Cheers!
I always wanted the game to have that effect, I wanted to get people into games. Even if they hadn't played them before, or didn't like them, I wanted to try and capture their imagination and give them something they'd enjoy.
Yeah, in the period where I was still at school and had ported it to the Amiga. As it was evolving and I'd made the tanks move, jumping obviously looked stupid. I'd also been teaching myself to code in assembler because of how much I liked the demo scene, and understanding how memory was used to store everything made me also write a program called Jack The Ripper, which let me view graphics, find music, and just mess around with memory really.
The game was just for me and my mates at this point, and small characters were needed so I bunged them in there to make all the moving around and jumping look right. It also made the whole thing quite funny, the game was now called Lemartillery at this point.
When that got banned and I quit A-Level art, I started a complete rewrite of it all called Total Wormage. I picked worms as what the characters should be because at that point they were about the only creature that hadn't been in a game! This was pre-Earthworm Jim time. I also thought I could get a lot of humour into their animations, such as sticking into the ground like a ruler, spinning and things like that. I'd always been so impressed with the amount of detail and character they'd got into the animation in Lemmings, so that became another little challenge to myself to see if I could draw things that small that had the same effect.
Drawing all the worms also started a chain-reaction where loads of new things started going into the game, just because I could. I always remember after I put the spinning worms in, to make it look funnier when things were thrown by explosions, I then thought worms should knock other worms as well and with the spinning animation it would look correct. So I changed that and then absolutely loads of extra strategy started opening up. Also leading to things like Kamikaze, which I was very chuffed with
The rewrite and all the additions took about 2 years, and Total Wormage was the game I showed Team17 in 1994. As a whole game it was about 80% done at that point, the last things to go in the Amiga version over the next year was stuff like new background graphics, and custom levels where you could play on pictures and import them.