Development on Ewe Woz 'Ere started at the end of January 2020, just after the competition was announced. The initial prototype came together fairly quickly. At this stage the game was going to be a more conventional run and gun style game, potentially with platforms and other obstacles. I had decided not to use a sprite multiplexer this time so only 8 sprites would be available in the game at a time.

As seen in the video, some elements of the prototype were removed by the end (such as the starfield, which was initially changed to clouds but then moved into the readme file). This prototype had the entity system, animation, physics and scrolling mostly working but not much else. No sound as yet but the sound effects player would have been included. We used the C64's ECM mode for the graphics which made the hi-res backgrounds look a lot nicer.

At this stage, our development tools were Visual Studio Code, Kick Assembler, Aseprite, SpritePad, CharPad and our own custom tools. Most of the graphics were designed in Aseprite then converted to SpritePad and CharPad formats and refined for the game.