To Every Screen a Purpose

In the flick-screen world of Spectrum platformers, there was always a tremendous drive to spend your room wisely. Each room needed a reason to be there, taking up precious bytes. There wasn't really much room for a room to exist purely for what limited eye-candy it could deliver. In Dizzy games, you can often place a room in one of the following categories.

The first type of room plays host to a puzzle, which in Dizzy would be somewhere you needed to bring an item or items to complete it. Completing the puzzle might open up access to new rooms, or drop a new item, or something similar.

The second was somewhere to find an item for one of the puzzles. By itself it's not that interesting, but often this item was placed deliberately far away from where it needed to be used. Then , in combination with-

-Rooms that were difficult or hazardous to traverse, the challenge to the player was established. Most Dizzy games have at least one area near the middle that's tricky to get across, either in terms of object manipulation or tricky jumps to avoid death. Putting them near the middle gives the most bang for your buck, and causes players to curse you.

Some rooms existed only to have collectible items in them. These were often softly hidden, for example rooms full of clouds you could only reach if you did a jump from the correct position in another room. Finding them, without a guide, meant a lot of blind jumps that were possibly fatal.

So when you set yourself the task of writing a large Dizzy game, this aspect forces your hand somewhat. No rooms just to be there, not even to set the scene. There must be something there, or the room must have some interaction with another room, for it to have a reason to exist. By making sure that each room has such a purpose, and gating access to later rooms, you start to generate puzzles naturally.

Some puzzles in Lost Temple Dizzy were essentially recurring ones - the same item used to clear a similar blockage in a number of places. Done too much, it would become boring, but just enough and it gives the player a little lift that they recognised the problem and knew instantly what they needed to do about it.

Iron Tower Dizzy was kind of the antithesis (or one of them) of this idea. In that game, I tried to pack as many puzzles into a small area as I could. In some cases this even meant there wasn't enough room to drop items and manage inventory effectively! There was no longer much movement, but a lot of thinking and moving items about. In theory, it should make the game quicker to solve as the player can test ideas more quickly; but in practice it didn't seem to. I'm not sure why.

I'm definitely sticking to the original formula for Splintered Realms Dizzy. I'm going to have a limited number of recurring puzzles, though, as they worked well before. It remains to be seen if I'll be able to generate enough puzzles and challenges to fill out the room count. The Oliver Twins apparently wanted their Dizzy games to have every screen look good in a screenshot - at least by the standards of the day. Advancements since then mean graphical elements can be layered (and we're no longer restricted to colours per 8x8 block) but I still re-use the original graphics where I can to keep the feel of the old games as much as possible.

Realm 2 is now complete, and I've made in-road into Realm 3. So far, it's been a lot of fun.