the Crystal Sphere. The player can bring the ship close to an enemy ship, board, and do turn based hand-to-hand combat on a simple isometric map. A full range of spells and weapons is available, and ships are crewed by a wide range of humans and monsters. In the turn-based combat system, the player controls the ship's officers, and the computer controls the regular crew and the enemies. The turn-based combat engine supports spell effects and animations on the map, for example a "stinking cloud" that persists for multiple turns. Development Initial phase Al Escudero was a successful game designer with a couple of commercial titles under his belt working out of Vancouver BC, Canada in 1990. Escudero had started design work on a space battle game for Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), and put in a few months of effort before SSI decided to kill the project. Design work continued for as long as it did because the decision to kill the project did not trickle down to the level of management Escudero was dealing with for two months after upper management killed the project. To make up for the loss of time and money, SSI quickly found another project for Escudero – Spelljammer. Escudero designed the ship to ship combat and came up with the idea of using a 2D map, then using the distance between ships to scale the size of the ship's bitmap and display it in a simple 3D view on one plane. He then designed the basic layout of all menus, the overall look and feel of the turn based hand-to-hand combat, and most other key parts of the game. At this time Cybertech Systems was actually just Escudero in his basement. Lead programmer Alex Russell was acquainted with him because he went to high-school with Russell's younger brother. Russell had done a couple of small porting jobs for Escudero in the past. Another programmer named David "Zoid" Kirsch worked on the game for a couple of months. As Russell had only been programming business systems up to now, Zoid's knowledge of PC hardware was valuable at the start of the project. Artwork Escudero worked on the art for the game, doing most of the planets, tiles, and much other minor art. Russell also did artwork, doing a few scenes used when at ports, and decorations for menus. They also used a black and white