While some of the professional development probably was on host systems, not all of it was.

Especially since the release of Turbo Assembler in 1985, serious development on the C64 was quite comfortable.

Years later in the 90ies, Fairlight enhanced Turbo Assembler with REU support, which made development on the machine itself ridiculously comfortable. Basically the only thing missing I can recall was there was no concept of version management back then.

Of course, this came too late for professional development but it's basically what the demo scene ran on till cross assembling from PCs came in vogue.

"AAA" publishers of the period definitely used larger systems, all the way up to VAXen, but smaller devs worked on the systems themselves because that's all they had. If you buy some teenager's game for £10 at the chemist's, that teenager can't afford a large powerful system to develop with.

I seem to recall an interview with Paul Urbanus in which he noted that the graphics for Parsec on the TI-99/4A were designed on the TI-99/4A, which to him proved the machine as a tool for serious creative work.

I remember reading a story about writing games in the 80's, and the programmers were all using some powerful timeshare system, but during the workday it slowed to a crawl as everyone compiled their code.

It was far more productive to just write/run code on a dedicated Atari/C64 or whatever the target system was.

The C64 was being actively developed for for a decade or more, and Blood Money came in 1990, towards the end of that period. The Amiga was reaching its peak popularity by then.

By that point, more powerful development machines and tools will have become much more affordable/available than in the early 80s.

Ron Gilbert (of Maniac Mansion / DOTT / Monkey Island / SCUMM fame) speaks to this in an interview he gave at Handmade Con, you can find it on youtube.

IIRC he says they used UNIX workstations to develop Maniac Mansion/SCUMM for the C64. Complete with hot loading of levels, presumably they had a similar hardware interface to what's shown in TFA for manipulating C64 memory contents from the UNIX box.

Response via Bsky https://bsky.app/profile/mdf200.bsky.social/post/3m3uejt3yi2...

"Parts 2 and 3 will be released over time.... prob one a week or something - if I remember :)

Patreons get access to all locked articles."

Would like to read them as well

Man I'm still waiting for a modern (2D) Lemmings remake or spiritual successor :')

Take oscar64 [0]. So far the best C compiler for the C64 with a lot of extra options, good library and a good documentation.

[0] https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64

I am using ca65 / cc65 for all my Commodore programming. Should run under Linux just fine.

https://ide.retrogamecoders.com

The problem with these games was that you tended to lose all your upgrades if you die, and later levels were essentially unplayable if you lost all those upgrades. So you really only had one life.

And you'd quickly figure out a fairly optimal upgrade sequence and stick to it.

Still, I enjoyed them back then too. X-Out was another one, with a particularly interesting shop/ship configuration system for its time.

Yeah, played both of these on the ST, absolutely loved blowing up weird alien squid things and collecting loot.

"an inherently repayable experience"

Interesting choice of words.

Blood Money is way too hard now. Even when playing on an emulator and cheating a bit with savestates!

Was super-impressed by the visuals of the Amiga version at the time, those jellyfish animations and huge claws on the 2nd stage.

(Never played the C64 version back in the day, but it does look surprisingly impressive, quite faithful to the Amiga version, a whole lot of stuff moving around at a good speed)

It is even harder for me now. I found such games easier as a child.

Yeah, it was hard. Then again, many C64 games were hard, but I remember my brother and I really struggling with Blood Money.

PDS required a PC with PDS ISA card (not much more than an 8255 iirc), was never available on the ST..