Stormlord
Built in public, one diary entry at a time
Raffaele Cecco's 1989 Hewson game, and the only one in this Vault whose construction was documented month by month in a magazine column as it happened. CRASH gave it 91%; Sinclair User gave it 71%.
Stormlord is Raffaele Cecco’s follow-up to Cybernoid for Hewson: a scrolling platform game about freeing captured fairies, with the dense, exact pixel work that made his name.
It is also the best-documented game in this Vault, because CRASH ran Cecco’s Log — a development diary, published under dated entries while the game was being written.
How it was received
The press disagreed about it more than about any other Hewson title here.
| Magazine | Score | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Your Sinclair | 93% | June 1989 |
| CRASH | 91% | May 1989 |
| C&VG | 87% | June 1989 |
| The Games Machine | 86% | May 1989 |
| Sinclair User | 71% | May 1989 |
| ACE | 574/1000 | June 1989 |
Twenty-two points between Your Sinclair and Sinclair User in the same month, and ACE’s 574 is far below the 871–931 it gave R-Type and Driller. Your Sinclair returned to it at 92% in August 1990.
Stormlord II: Deliverance followed in 1990 — Your Sinclair 91%, CRASH 85%.
Cecco’s Log
The diary is why so much of this game’s making is recoverable. Written in the first person with mock-Star Trek stardates, it ran across a year of CRASH and records the decisions as they were taken.
The scrolling, May–June 1988. The earliest entries are about making it move. He is “using every nifty little trick I can think of” to get the scrolling fast enough, and by 18 June is adding a parallax effect — a pattern of dots giving an illusion of depth behind the playfield. A visitor to the studio that August is recorded as duly impressed by “the super-smooth scrolling plus the fabulous colourful and lavish graphics”.
Why he was pleased to be on it at all, 3 October 1988:
How wonderful it is to once again be tucking into my pride and joy — Stormlord. To be quite honest, I was getting rather jaded bashing away at Cybernoid II-type code for so many months. Programming the same game can become very routine and boring after a while, regardless of how innovative or tremendous you thought it was at the beginning.
A design decision, 4 October. He resolves that Stormlord’s information panel should be unlike those in Exolon and Cybernoid, representing what the player needs graphically rather than numerically — prettier, and less boring than his old panels. In the same entry he notes a change in the industry with visible regret:
These days, regretfully, it is becoming the norm for graphics to be drawn by an artist leaving the programmer’s time free to concentrate on coding.
A mechanic, 11 October. Discussing with Nick Jones how the character should fire, he settles on holding the key to build energy and releasing it to throw — more energy meaning a faster, longer throw. His own note on why: it “introduces a nifty element of strategy that I will utilize when planning out the maps”. The control scheme is chosen before the level design, and shapes it.
Refactoring, 14 October. He spends a day re-coding the sprite handler:
I could adopt the old adage of ‘if it works then leave it’ but feel that the new modifications (that make the routine more flexible) will pay dividends as far as programming time goes in the long run.
The music arrives, January 1989. The diary records Dave Rogers delivering “sound effects and music for Stormlord”, which Cecco “hastily” drops into the program to hear. Stormlord’s score is one of the most admired on the machine and is very often credited to Tim Follin; the diary of the man who put it in the game says otherwise.
And the rest of it. The ‘life force’ and ‘fairy level’ indicators working on 12 October. A visit on the 13th to “good friend and fellow programmer” David Perry, who wrote Savage, to admire a VW Scirocco that Perry — 6ft 8in — has to drive with the sunroof open. The customary last-minute rush on the 18th, with the Spectrum choosing that moment to misbehave. And the meeting itself on the 19th with Hewson’s software manager Paul Chamberlain, where he and Jones were “slightly praised for our work (but as usual we had to make our own coffee)”.
Why the diary matters
Andrew Braybrook kept development diaries in Zzap!64 and they are rightly famous. Cecco doing the same in CRASH means both of Hewson’s flagship authors published their working notes while working — which is a remarkable amount of primary documentation for an industry usually reconstructed from interviews decades later.
For anyone learning this craft, the diary is more useful than the game: it shows a professional choosing a control scheme before a map, rewriting a working routine because flexibility will repay the time, and being bored by his own successful engine.