Back in October, the news about a 30th anniversary edition of Worms: The Director’s Cut made the rounds, to be released at Gerp 2025. Original developer Andy Davidson will put together a new release on the original platform: Worms DC 1.5 for the Amiga!

(By the way: If you haven’t already, now is a good time to watch the fascinating documentary about the making of Worms a.k.a. Total Wormage.)

Andy Davidson on Twitter

Look at that BlitzBasic code, erm, comments… :)

Being a huge fan of Worms myself, I had to get in on that!

Naturally, the first step to design a custom level for the game is to reverse-engineer the internal file formats and build a custom tool based on the existing level editor, WormPrefs. :)

WormPrefs

Apart from the fun of meddling with obscure binary formats, this was a welcome opportunity to freshen up my JavaScript and HTML foo: Juggling with binary data and UInt8Arrays, file-drop inputs, canvas drawing, classes (gasp!), color and range inputs, etc. And it brought some concrete advantages for other custom level designers, too (I hope):

• Live previews of everything
• Live palette manipulation
• Ability to quickly inspect existing custom level, mountains and landscape files

So here it is, my little Worms DC assets utility. No Node.js, no frameworks, just plain JavaScript (and Simple.css):

Worms DC Assets util

The tool is still work in progress. I need to tackle DIY landscapes at one point, and there are always weird file format issues popping up.

To join the fun, have a look at the dedicated Worms DCHQ Discord server. Keep on wormin’!