As development progressed, some of the caverns originally planned for inclusion were deemed to be impossible to add to the existing framework, or found to be unsatisfactory during playtesting. We'd already compromised on some of the Bob McFarlane levels, reproducing them as best we could, but losing some of their unique features. Some of the caverns which hadn't made it into the official SAM releases of Manic Miner had to be rejected outright (with tentative plans to include them in some form in a later game) because there was no way to achieve their intent within the existing cavern structure code, even with the updates and rewrites. This led to a shortfall in the number of caverns available to add, which led to members of the development team being asked to provide some new layouts. Since there was no set number required by each of us I just let myself go wild and put together as many layouts as I could dream up.
I ended up providing four unique caverns for The Lower Caverns, with three appearing in the final set of 20 caverns and the fourth appearing as a bonus level within the final set once the player has completed each of the three main sets of caverns.
It's All Sunshine & Rainbows
Since the majority of caverns have a black background and the remainder use the darkest colours available, I wanted to throw in something deliberately contrary. The game's palette is actually quite bright and vibrant on the whole, but the normally dark backgrounds belie that.
I came up with the name for this level before its layout, and hoped to create something bright and colourful, yet (with any luck) somewhat fiendish. The first idea was to have the exit obstructed by a rainbow barrier, and it was my hope that it could be set up such that, once the final treasure was collected, the player would have to time their plunge toward the exit so that the rainbow was open when they reached it.
A Rainbow necessitated a bright, yet cloudy sky, and made the existing flowers an ideal hazard. I wanted a sort of 'magical castle' vibe to the level, which then led to the addition of prancing unicorn sprites and their colourful droppings as further hazards.
The end result is not quite so effective as I'd hoped. The 'castle' is small and fairly insubstantial (almost all the platforms, both cloud and brick, had to be set in such a way that Willy can jump and walk through them), and the rainbow barrier idea was not compatible with the existing level types (which I should have realised due to it being functionally identical to the extra barrier in "The Penguin Room"). Aside from a couple of tricky jumps over the 2-block high flowers, it's a very easy level to complete.
Undermined Nostalgia
This is the first of three levels that reference certain contentious events in the retro gaming community, some of which were, if not ongoing, then certainly still topical, and so very much on my mind when I was first offered the opportunity to provide some cavern layouts.
My original concept was to have three caverns directly referencing a certain well-loved trilogy of Spectrum games by William Tang, published by Melbourne House between 1982 and 1983. Thing is, there's already a much more direct Pac-Man reference in The Lower Caverns in the form of "The Packing Plant", Bob McFarlane's remix of "The Processing Plant", and I cranked that up even further for the SAM version, introducing a Ms. Pac-Man sprite, as well as making all the background tiles look like the maze graphics and the treasures turned into pulsing Power Pills. Because of this, a reference to Hungry Horace would probably have come across as lazy, even though it's only loosely a Pac-Man clone. This left Horace and the Spiders and Horace Goes Skiing, and no prizes for guessing which game this cavern references.
Specifically, it references a mix between the initial 'run up the hill' stage and the final Space Panic-style game though, to be honest, I don't think it does either very effectively, as there simply isn't enough screen available to do it properly. I've managed to squeeze in lots of webs and some spider hazards hanging on strands of web, as well as a few ladders, but the layout doesn't really resemble Space Panic. I've got a hill on the righthand side, but there's no reason to climb it – it's just there as a means of getting back down to ground level so, in retrospect, I don't know why I bothered adding a ladder at the entrance – Willy can't jump down. For the most part, it's quite an easy cavern, but reaching the exit requires some precision jumps with precision timing, since Willy is inclined to bump his head on the overhanging rock inside the hill. It's certainly not impossible, though.
The mobile hazards in this cavern I've dubbed 'Horaspiders' – being, it probably goes without saying, a portmanteau of 'Horace' and 'Spiders'. They're fairly cute, but the legs were a real pain to animate. My favourite part of this cavern is the treasure, which is designed to resemble a cassette, with the colour cycling giving them rotating spools.
For some reason, this cavern seemed more taxing than most of the others, despite having only four moving sprites, four treasures and no conveyors. As a result, its speed setting had to be bumped up several times to ensure it was playable.
Taking The Piste
This one is fairly obvious: it's Horace Goes Skiing condensed into a single screen. The 'pavement' is on the left, followed by the road, the ski hut, and then the slopes on the right.
I had grand ideas for the road, with different vehicles passing down the screen from the 'tunnel' at the top, reaching the barrier at the bottom, and turning back, disappearing back through the tunnel. Unfortunately, the limitations of sprites in The Lower Caverns meant that the closest achievable effect was switching between sprites depending on the direction of travel. The end result is that vehicles travelling in one direction are cars, while those travelling in the other direction are ambulances. The use of traffic cones as platforms is perhaps a little desperate, and their precise arrangement was a bit of a headache, since the Willy sprite is wider than 8 pixels, and so needs at least that amount of space to either side of a platform to facilitate dropping down below it.
The ski slope also isn't everything I hoped it would be – from the very UDG-like trees to the repeating angled rock pieces fudged into 'snow', and the grey background carrying over from the pavement/road. It also highlights that the Manic Miner game engine really isn't intended to cope with angled surfaces, as navigating those slopes is pretty clumsy. It features a unique 'snow plough' sprite, but the original 'pie-in-the-sky' idea was to have skiers shooting down from the top, Skylab-style, but changing direction as they hit each new slope.
It's not the best cavern ever created – probably a bit too ambitious for a single screen – but I hope it's seen as a fun homage, if nothing else. One thing I'm particularly happy with is the flapping flag treasures, achieved with the palette cycling.
It's Definitely Not Stonkers
Oh, dear... Where do I start with this one?
The end result here is... not entirely as I'd originally envisaged, mainly due to my lofty concept being deemed just that little bit too contentious.
There's a certain figure in the (Atari-focused) retro gaming scene who, just a few years ago, was revealed to have been... problematic. He had spent years promoting himself as something of an authority on all things Atari but, behind the scenes, it appeared as though he was trolling a long list of people in the retro scene – publicly offering support, while using so-called 'sock puppet' accounts to attack them. He also gained some notoriety by self-publishing some shoddily-written A-Z books on games for various formats, lazily copying reviews of games on one format into the books on others with barely any amendments – particularly embarrassing and obvious when certain features from one version did not even appear in another, or when his 'reviews' rambled on at length about an original arcade game's hardware and said little to nothing about its conversions to the specific home formats.
The very first concept for this cavern's layout was just a massive Atari logo made up of a mixture of solid and crumbly blocks – which would have been deliberately indistinguishable – with a sock puppet perching at the top, Alien Kong Beast-style, ready to be dropped into the exit at the flip of a hard-to-reach switch, and maybe just one or two treasures. Since the active game window is effectively widescreen, it was next to impossible to get a reasonable-looking interpretation of the Atari logo, so I ended up re-thinking it, and came up with a level somewhat inspired by Pitfall.
Naturally, I couldn't include sinkholes, alligator pools or rope swings, but rolling logs were an obvious choice for mobile hazards. I took the opportunity to re-use the sun sprite from “...Sunshine & Rainbows”, and used the snapping toilet sprite as the basis for an Atari Jaguar + CD sprite. The Space Invader sprites were among the earliest ones I put together, but remained unused until the remixed Eugene cavern. The only wholly new sprite is the little E.T. Character, because one cannot make Atari references without also referencing their notoriously bad movie tie-in. All of the scenery is recycled from other caverns – the pedestal coming from the Game Over screen – and the exit is literally just an inverted Atari logo because why not? The pièce de résistance would have been that throwing the switch reveals the true identity of the sock puppet before he plummets downward.
While the cavern has remained largely intact, its original title – which included the referenced individual's name – had to be changed, while the sock-puppet sprite and the switch-activated reveal were traded for a modified version of the Kong sprite, since the reference was deemed to be a little on-the-nose, if not overtly contentious enough to cause problems down the line.
I did also want to vary the background colour down the height of the screen, with 'daylight' at the top and increasingly shadowy caves below, but this was impractical. The absolute ideal would have been for the lowest level to be flooded, slowing down Willy's jumps... Perhaps a feature for Manic Mansion.
It's also worth noting that the individual referenced by this cavern was a guest at the event at which The Lower Caverns made its public debut, and he seemed to take exception to an update to the SAM version of Manic Miner because the current owner of the trademark is – and I quote – “a very good friend”.
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