Steve Wetherill

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 ...

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...

This week I posted a poll on Twitter to find out which of the three presented graphics styles people would prefer for Astro Charlie, the protagonist in Nodes of Yesod, on the ZX Spectrum Next. The images, and the poll results, can be seen below: Which style do you prefer? — Steve Wetherill (@stevewetherill) February 15, 2022 With 384(!) votes in total, the clear poll winner is option A at 55.5% of the vote, with option C a strong runner-up at 33.9%. In fact, there was a fair bit of feedback in the discussion thread where people said they liked option C, but perhaps it could be ramped up a little, adding some subtle shading, so that it wasn't the full-blown "Amiga-esque" style shown in option A, but something more retro and perhaps 8-bit looking. What I didn't say in the poll, but have stated here on this site, is that I plan on having two modes in the game. Previous incarnations of Nodes of Yesod have gone with "classic" (option B) and "enhanced...

A ZX Spectrum Next, in its natural habitat A quick progress report on Nodes of Yesod for the Spectrum Next. The good news - I worked on it! I managed to spend a couple of evenings last week working on (or more accurately, toward) the game. I am in that preparation phase where I think I have a handle on how to do things, but can't do those things until the other things are done. Such as having some data in a useful format. Most effort has been spent against wrangling graphics, specifically sprite graphics. I already have all the art I need, in (or close to) the appropriate (pixel and color) resolution. The main challenge with the sprite graphics is to wrangle them into a format suitable for the Next hardware sprites. It will be cool to really lean into the custom hardware on the Next, but the problem is that there are way too many sprites to fit in the internal 16KB of VRAM. For example, each animation frame of the main character, Astro Charlie, is nominally 24 pixels wide by someth...

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. Fo...