Manic Miner. It's legendary status is well deserved, and I think it was probably one of the first ZX Spectrum games I owned (but sadly couldn't play because my lovely parents bought me a 16K Spectrum that Christmas rather than the 48K one you needed to play it). A memory upgrade later, and I got totally hooked and I think there was even one legendary play through where I did finally complete it and got through the final barrier, only to be dumped back at level 1.
What a game though. It had amazing graphics and animation for the time, it has MUSIC in the game which was just unheard of at the time and when you consider that Matthew Smith, its genius creator, had to run interrupts between CPU time for the music and the gameplay but still kept it playable, that's one hell of an achievement for a game that fits into less memory than a word document.
I love making games but I'm just not a programmer, so I could never knock up something as brilliant as this from scratch. But on a whim I reinstalled Dreams on the PS5 recently, and discovered that the geniuses at Media Molecule had put in a bunch of 2D platform game assets. Their intention was probably for folk to make straight left to right side-scrolling platformers a la Mario, but I had other ideas...
Those assets served as the original building blocks for me just messing about to see if I could rebuild some classic Manic Miner levels for a giggle. Once down that rabbit-hole though, it got me thinking around some of the problems Matthew Smith would have had to deal with when designing the 'perfect' platform game all those years ago. Adopting a level by level approach meant that he could use the assets in memory to their capacity before flicking to the next level / screen. That works doubly in Dreams on PS4 too and I soon found out how 'costly' in terms of graphics thermo (your resources for all the visual elements in a game or scene) all those lovely pixel-based sprites would be.
There were other challenges to solve too like this rather esoteric list:
- How to build a game mechanic where the player collects a set number of keys before the exit is unlocked
- How to kill the player if they fall too far
- How to make 'melting' platforms (still haven't perfected this but one of the 2D game assets was a pretty close fit)
- How to animate pixel characters and have them 'patrol' a certain area of the screen. I developed a stupidly overblown method for this using followers and look-at tag things, before realising it would be easier to just do it all using a timeline and keyframes (which I went up the steep learning curve of figuring out, finally!)
- How to make a ladder where the player could jump THROUGH the rungs but land ON them solidly (sort of like a 'one way' platform. Tougher challenge than you'd think!)
The most fun bit has been trying to nail the visual look of the original game. As I looked at old resources for level maps etc, I came to dread building levels like "Eugene's Lair" from the original, before solving each of the level's unique problems piece by piece until the final product is finished (Eugene's Lair now plays pretty close to the original game but I still haven't figured out a clever way to make Eugene slowly sink to the bottom of the screen and sit over the exit, covering it if you haven't worked out your strategy correctly but I will get there, just watch me!)
Other things are missing like the game doesn't have lives (infinite lives until I work it all out, get all the levels built then go back and make a lives mechanic). There's no air meter either (same reason) but those are things that could be developed and retrofitted to the game if I don't totally lose my patience and my mind from trying to use Dreams fiddly little sculpting tools making pixel characters and platforms!)
I once again raise my hat to Matthew Smith for building a game all those years ago that's kept my attention, long into my 50s - when most other games have come and gone from my memory or my collection. Long live Miner Willy. Would I be crazy enough to try and redo Jet Set Willy though? I think perhaps not...!
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