TLC #9 - Putting The Boot (Back) In

Or 'The Full Monty (Python)'

It had bugged me, since the very first time I played the original SAM version of Manic Miner, that the iconic 'Boot Crush' game over sequence of the original Spectrum game had been removed. In its place, Miner Willy is unceremoniously disintegrated by a multicolour death beam (per the Solar Beam caverns) from above, without even the flashing background – which would, I'd have thought, be easier to accomplish on the SAM due to its clever palette switching tricks. It looked cheap and lazy, the sound effects were dull, and the sight of Miner Willy crumbling just didn't quite hit the right note.

Of course, having been brought up on a steady diet of British absurdist comedy, the 'Boot Crush' felt to me like a nod to Monty Python, making it all the more perfect, and all the more important to ensure it resumed its proper place within the game. (Of course, it was Jet Set Willy that committed to the full Pythonesque attitude, with Willy being crushed by a bare foot.)

The effect is something that even I could have achieved, using SAM BASIC, so its omission was practically criminal, and a significant contributing factor in my overall dislike for the SAM version of Manic Miner.

I mean, is it even Manic Miner if it doesn't feature the 'Boot Crush'?

Now, it's all very well for me to proclaim that I could reproduce Matthew Smith's original 'game over' animation on the SAM using nothing but BASIC, but that's neatly ignoring that squeezing the necessary code into a piece of software that already exists is not the same as grabbing a set of 16 x 16 pixel sprites and setting up a FOR-NEXT loop to make one of them descend the screen toward the other, leaving a trail, and accelerating as it goes. The mechanics of it might be quite easy in and of itself, but actually fitting it into the existing code could be anything but. The Lower Caverns is not a rewrite of Manic Miner, however little of its original code actually remains when the game is finally complete. It's a remix with new elements, and much of the new had to be squeezed in around a lot of the old, some of which turned out to be utterly inflexible beyond its location in memory.

Nevertheless, I was adamant that the 'Boot Crush' was as much an intrinsic part of Manic Miner – and, by extention, The Lower Caverns – as a short refrain from In the Hall of the Mountain King, or an interpretation of The Blue Danube. I also – in case I've not already expressed this clearly or emphatically enough – really, really, really hated the 'Death Beam' game over screen from the original SAM version.

Creating the requisite graphics was easy enough – I just needed a simple boot and a section of trouser leg that could be repeated as the boot makes its descent. I also wanted to replace the plinth Willy is standing on, since the shading on the existing version was a bit basic.

It was determined that the best way to make this screen work was to build it like one of the in-game caverns, which then gave us the option of giving it a name. At this point in development, there was a spare block of memory, equivalent to 80 x 16 px, which the programmer suggested could be used for some sort of 'Game Over' text, to sit in the middle of the screen, either side of the descending boot's path. True to form, I presented a selection:

From a rip-off of the font used in Street Fighter II (wholly unsuitable, but fun!) through four different colour versions of a double-width font, each only 80 x 8 px, to a cartoonish, hand-written version and a double-sized interpretation of the Spectrum game's 5 x 5 px loading screen font. Two versions of the latter were created, simply because I couldn't decide which version looked better, but the programmer suggested using both, giving us an animated 'Game Over' message, recalling that iconic flashing loading screen.

This was a great idea in theory, but the timing of the animation was tied to the boot's decent, and so the letters jiggled awkwardly until Willy is finally crushed, and the effect just looked flickery.

But that wasn't the end of it. Of course, being obsessed with filling the screen with as many of my graphics as possible, I decided to put together a full cavern, attempting to give the illusion of depth by using different colour versions of the rock pattern to represent foreground, mid-ground and background:

Needless to say, this concept fell foul of the 15-block limit on scenery-per-cavern, since each colour version requires 8 blocks in and of itself, making for a total of 24 blocks. It's also, if I'm being perfectly honest, nowhere near as effective as I'd hoped. Weirdly, I quickly started to see the yellow/orange rocks as forming the knuckles of a hand with its middle finger raised...

The programmer liked the concept, however, and ended up building a version of his own using only one set of rock graphics and a few other items of scenery. This then remained throughout most of the development period, until I had another one of my hare-brained ideas, not long before we'd be presenting the latest build at RetCon 2021. Utilising the same single set of rock graphics, there was enough space to build the words 'Game' and 'Over' in scenery blocks, so the player's abject failure would be writ unmistakably large across the screen:

Another thought I had was palette cycling the background, just like on the Spectrum version. At the time of writing, it's not clear whether this can be implemented but, if not, it will no doubt be added to the ideal features list for Manic Mansion.