Glass Pockets

One of the changes in the later LucasArts games was replacing the text descriptions of objects in the inventory with pictures. That lost a little bit of the charm for me; even though the text names for the objects was still there, they were a little less front and centre. There was less need to make them quite as evocative, or as funny. That said, I completely understand why it was done that way. It's an aid to the player to use visual memory to find objects in their inventory rather than having to read and comprehend text.

The Dizzy games iterated through a few options before settling on inventory management. The first game only allowed the player to hold one item at a time, which caused a great deal of backtracking across the map. Treasure Island Dizzy expanded the inventory to three slots, but in a strict last in, first out fashion. This meant the player had to cycle through the items held when they needed to drop one to solve a puzzle, and potentially had to drop and pick up several others before they could do what they wanted to. This was particularly annoying in the underwater section, where you had to take great care not to accidentally drop the snorkel as that would instantly kill you. In games after that, however, the inventory was greatly improved. Players still had three slots, but could choose which item to drop from a menu. This was basically what they stuck with for the rest of the series.

In Fantasy World Dizzy, Magicland Dizzy and Dizzy Prince of the Yolkfolk, the inventory was purely text, even though the items have sprites when they were sitting in the level. In Spellbound Dizzy, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy and Wonderful Dizzy, those sprites did make their way into the inventory, alongside the text name.

The DizzyAGE engine treats the content of all menus as a single string of text, with no inline markup options except some very basic text formatting ones. There's no facility to place an image alongside the text, and even if you could do so it would be awkward as each item sprite is two rows of text tall.

What I found I could do, however, was set extra attributes on the dialogs. I could set a reference to a function as one of those attributes, and alter the menu drawing code to check that attribute and do some additional rendering with that function if the attribute was set. Because the main menu drawing function and the supplemental function don't share any variables, there's some duplication of code in things like calculating line lengths, retrieving the inventory information and so forth, but honestly at this point, with the age of DizzyAGE for any machine that isn't itself a museum piece performance is not going to be a factor.

This places constraints on inventory size and item name length. Currently I'm allowing 2 rows per item, to fit the sprite. Spellbound and Crystal Kingdom make the sprites act like dropped capital letters, to save vertical space, but this comes at the price of making the maximum item name length shorter. In Iron Tower Dizzy the inventory could eventually expand up to 10 items, but I had already settled on a maximum of 4 for Splintered Realms. Happily, there's just enough room for the 4 items, the boilerplate, the switch option and the special ability option on screen at once. I've had to shorten a couple of item names, but nothing too drastic. At its fullest extent, the inventory dialog takes up all of the active screen; but nothing is happening at the same time so it's fine. And Dizzy can have glass pockets

I recently finished realm 7, so progress is good.