stefan Walker, Marc Wilding, and Steve Wetherill. Photo courtesy of Marc Wilding. Back in 2015, Frank Gasking approached me about doing a piece on the "game that wasn't", Heart of Yesod , for what would become his excellent book, The Games That Weren't . This is a somewhat meta post then, a making-of-the-not-making-of, as I share with you Frank's Q&A that was used in his preparation for the piece in his book. I've also included a transcription of the original pitch document that accompanied the tech demo that I created for Heart of Yesod, along with scans (courtesy of Colin Grunes) of the dot-matrix printed originals. Heart of Yesod was to be a 1989 16-bit follow-up to Nodes of Yesod and Heartland. Sadly, it went no further than a tech demo and pitch doc. Read on for Frank's Q&A!

As noted in the earlier post on EA Air Hockey, all in-game graphics were created in 3DS Max as 3D models and then rendered into 2D images and sprites. This eased the creation of game graphics and animations for the myriad target devices. The moving objects, which were basically the "puck" (seen here) and the "mallet" were also created in 3DS Max. In this way, I was able to generate objects that were apparently moving in 3D space with the correct perspective. The mallet changes color as it moves down the screen because in Air Hockey movement of the player mallet is restricted to one side of the table. I created tools to create sprite sheets from these animation frames, once rendered. Here's how the table looked on our friend the Kyocera KX414 (104x68 pixels, rendered direct from 3DS Max). Scaled up so you can see it, followed by the original. Here's how the player mallet looks. Actual size. If you enjoy my blog, you can help support it by  buying me a coff...

Note: This article was originally published in two parts on Gamasutra (now Game Developer) in 2007 and may be found  here . Though I have made various edits for clarity and grammar, I've maintained the original two-part demarcation (albeit condensed into one post). EA Air Hockey (yes, that EA, Electronic Arts ) shipped in 2006, and as noted this article was originally published in 2007; as such, it uses the mobile development vernacular of the period (pre-iPhone remember) such as BREW, J2ME, and so on. Yes, there were mobile games before the iPhone! For about 6 years before the iPhone App Store opened in July 2008 my company, Uztek Games was doing game development for mobile devices, fragmented and awful how they (some of them) may. There were basically no (usable) touch screen phones during this period, hence the focus on a one- button game design. Eurogamer reviewed the game at 8/10 , IGN reviewed the game at a clearly finely grained  7.6/10 . EA Air Hockey: Designing A One...

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 ...