Carleton Handley

I remember the demo disk coming into the office bundled with CTW. No work was done that day. Such an amazing game, thanks for making it.

Don’t tell me I don’t know how to treat my wife on Valentine’s Night. We’re in the Pixel Bar in Manchester. To be fair it was her idea.

Some pro-gamers are on the TV earning more money than any developer I’ve ever worked with.

I had two Game Gear games published. One was the original FIFA game. The other was the official Winter Olympics game of 1994. Sadly we didn’t do Curling which is a fave of us Brits as we’re good at it. Otherwise I think it’s a pretty solid effort.

I never knew Skull and Crossbones was included on a compilation. One more on the list of physical releases of my #C64 games I don't own.

Yeah, there’s something oddly satisfying about it.

Blimey! I'd have expected exporters and plug-ins maybe. Can tell I've been out of the games industry for an age.

From when part of creating a game was also making your own bespoke utilities. I coded at least five map editors and a couple of sprite tools BITD. Degas Elite (ST) and DPaint 2 (PC) changed some of that but even in my Zed Two days (early 2000s) I wrote a map editor for a PS1 game I was developing.

Coding in hex is madness.

I think a lot of people used Zeus Assembler for Z80. Actually written by Simon Brattell who made the hardware I mentioned. He talks about Design Design’s dev processes a bit here:

www.desdes.com/products/old...

PDS was a great piece of kit. The Z80 developers worked on Amstrad word processors with a bespoke piece of hardware built by one of the developers there. Although that was pretty advanced I think they were quite jealous of my setup.

All my C64 games were developed on an Amstrad 1640 coupled with the Programmer’s Development System (PDS). @uridiumauthor.bsky.social spoke of 20 minute compile times in his Zzap diaries, mine was seconds. Still didn’t make me produce anything off the quality he did.

Cheers, I may take you up on that. Out of touch with this old school design. I need everything pointing out to me these days.

I’ve set up the #C64 Mini Black and I’m suitably impressed. Always wanted to play Sam’s Journey but never got around to it. I’m stuck on the second screen!

Moon Jelly. A game just about everybody who was at Software Creations worked on at the time but very little info is available. I worked on it and can only barely remember it! We never had a publisher for it so I don't imagine there was much promo.

They wanted to give the other games a chance to shine.

I’ve eventually got hold of a #C64 Mini Black Edition. It includes 25 modern C64 games, four of which I coded. @stepickford.bsky.social‘s version of Millie & Molly also adorn the box. Looking forward to trying out some of the other games on there. Quite a few look amazing.

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I’m guessing they’ve refilled the chemicals. No access to that stuff when we were kids, we couldn’t even afford replacement batteries.

I assume it’s even older than the 70s. Pretty sure my dad gifted us his original from the loft, along with an OG Subutteo. All the chemicals had perished but it was nice to have the test tubes.

In 2019 Grid Pix was the first game I coded for the #C64 in the modern era. It led to some amazing physical versions and a glowing review in Retro Gamer. No wonder I got back into coding for the old machine. I've released eight games since then and worked on plenty of abandoned projects.

I think it was fair enough. Things were moving really fast back then. Home computers were being replaced by consoles. I had no experience of the latter. I don’t think my heart was really in it, I was planning on leaving the industry. And I’m terrible in interviews.

Went for an interview there in '92. Didn't get it. Whole place felt chaotic in a good way.

Thanks. I did start the second mission of RnG but struggled to come up with ideas for the levels. I think I need somebody with better design skills than I have to do that sort of thing.

I reckon 2026 is the year I complete the #ZXSpectrumNext #ZXNext port of my #C64 game Runn 'n' Gunn. I made some rapid progress early in 2025 but didn't have see great change later in the year. This is known to programmers as the 90/90 rule:

w.wiki/A6MJ

I received an @evercade.co.uk for Xmas. I fancy picking up one of the Indie packs as my first cart. I can't decide which is the best. I see there's a #C64 cart, wouldn't have minded getting some of my games on there. Perhaps if the do another I can pitch ;)

That's tough. There are at least five all-timers there. I'm going to cheat: Paradroid, Elite and Action Biker for solo gaming. Summer Games II and Kikstart when mates are round.

Vinny was a real help during the development of RnG. He gave a load of helpful feedback on Beta versions. There was only one difficulty level, now classed as hard mode, before I sent it to him. Developers get good at their own games and can lose sight of the challenge.

Cheers, that’s pretty amazing. Half the time we weren’t even allowed to put credits in our games. And he’s got away with a classified ad.

I was told never to return early from a function. So I never did:

if (x) return

which leads to nesting I guess. I have softened on this over the years.

Don’t start on Egyptian braces.

Didn’t play that. Didn’t they take the piss that he advertised a programming book in the scroller on the title screen?

I think Zzap hammered this but I really enjoyed it. The Spectrum version was really good. The coder of the version became a producer and worked on a couple of my early Domark games.