Poached, Scrambled or Boiled

The original Dizzy games came from an era where you were expected to die, even in cartoon puzzle games. There was little facility to save your position, so most games were short enough to feasibly complete in one sitting. Losing a game and having to start again was no big deal, you'd have to do it if you were planning to play the same game tomorrow anyway.

In most incarnations, Dizzy has a supply of lives and an energy bar. Touching dangerous objects, including moving enemies, depletes the energy bar. It's particularly harrowing when Dizzy is in one of his uncontrolled rolls and an enemy keeps pace with him, sapping a great deal of energy before you have control again. If he runs out of energy, or he touches one of the things that will kill him instantly, he loses a life and respawns at the last (relatively) safe place.

The first Dizzy game had the feature where carrying certain items would kill enemies when they touched you instead, meaning you could clear a path through otherwise dangerous territory and return with a puzzle item instead. You were normally given 3 lives, but notoriously in Treasure Island Dizzy you only had one. According to rumour, this was because the Oliver Twins realised that if you dropped the snorkel when underwater, not only would you die immediately but you wouldn't be able to recover the snorkel, making the game impossible to complete. The 'fix' was to only give the player a single life.

In many games it was possible to restore energy by consuming 'food' items. In some cases, these were the collectibles themselves. I don't think this is the best approach, as it encourages the player to leave collectibles if they're already on full energy, in case they need a boost later, and then they may forget about the collectible or mistakenly think they already picked it up. Having a separate item allows the player to manage energy more sensibly.

In DizzyAGE, it's possible to save at any time. Although the engine is limited to 3 save slots, that's usually enough per game. Lost Temple Dizzy leaned rather heavily on this feature, both for its length and for some of the tricky jumping puzzles where failure meant death. However, even when the player saves regularly, there's always the chance they might forget, or get mixed up about which tasks they had done since the last save.

I've decided to abandon lives altogether for Splintered Realms Dizzy. Instead, I track deaths. Where the life counter would be, there's a display telling you how many times you have died so far. It allows players to aim for a deathless run, or have a bit of a laugh about how many times they'd offed themselves in the course of completing the game. It also means I can be a bit mean with traps and other dangers without rendering the game essentially unplayable or too annoying.

Currently, both controllable characters share an energy bar, although I could change that. I'm not sure I want to encourage players to juggle characters just on the basis of energy, though. I've also not currently included any energy recovery items, but I might revisit that decision. Even if death has no great consequences, a little pick-me-up here and there feels friendlier to the player.