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.)
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. :)
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):
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’!
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