Thank you Sparky-D,
I totally agree, C64 games and joysticks just go together. Unfortunately, the lack of joystick here was purely due how unresponsive it was during testing. The game running in BASIC just doesn't loop fast enough to capture the joystick input as it happens. This leads having to hold it in the direction you want to go to get it to work, making fast direction changes almost impossible. The keyboard on the other hand is read from the buffer where the last 10 keystrokes are stored. This allows you to type all of you next moves fast and watch the millipede perform them on its next moves, making U-turns and other multi direction changes easy to pull off. I think the only way to be able to replicate this with the joystick would be a complete rewrite of the game in Assembly language, as the game loop would run 100x times faster.
But I will definitely keep this in mind moving forwards. I do want to start making Assembly games in the future.
Thanks again, Steve