So, the layouts of the first 20 caverns – the “Revived” set – are identical to those of the ZX Spectrum (and basically every) version of Manic Miner, but with the improved graphics detailed previously. The second and third sets, unique to The Lower Caverns, will be new to most players.
The “Remixed” set is based upon levels created by Bob McFarlane for the Wonkypix version of Manic Miner created using AppGameKit version 2. The caverns in this set are mostly quite subtle variations on the originals: additional crumbly blocks here, an extra conveyor there, new hazards (some of which animated, which made adapting them interesting), some with fewer treasures, some with more. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that some of the levels got updated between my first experience of the Windows remix and the version I downloaded to make direct comparisons much later in development. Not least, I don't recall some of the animated hazards and half-size sprites being present in my original playthrough. Each cavern requires the player to discover and follow a new optimal route to complete it, but having played the original game will put players in good stead with the new caverns.
With a handful of exceptions, these McFarlane caverns use much the same scenery and sprites as the standard game, but I felt their inclusion in the SAM version presented an opportunity to create something new and unique. I didn't want to go overboard, but there were a few caverns that really lent themselves to a whole new look. For starters, “The Packing Plant” – McFarlane's tweaked version of “The Processing Plant” – seemed to have become a more overt Pac-Man reference than Matthew Smith's original, so I created new scenery in the style of the arcade game's maze, hazards resembling the ghosts, conveyors mounted on cherries pulsing power pill treasures and, as the pièce de résistance, added a Ms. Pac-Man sprite. “It's Bananas! B-AN-AN-AS!!” got a bamboo-themed makeover for its platforms and walls, while “Flaming Barrels of Kong” got a more traditional industrial look. “Operation Annihilate” now has a Doctor Who-inspired look, with Dalek-analogues supplementing the Amoebatrons in a cavern that looks like a quarry in Wales, while “The Call of Cthulhu” got a more Lovecraftian veneer. We were also able to carry over some – but sadly not all – of Bob McFarlane's animated hazards. Thus, the plungers from “And So It Begins” and the doors over the exit in “The Penguin Room” are present, but the trick platforms of “Stomp! Stamp! Stomp!” are not, while the spiders on the ceiling of “Bottoms Up Down Under” and the four bug things rushing around the floor of “Patient You Must Be” had to be replaced with static hazards. Similarly, where the Windows-based game allows for sprites to pass over each other and scenery, the SAM version had to reduce the range of their movement or lose some static hazards.
The “Renovated” set began with 12 wholly new caverns designed by Phil Wilson. These had been intended for one of the previous releases of Manic Miner, but ended up getting omitted for whatever reason. That left eight caverns to be created from scratch, and so the call went out to me and several others in the development team to submit their own designs for caverns.
But there's more to The Lower Caverns than new cavern layouts. After we'd decided to make the game 512K only, I wondered if we could add unique title screen images to accompany the selection of “Revived”, “Remixed” or “Renovated”. While there wasn't enough memory left over for that, I was offered the opportunity to provide unique images to appear atop the final cavern in each set. Full of enthusiasm, I started thinking about what else could go in there... but, for months on end, struggled to come up with any alternatives.
Eventually, I found inspiration for a second image.
I've had a gallery on DeviantArt for many years now (supposedly 12 years, but I was sure I was a user before 2011, as I remember having a conversation about DeviantArt while at a particular job, which I left at the end of 2010) and, during late 2021, 'Journey' by OmniaC173 appeared in the feed of newly-uploaded images. Aside from the fact that it feature super-cute, semi-anthropomorphised cats on some sort of adventure, it features a very striking landscape with a distinctive mountain. That vista stuck in my mind, and I started trying to capture it in the available colours, with the idea that it was representing an alternate reality that Willy finds himself in after escaping one of the later sets of caverns.
I quickly realised that I couldn't adequately represent the wispy cloud rolling around the peaks, and even showing the different layers of foreground grass would be difficult, given the two shades of green available to me. The mountain itself came together reasonably well, and I was able to shade it nicely so that the sunlight seemed to hit the inner edge of the 'bowl' between the two peaks. In place of the clouds, I first tried adding a giant (and somewhat familiar-looking) statue captured in a shaft of light. Once in place, though, I didn't like it:
Part of the issue is that I was using a frame of the Willy sprite at 1:1 size and, coupled with the shading necessary to blend it into its environment, it didn't look good. Since the sun is a major feature of the original image, I fell back on that, and ended up – after many months of tweaking – with something I was pretty happy with, and assigned it to the 'Renovated' caverns:
I was all the more pleased with it because it's technically one of the first pieces of genuine 'pixel art' I'd ever done. Admittedly, I didn't do it on a real SAM, or even using SAMPaint under SimCoupe, I ended up using Photoshop and making extensive use of its layers so that I didn't accidentally do something unrecoverable. This – and other images – were transferred to the SAM by saving a PNG, importing it into the amazing Windows utility SCADM, and saving it onto a SAM disk image as a SCREEN$ file. Palettes had to be standardised, Photoshop doesn't support specific palette slots the way the SAM does, but that's a simple process in SCADM as well.
Completing this image left me with two more 'toppers' to produce... and, bouyed by my success with the alien landscape, I was once more hit with inspiration for the next. Since I'd been so happy with the alternate scoreboard image, it seemed a shame to leave it out of the game entirely. However, since I'd overwritten the bare image with the scoreboard furniture, any other use of it would require the missing parts to be redrawn. That was, perhaps, an even more daunting prospect than coming up with a new image, but I felt that it at least had to be attempted.
Because of the detail and complexity of the original image, this was a long, frustrating process. Even with the original reference image, it was difficult to figure out precisely how I'd handled certain aspects of the image when I first created it. There were several days where I wanted to give up... but I persevered, and eventually reconstructed an image which, I hope, is at least as good as the original version, before I added the scoreboard furniture. This image was assigned to the 'Remixed' caverns:
Far from feeling pleased with myself, with two new Cavern 20 'toppers' complete, I was starting to really worry about the other two. At this point, I still had no idea what I could do to replace the converted Game Boy Advance title screen image, but I was ever more sure that I had to do so.
The final image was, of course, an adaptation of the title screen image. The vertical position of various elements is slightly different here, to maximise the amount of foreground without obscuring too much more background...
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