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.