One of the interesting quirks of the ZX Spectrum version of Manic Miner was that some of its graphics changed between the original version of the game, published under the Bug-Byte brand, and the version published by Software Projects, a company set up by Matthew Smith after leaving Bug-Byte. While, obviously, The Lower Caverns was always intended to have as full a graphical refresh as I could produce, there were events during the development period that directly shaped some aspects of the visuals. Not least of these was that, back in 2019, the decision was made to apply the Entropy brand to the game.
Entropy was/is a coding group, founded by a prolific SAM coder. While Entropy might now be most notorious for the much-discussed, never-to-be-seen megademo Statues of Ice, its output included plenty of utilities and code routines, encryption and copy protection for commercial software, as well as music and menus for disk magazines.
Once upon a time, I had put together some graphics for Statues of Ice, and this was enough to grant me membership of Entropy. The Lower Caverns' coder was also a member of the group and felt that, since the game was being created by members of Entropy, it was only fair that we include the name, almost as a tribute, even though the plan was to eventually publish via Quazar, as a cover disk on a future issue of SAM Revival. The founder was contacted, just to make sure that would be OK – after all, as far as I'm aware, not even he has used the Entropy brand for more than 20 years.
The initial plan was to simply add the Entropy logo to the title screen, which was easy enough since there had been space given over to an incongruous smiley face in one corner of the title screen image on the SAM version of Manic Miner. Switching that out for the Entropy sigma was simplicity itself. However, it got me thinking that we could follow Matthew Smith's example, and use the Entropy logo within the game as well.
Where the original Bug-Byte game had a weird, unidentifiable spinning nasty in one of its later caverns, the Software Projects version substituted a Penrose triangle – the company's logo – which was also adapted into the original SAM conversion of Manic Miner, published by Revelation. The logical move was to replace that with the Entropy logo, and the only complicated part of the decision was how to animate it. I considered several options but, giving the typical limit of 4 frames per sprite, I decided on rotating the white sigma around its centre on the horizontal axis, but keeping the red arrowhead static.
I was mostly happy with my first take on this, with only some minor tweaking to the shading of the serifs. The additional shadow to the arms on a couple of frames – to give a better indication of which direction the Sigma was spinning – was added later on.
That isn't the full extent of the Entropy-referencing in the finished game, though. Much later, while we were working on the caverns going into the final set, one of the planned caverns was scrapped as impractical. This left us with a slot to fill at fairly short notice, at a point where we had started to think we were finishing the game off.
The coder came up with the idea of something referencing Statues of Ice, and his initial concept was based around “The Crystal Caverns” which, by this point, had the redesigned 'ice cube' scenery in place. This immediately brought to mind an idea I'd had much earlier in development, of using the different coloured 'rock' textures to form a massive effigy of Miner Willy. That had proven to be impractical, as I hadn't factored in the 15-tile limit on each cavern: even just using the four main tiles in all the colours required would have taken 16 slots, and it would have looked rough with out the additional corner pieces, which could have bumped the total to 32 slots. Thankfully, by sticking with the existing scenery from “The Crystal Caverns”, the coder was able to build a statue of Miner Willy out of the 16x16 pixel blocks with a few of the 8x8 pixel ones to smooth things out a touch. It took a little tweaking, since the statue would essentially have been the full height of the screen but, after a few revisions, back and forth, we eventually had something workable.
With a layout sorted, in concept at least, we needed to populate the cavern with nasties. This seemed like an ideal place to use a chilly blue version of the 'Clockwork Hooter' from “The Central Cavern”, as well as one of the new and unique sprites I'd put together right at the start of the project, which was essentially a bouncing snowman's head. Naturally the 'Entropy Spinner', as it had become known, had to turn up as well, and a couple of penguins rounded things off while keeping to the icy theme.
And, in the best traditions of The Lower Caverns, it had to have a joke name... I suggested 'Statues of I..?' because I'd saved a mockup from SamPaint under the ten-character filename 'StatuesofI', and that seemed perfect. A statue of Miner Willy made out of 'ice cubes' makes for a fitting homage to Statues of Ice, and a perfect nod to Entropy.
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