STERCORE
A Spectrum game from C64CD, developed and released for the CSSCGC 2018

The Story So Far
It’s the year 2304 and, after centuries of negotiation, diplomacy and peace unexpectedly collapse, an intergalactic war has broken out; outlying worlds of the Galactic Federation have already found themselves coming under fire from the Repugnant Swarm who have laid waste to cities and farmland alike simply because the Galactic Federation’s Right Honourable Representative for Earth And Her Colonies made a flippant comment about the livery of the Federation’s spacecraft being “a prettier shade of green”.
The next target of the Swarm’s ire on their way to the centre of our galactic hub and the source of that insult is Stercore 48, an artificial “world” constructed in deep space that was installed as a refuelling point for those slow moving but important cargo craft which deliver supplies to the federation’s outlying colonies. It also unofficially acts as a trading post for some of the nearby communities which is how your garbage scow the Theresa May comes to be connected to the docking harness of bay 42, automatically loading up on trash for dumping whilst you arrange the delivery of several thousand inflatable bananas in the process because everybody needs to make a little cash on the side these days and those things don’t deliver themselves.
Like all other deep space outposts, Stercore 48 isn’t completely lawless but can offer various entertainments of questionable legality to its visitors, although you’ve chosen to spend a relatively quiet hour occupying a corner booth in one of the seedier dockside pubs, nursing what the bar staff are generously calling “a beer” and waiting for the Theresa May to finish taking on fuel. That seems to be going well until your quiet contemplation, the strains of whatever bland dross is playing on the battered sub ether radio above the bar and a spirited discussion nearby about the merits of various brands of quantum flux star drive are simultaneously interrupted by a cacophony of klaxons, triggered by the arrival of a fleet of green Repugnant Swarm fighters as they unexpectedly translate into existence nearby and manoeuvre into an attack formation.
Everybody else makes for their allotted bay to get the heck out of Dodge – many are hauling the kind of cargo that either explodes unexpectedly or really shouldn’t be there in the first place – but your intentions are different; the Theresa May might be a bulky, rusted piece of pretty much obsolete space junk but, due to some healthy paranoia on your part, she’s also armed to the metaphorical teeth. So, with bay 42 set to auto detach you fire up the systems and sling your craft skywards, aiming directly for the ridiculously stupid enemies that need to be destroyed for... well, reasons? Look, this is a shoot ‘em up and nobody reads the instructions for these things unless it’s to kill time during loading so I’m surprised you’re still paying any attention at this point!

The Game
Stercore is a scrolling shoot ‘em up for any Sinclair Spectrum with 48K of memory or more and can be played either from the keyboard – controls are the classic Q, A, O, P and M – or via joystick with either Sinclair or Kempston compatible hardware. The action takes place flying at speed in the Theresa May over Stercore 48 and, because the scrolling is moving at eight pixels per frame, there aren’t any landscape features to collide with; the player’s craft and enemies do pass behind some of the background elements however, so keep an eye out for sneaky Repugnant Horde craft concealing themselves in this manner.
The objective is to travel the entire length of Stercore 48, destroying as many enemies as possible along the way in the hope that your efforts will leave la more manageable number of targets for the Galactic Federation’s forces to deal with when - or possibly more accurately if - they turn up. Good luck, captain.

Credit Where Due
All programming, graphics, “music”, general data wrangling and tea making by Jason.
The character set, tiles and map data were created with Char Pad 2, sprite designs edited using ProMotion 6.5 and anything that needed converting was juggled by bespoke tools written in BlitzMax. The tune was originally “composed” by a Python script called Autotracker, with the results being manually shovelled into Beepola.

The Legal Disclaimer
This program and its associated source code are provided “as is” with no warranties from the developer, implied or otherwise; playing Stercore for extended periods of time can cause epileptic seizures, heart palpitations, constant itching, mild to severe vomiting or a vague feeling of ennui that the suffer can’t quite put their finger on the cause of.  Stercore is 100% machine washable (apart from the bits that aren't, which is pretty much all of it really) and fully compatible with the ZX Spectrum Vega+ unless someone fancies proving me wrong.