Independent game studio

New games for old machines. And new ones.

I'm Francis Lillie. I wrote Puggsy on the Amiga, Worms on the Mega Drive and SNES, and Crazy Taxi on the Game Boy Advance. Silicon Wizardry is my own studio, building for Amiga, Mega Drive, Neo Geo and GBA as well as Steam, web and mobile.

game credits: 40
published: 31
unreleased: 9
platforms: 13

Amiga ★ Mega Drive ★ SNES ★ Game Boy Advance ★ PlayStation ★ Dreamcast ★ CD32 ★ Game Gear ★ PS2 ★ Wii ★ J2ME ★ PC ★ Next: Neo Geo · Steam · iOS · Android · Web

In development

Read the devlog →

In development

Puggsy AGA

An AGA version of Puggsy for the Commodore Amiga.

Amiga

From the back catalogue

Every professional game credit, shipped or not, across 13 platforms. Filter by platform, status, role, type or the language it was written in.

Commodore Amiga · #5

Puggsy

First published game; arm movement and more rebuilt from scratch.

Publisher: Psygnosis
Developer: The Dome
Role: Sole/Lead
Language: 68000 assembly
Type: Conversion + original

Published

I do, and always will, consider this to be my first published game. Broadly speaking it was supposed to be a conversion of the Sega Megadrive version, but we never had completed source to work from, just a submission candidate cartridge. So, although there was some code that could be used, some of the more complex game code, such as the arm movement was absent, and had to be coded from scratch. I was forced to develop this using the Amiga’s dual playfield system, which I did not agree with, but went with anyway.

Sega Mega Drive · #6

Euro Soccer Manager

95% complete and in QA; built on the Rachel dev board.

Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: The Dome
Role: Sole/Lead
Language: 68000 assembly
Type: Original

Unreleased

This was my first taste of developing for consoles and it was done using the non-official “Rachel” Megadrive development board from Codemasters. Although this was never actually published the game was 95% complete and had started QA testing. It was a football management game where you could watch the games play out like the original version of FIFA.

Sega Mega Drive · #11

Worms

Deformable landscapes on a character-map machine.

Publisher: Team 17/Ocean
Developer: East Point Software
Role: Sole/Lead
Language: 68000 assembly
Type: Conversion + original

Published

This was my first game for EPS, and I was moved onto it the day I started. At this point in time, unknown to me, it was already 9 months behind schedule, and all that was in place was a (superb) graphics engine, and most of the logic behind having a fully deformable landscape, which was unheard of on a character map-based system. It was supposed to be a conversion, but all we had to work from was 2 year old Blitz Basic source code and a set of master-candidate Amiga disks, so the “conversion” was done from playing the game and a few rules written in a Word document. Some features/weapons had to be dropped because of hardware limitations.

Super Nintendo · #12

Worms

Converted from the Mega Drive code base.

Publisher: Team 17/Ocean
Developer: East Point Software
Role: Sole/Lead
Language: 65816 assembly
Type: Conversion + original

Published

Once I had finished the Megadrive version I was moved across to the SNES version which again only had a basic graphics engine in place, but no code for deformable landscapes. I chose to convert from the Megadrive code, as I knew that inside out, obviously. Apparently this was Team 17/Ocean’s first published Nintendo game.

Game Boy Advance · #29

Zoocube

Stripped back and rebuilt to ship.

Publisher: Acclaim
Developer: Graphic State
Role: Sole
Language: C, ARM & THUMB assembly
Type: Original

Published

When I joined Graphic State this game was about 60% complete, but due to the way it had been written there was no way it could be completed, so I had to strip it back to about 20% and start again. It was a quirky little game, and quite a technical achievement.

Game Boy Advance · #30

Crazy Taxi: Catch A Ride

Dreamcast to GBA with no source or assets to start from.

Publisher: THQ
Developer: Graphic State
Role: Lead
Language: C, ARM & THUMB assembly
Type: Conversion + original

Published

One of the hardest projects I ever worked on. This was a conversion from the Dreamcast to the GBA. A vast difference in performance obviously. We had no source code to work from, or graphics, so it was in effect an original, as we used online maps to build the worlds, and playing the Dreamcast version to try and get the car handling right. Other members of my team took care of the 3D engine, and I wrote everything else and tied it all together.

Browse all 40 games →

About

I've loved programming and games since I was about 10. I wrote games professionally part-time from 16, full-time from 18 to 31, then part-time for five more years: at The Dome, East Point Software, Promethean Designs, Graphic State and as a freelancer.

Silicon Wizardry is where I make my own games now: new titles for the machines I grew up on, alongside modern releases.

More about Silicon Wizardry →