SWIV Concept Art, Doodles and Notes: Part 2

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SWIV/Silkworm Team: Dan Marchant, Ron Pieket, John Croudy, Warren Mills, Ned Langman

These days, if you work for a big company, the development of most games doesn't even start without the creation of some sort of GDD (Game Design Document) and tonnes of market research.

Back in 1990, our process was much more, shall we say, organic? I just had a large A4 notebook on my desk during the development of SWIV, into which I scribbled notes, doodles, ideas and completely random stuff that I don't understand now!

I was so pleased to recently discover that I'd kept this book. This is where I made all my notes while making SWIV. Most times I wouldn't put pen to paper, but would work directly from brain to computer. And even when I did sketch an idea, by the time it became pixels it would look totally different. But the fact that any visual record of my process exists at all is pretty amazing!

It's hard to get my 50 year old brain to unravel what my 21 year old brain was thinking. I did have an over-active imagination tried to cram so many ideas into that game - some worked well, some not so much, and anything that didn't make it into the Amiga version, did end up in the snes version, Super SWIV 2 years later.

It wasn't all made up as we went along - there was some sort of game design. Below are our nicknames for the various types of enemy. Fodder was anything that came in large, easy to kill waves. Goose was the copter that dropped pick-ups. Yelhoming were those little yellow copters that would home in on you (also in Silkworm)

I also have a few pages where I scribbled stuff for Super SWIV, so I'll post those up in part 3. Some of my favourite stuff in this book however, are the ideas for games that never got made, so I'll put all that up too. But until then, here's some more random SWIV doodles.

Puntettay.

SWIV Concept Art, Doodles and Notes: Part 1

When we released Silkworm in 1989 it was a surprise hit. Although the game was great, we didn't expect it to do that well because the Arcade machine it was based on wasn't widely well known. (Well, I'd never seen it before, and I lived in arcades, so I just assumed it wasn't well known!)

Based on Silkworm's success and positive reviews, Jane Cavanagh, the boss of Sci, green-lit a follow-up. and wanted the Silkworm team to develop it. Both Ronald Pieket and myself had already been working on our own personal shoot 'em up ideas. Ron, because he could code, had produced a playable demo of a game he'd been making before he started at Sci.

An early idea for an end of level boss

As I was only an artist, my idea was just in the conceptual stage and I had loads of drawings and ideas, which I'm very pleased to say that I have kept in storage! Hardly any of this made it into the final game, but it certainly fed into the look and feel of what later became SWIV.

Another Boss called The Killdozer. 

We were planning to fuse our ideas together, and I had already started doing sprites for Ron's game when the opportunity to make SWIV came along. I loved the quirky, stylised look of the vehicles in Silkworm and while we decided to keep that semi-futuristic look, we dropped the sideways scroller style and went for top-down verticle. Partly because that's fitted what we were already designing, but also to avoid it looking too similar to Silkworm.

A Gerry Anderson inspired idea for an airbase level

Pretty much every drawing I did was heavily influenced by Gerry Anderson TV show, especially the designs of Derek Meddings. I think that's why I loved Silkworm, because a lot of the hardware in that looked like it could have come straight out of UFO or Captain Scarlet. It was rooted in the look of existing, military vehicles, but with that futuristic twist. 

The wonderful thing about making SWIV was, like most projects in those days, we were given complete artistic freedom. Apart from the fact that we kept the two-player Jeep and Heli aspect, there was little else that carried over from Silkworm. 

And as we didn't have the license to do an official sequel, we had to come up with an ambiguous name that might or might not have referenced the name Silkworm. (I might have to devote a whole post just to discuss that title!)

An early concept for the pickups drop ship

The final design for the dropship made it into Super SWIV

I wanted to make a sort of Thunderbird 2 inspired drop-ship in SWIV, but in the end we went for a new version of the Goose-Copter that appeared in Silkworm. This would assemble itself in mid air and if the player shot it before it fully assembled, you would get extra pick-ups.

In Super SWIV, I got my drop ship in, and to keep that gameplay feature, we made it so that you got extra pickups if you shot the pod before the carrier picked it up. Or was it extra pickups if you shot it after? I can't remember!

Another End Level Boss idea

So, this is all the work I've found that I did between 1987 and when we started development of SWIV in 1989. 

In Part 2, I'll share all my sketches and development notes that I made while making the game. 

Commodore 64 Concept Art, published and Abandon-ware Part 3

Between the release of Hades Nebula in 1987 and me joining Sci in 1989, we (Paranoid Software) were eager for our next game release, but with the funding drying up, we had little resources or time. That didn't stop me sketching out lots of ideas and producing plenty of pixel work.

ENEMY

Enemy was our attempt at an R-Type / Nemesis style game. That was my sketch for the title screen, and the Koala Pad drawing. 

I believe I finished the graphics for all the levels and sprites. And Stuart Cook did code some of the game, but I don't think it was ever finished. 

Thanks to the amazing detective work of Frank Gasking and Darren Melbourne, there is some downloadable content at the Games That Weren't website. 

DUEL

This was such a cool idea. I loved Defender and Dropzone on the C64, but I was also really addicted to the two player action of Archon and Ballblazer. So I mashed the ideas together for a split screen, two player Defender style game. It had nice, multi-layer parallax scrolling ground and simple, instantly appealing gameplay. I don't remember it ever being coded, but apparently it was, and there's a playable download at Games That Weren't 

EXODUS

Now this is where my memory gets blurred. I was about 18/19 now, so hormones and alcohol had taken over from basic brain functions. There are other accounts of how it went down from Rick Paynter and Darren Melbourne

I think I was now working at Sci. I'd done some pixel work on an un-released Commodore 64 port of Kid Nikki: Radical Ninja. Then I spent some time designing this Uridium / Defender style game. It was a left-right scroller and you had to defend a fleet of ships, like the rag-tag fleet from Battlestar Galacitca, from space pirates that would try to drill through the hulls of the colony ships.

When we learned that the name Exodus had already been used, it got renamed as Long Haul, and there was another title which I forget. Coding wise, it was about half finished by Rick Paynter. Game That Weren't has some downloads.

Max E Tuff

My memory is pretty sketchy about this. We had always planned a sequel to Hades Nebula with platform game stages. This started off as a twist where you played the bad guy, A fallen Emperor Hades. We wanted the gameplay to be like Rygar and Shaolin's Road. 

The idea got put on hold while I worked on Duel, but Darren Melbourne had been writing for a character called Mr Max E Tuff so we then decided to base the game around that. 

I did this one drawing of how it could look in the game. It was planned for the Commodore 64, but when we started working at Sci in 1989, the idea was put on a back-burner.

Many years later, this idea evolved into (an also un-published) Mr. Tuff for the Snes.

All these drawings have been discovered while trawling through my loft, but this is just the tip of the iceberg! Luckily, I kept most of my drawing pads and note-books from my time at Sci, so I have all my sketches and notes that I made during the development of SWIV. 

In my next series I'll dive deep into SWIV and other Amiga games that never were....

Commodore 64 Concept Art, published and Abandon-ware Part 2

HADES NEBULA

Sometime in 1985/1986, Myself (Ned Langman), Darren Melbourne and the rest of us, when not wandering aimlessly around the streets of Welling, would hit the arcades and pile all our cash into games like Xevious, Slap Fight and, best of all, Star Force - an intense space shoot-em-up.

Starforce

Uridium - C64

And when Uridium came out on the C64 in 1986, we were inspired, under the name Paranoid Software (taken from Space Paranoids in Tron) to make Hades Nebula for the Commodore 64 with me on pixel duty and Mark Greenshields coding. Nexus Software published it in 1987.

Recently I found loads of concept art in my attic. This one was supposed to be one of the end of level bosses.

It makes me laugh to read all the notes now! I was only about 17. But it was the law in those days to have a cheesy back-story. And we were hoping to do lots of sequels.

Everyone was obsessed with gray-scale shading back then, so all games had embossed slabs or metal spheres. Sadly, I gave the wrong colour palette data to Mark, so the climactic end of game boss, Emperor Hades' ship (pictured above) was in inverted colours and looked all corrupted!

That big guy with the gun is not Thanos! It's the big bad Emperor Hades. We were going to have platform shooter levels in the sequel, but that idea mutated into something else.

Aw bless, I remember being really pleased with that when I did it! Just as well I had a day-job. I do remember us all being very excited when we saw the box artwork. Having your first game published and seeing it in the shops was such a high, even if the game was balls-hard to play. 

Also, special respect to the late Ben Daglish who composed the excellent music, which I think might be the thing people remember most about the game, but that's cool by me!

In Part 3: Commodore 64 games that weren't

Commodore 64 Concept Art, published and Abandon-ware Part 1

Clearing out my loft, I'm discovering old game concept doodles and sketches that I did throughout the 80s. I never considered myself great at art, but being able to make computer games motivated me to draw.

All my inspiration came from Sci Fi artists like Chris Foss, Syd Mead and Ron Cobb, and the tv work of Gerry Anderson and Derek Meddings.

While only a few of these games were published, all of them were coded and some almost completed. The earliest sketch I found is for a character called Nuker who was born when I started doodling over my art homework of a shaded ball!

When Paradroid came out, it inspired me to design a game around the character. Nuker (meaning "Nuclear Snooker") had the very simple concept of a droid ball that has to push radio-active waste balls down disposal chutes.

Then, we started work on Hades Nebula, so the idea was put on hold. After Hades Nebula came out, I presented the idea to Darren Melbourne and he recruited Stuart Cook for coding duties, and I did the pixel work.

By then, Arkanoid was the current craze, and so we put in all these power ups that made it easier to dispatch the balls. And enemy droids would get in the way or try to kill you.

In my memory, it was never finished or released, and as it had been a year since leaving school, I had to choose between further education or work, and that was when I joined Sci.

Thanks to the internet, and the growth of interest in vintage gaming and abandonware, I've been able to learn that Thalamus expressed an interest in the game, and Frank Gasking has written about it all here!

I still love the concept of Nuker, and who knows, maybe I will bring the game back to life!

In part 2, Hades Nebula!

Weta Workshop Hacked My Brain

Yeah, I know, there's no such thing as a new idea - it's just one of the downsides of being a creative genius, I guess - but can you imagine how vexed I was when, tuning into the new Thunderbirds Are Go TV series by Weta in 2015, I saw one of their vehicles, the Thunder Shadow, resembling an idea I had for a Thunderbirds sequel I designed 20 years before the episode aired!!

So, here's my sketch for a rescue vehicle that takes off vertically from a platform that swivels into position.

Whilst in flight, the jet craft can then jetison it's cockpit which turns into a wheeled road vehicle that's like a cross between a bike and a car.

And here is the Thunder Shadow which, yep, does the exact same thing!

I was super pissed off, because this was meant to be my star vehicle - I'd  written many stories that centered around it's unique abilities. And, just to put one last boot in, was to be piloted by a female character, just like the Thunder Shadow.


I had to rewrite episodes, and drop the vehicle altogether. It sucked, and this happens all the time. But rather than getting bitter about it, I prefered to take it as a validation.
This isolated, unemplyed nerd, who lives in the back end of the West Country, had ideas that are worthy enough to make it into a prime-time tv show like Thunderbirds, which I have always loved.