The Damsel in Dese Boxing Gloves

The first Dizzy game was a straight up assassination quest. Granted, it was of an officially Evil wizard via the medium of a magical potion, but still. The second game found Dizzy stranded on a desert island trying to get home to what the manual called the 'Yolkfolk'. The third in the series, Fantasy World Dizzy, started naming the Yolkfolk, something like an extended family for Dizzy. Dylan, Denzil, Dozy and Grand Dizzy were characters you could talk to. Daisy, introduced as Dizzy's paramour, has been kidnapped and needs to be rescued. Rescuing Daisy became the primary objective in most official games - albeit in some you also needed to rescue the rest of the Yolkfolk.

It was a simpler time. Damsels in distress abounded.

When I set out to make Lost Temple Dizzy, I wanted curing the Yolkfolk of a disease to be the primary objective (and from the vantage point of 2021 it seems very on the nose). Daisy was no more imperilled than anyone else. Other fangame creators had already made Daisy the star of their games; and for Iron Tower Dizzy I wanted the player to be able to control both her and Dizzy, switching between them. Both of them are prisoners, and both work to escape. I'd like to credit whoever originally made the character switching code for DizzyAGE, but I can't remember who made it. For most of Iron Tower, the two characters are separated so you use a walkie-talkie item to switch between them.

In Splintered Realms Dizzy, both characters are controllable again. Instead of being mostly separated, I'm using the two characters as a way for the player to switch between different parts of the game quickly, so if they get stuck on one bit they don't have to travel all the way over to a different one. This is another way to make a large map more manageable.

It's no longer necessary to link this character switching to a specific item - so I can modify the item drop dialog to include a 'switch to' option when a certain game flag is set. The original switching implementation required you to stand over the other character and 'use' them to switch to them, but it undoes the advantages of working on two areas simultaneously if that's the only way to switch. However, now the two characters are in the same environment, so I can restore the 'use to switch' portion alongside the modification to the drop dialog.

But why stop there? In Iron Tower, passing an item from one character to another involved dropping it, switching, then picking it up with the other character - six action key presses and a no small amount of faff. By implementing a use menu from which you can either switch or take an item from the stand-by character, it's a lot more smooth: three action key presses to take an item. Getting deep enough in the guts of DizzyAGE to make it work took some effort but it's fully working now. The traditional secondary dialog that appears below the inventory I've got rid of, on the basis that there's not really enough room for it any more, but then I ended up doing that for Iron Tower before anyway. I'm not quite done messing with the inventory dialog yet, though. I have further plans, but that's a task for later.