Steve Wetherill

Steve Wetherill and Marc Wilding, the Eldritch Cats Eldritch The Cat Mark I 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 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, we 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 smooth, multidirectional scr...

In this third developer diary update for Nodes of Yesod: ZX Spectrum Next, I'll talk about progress on the coding and tools side, and give a preview of progress on the art side. Coding Update In previous posts, I have mentioned the sprite exporter tool that I'm working on and that once I had "something on-screen", progress would 'spiral out' from there. Let's get spiraling! Here's a snapshot of Astro Charlie captured on the CSpect ZX Spectrum Next emulator. This image is composed of 6 x 16x16 hardware sprites (Astro Charlie needs 6 sprites because his animations are over 32 pixels tall and up to 32 pixels wide, needing 2 x 3 hardware sprites.  Astro Charlie, rendered on CSPect as 6 hardware sprites My plan is to cache his sprite animations in the 16KB of dedicated sprite VRAM and then dynamically update the cache on-demand. I am sharing this image in its raw form, which looks off because I am using the default sprite palette which is limited to 4 dis...

"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...