What software tools did you use?

[sima]

What software tools were used at the Ocean office for game development in the 8-bit era?

And what tools did you use when you started coding games in assembler for the first time (maby at home)?

[Bill Harbison]

Personally on the art side i used The Artist II for loading screens and an inhouse sprite/animation editor written by John Brandwood for the Atari ST which could even handle Spectrum sprites. It was a great utility and way ahead of it's time.

[Paulie]

Initially on the code side we used a Tatung Einstein based cross assembler (written by Mike Webb) for the Spectrum and a Commodore 128 based cross assembler for the C64 (again by Mike Webb) - around 1988 we wrote a new cross assembler / dissasembler / debugger on the Atari ST that could assemble to Spectrum, Amstrad, C64, ST, Amiga, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Megadrive and even the Konix Multisystem! (written by Dave Collier, Paul Owens, Alan Shortt and myself).

When I first started writing (on the Vic20!) I used to enter everything in hex in a machine code monitor! Once I got a C64 I wrote my own assembler and used that until I discovered Crystal Computing's Zeus Assembler.

[Mark Jones Junior]

I used an amended version of 'Melbourne Draw' that could handle animation for sprites and the 'Artist II' for loading screens. On the ST I used the aforementioned John Brandwood written animator. Was jolly good! All backed up on Microdrives, which, STILL, were readable nearly 20 years later when all the data was salvaged off them.

[dlfrsilver]

you mean SpriteED and Mapeditor by Elmer Food ?

I got my hands on these quite complex and mainly no manual
hehe.

These tools use *.WRK files and *.SPR files am i right ?