Terrorballs Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum

A walkthrough of the ZX Spectrum game, Terrorballs. A 1987 unpublished sequel to Dogsbody, which was only recovered in 2020 by the author Steven Monks (Whammo Productions)...Help Rover the dog to bomb all the Terrorballs on each level before moving on to the next one. Completed until it loops around.
From the recording originally sent by Rafal to www.rzxarchive.... . Recorded using "rollback", a feature of the emulator which allows you to mark a point, which you can then roll back to later if you get into difficulty, and try again. More info. on the channel "About" page: / rzxarchive
#ZXSpectrum #RetroGaming #Walkthrough

[@stevemonks]

I love the fact that someone took the time to play this all the way through to the end. I'm feeling a little bit guilty now for not putting in some kind of game complete screen.

[@stevemonks]

Yes, although it never got published and had sat on a tape gathering dust in my desk drawer for 20 years until someone contacted me about getting tape images of Dogsbody for preservation purposes, at which point I said "by the way, you might be interested in this..." . It's pretty much the last thing I wrote for the Spectrum before moving onto the Amiga and PC. There's an Amstrad CPC 464 version out in the wild somewhere too, redrawn in lurid 4 colour graphics. It's mostly the same code, written and assembled on the Spectrum because I preferred the dev tools I had on the Spectrum to what was available to me on the Amstrad at that time.

[@stevemonks]

Dogsbody was my first commercially published game, so there's probably some terrible code in there. I think I was doing some pretty dumb things such as the 4 pixel character movement by repeatedly shifting the bitmaps, rather than just storing a pre-shifted set of graphics, which didn't occur to me at the time, but is pretty obvious when you think about it. Used for reference, that codebase could set someone back years ;-)

[@stevemonks]

Seems fair, that game's got a lot to answer for. Personally I'm blaming it for a 30+ year programming career in the games industry.
Although it looks like a Boulder Dash clone, I actually got some of the ideas from a C64 game called Quango which I briefly saw at a local computer club and thought it looked cool. At the time I never played Quango, or Boulder Dash either for that matter, so I was oblivious to the nuances of both games when I put Dogsbody together. IIRC it took me a week to write and just over a weekend to port to the CPC 464.
I've recently been rewriting it in C for the ZX Spectrum Next. hopefully fixing all of the infamous bugs it has and some of the gameplay issues. I might even add more levels if I ever get time to finish it. 40th Anniversary version anyone?

[@robsmall6466]

Amstrad also has an unfinished version of the game. Sad that it wasn't completed

[@stevemonks]

The Amstrad version was finished to the same extent as the Spectrum version, it was mostly the same codebase as this one (both versions were assembled on the Spectrum). Neither were released though.

[@robsmall6466]

@@stevemonks Was there supposed to be more levels or was it supposed to loop back to the beginning at the end as seen in the video?

[@stevemonks]

@@robsmall6466 I hadn't planned for more levels, IIRC there wasn't really any space for more. The levels were stored uncompressed, if I was to write it now I'd be using some sort of compression to squeeze a few more levels in. I should have implemented some sort of end screen as a reward for playing it through, but looping back to the start was an easy option and not uncommon in those days.

[@robsmall6466]

@@stevemonks That's great info. Shame it was unreleased but glad it's now available for everyone to try

[@pauljones8135]

good graphics for 87