A lot of obvious potential improvements to the SAM version of Manic Miner could be quickly scrubbed from the wish list. Quite early on, I'd been looking at other versions of the game, and enquired of the programmer whether it was feasible to add background images like those on the GameBoy Advance version. Obviously nothing quite that complicated or colourful. For one thing, they're too distracting and make it difficult to see the platforms in some caverns. For another, we only had 12 colours to play with, so the screen would quickly become too busy. I had wondered, perhaps, about a single-colour image – something as close to the background colour as possible – just to give the screen a bit of depth.
The lack of memory available for such pictures was another problem, but the main issue was that, even if we had the space for background images, the whole collision detection routine would have to be rewritten to accommodate them. This is because the SAM version handles collision detection in the most simplistic way imaginable. If any non-black pixel (or, more accurately, any pixel coloured with anything other than palette slot #0) collides with any other non-black pixel that isn't a platform or a treasure, Miner Willy loses one of his lives.
It's not even specific to the Miner Willy sprite. One of the first bugs we encountered when we started playtesting were several instances of insta-death or seemingly random death in some caverns, where the paths of the hazard sprites intersected with each other, or with scenery.
Related to this, much later in development, I asked if it would be possible for the player sprite to move in front of the traversable scenery rather than behind it, more like the Game Boy Advance version. This, again, would have required a substantial rewrite of the display routines, if not the collision detection, but it's been added to the potential features list for Manic Mansion.
While working on updating the Willy sprite, I asked if there was any way to add a 'jumping' frame since, by default, the sprite simply continues its standard walk cycle through a jump. On the one hand, obviously, we wouldn't wish to turn such an iconic character into a bland Mario clone, but I always think that the animation should reflect the action as far as possible.
Sadly this wasn't possible, but the idea was filed away for future reference.
An omission from the SAM version of Manic Miner, which is obvious before the game even starts, is the 'Attract Mode' from pretty much every other version of the game. I gather this is something the original programmer simply forgot to include but, by the time we were nearing completion on The Lower Caverns, there was just no way to accommodate it. Blame me for throwing in about a billion recoloured sprites, I guess.
Thing is, this wasn't even something I remembered from the original Spectrum version, but it's certainly something that comes up in the Bob McFarlane remix, as every level has its own unique soundtrack which plays – very briefly – during the Attract Mode. While it's nice to see the levels you're about to face, I suspect it would have become rather more complicated to show only the set selected on the title screen, and an Attract Mode showing the full 60 (or 64) caverns would take too long to run, and splitting it into three separate Attract Modes – one for each set of caverns – would have required even more substantial coding work.
In some versions of the game, Willy's lives are represented by 'dancing' duplicates of the player sprite. This was originally replaced in the SAM version by the large, static cartoon heads and, while we could switch back to using the Willy sprite quickly and easily enough, we weren't able to get them animated. Something else to plan for in the sequel. The main upside was that the game could now show more than three lives if any bonus lives are earned, though it took a while to get that bit of code working properly.
In the cavern named "Solar Power Generator", Manic Miner features a beam of light that bounces off the mobile hazards – three spinning balls and four wheeled reflectors – and causes Miner Willy's air to deplete more rapidly. While the effect on the Spectrum version is achieved simply by having a stream of attribute blocks with a different PAPER colour, the SAM version instead has an 8 pixel wide stream of randomly-coloured pixels – the same effect used for the 'Death Beam' on the original game over screen.
While it looks good, doesn't glitch out like it does on the Spectrum version (by trying to force its way through sprites at certain points) and is certainly something unique about the SAM version, it was problematic on several counts. When I first suggested replacing the beam, it was quickly determined that such a move would be practically impossible without rebuilding the game from the ground up. The beam may look like a random stream of pixels, but the pattern of colours turned out to be derived from the very game code itself. It's incredibly clever (or sounds it, anyway – I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand what's going on to make it happen), but that code is absolutely rigid. We could move or remove all the sprites from that cavern, and the beam would follow the same changing path regardless, as it's all down to unique timing rather than actual sprite collisions.
That the beam isn't actually reacting to obstructions caused another problem later on. For some reason, the original SAM version of Manic Miner featured only two spinning metal balls on this level, while the Spectrum version has three. There's a hard limit of seven mobile hazard sprites per cavern in the SAM version, so the capacity was there, it just hadn't been used. It was easy enough to reinstate the third ball... but the beam passed straight through it, since it wasn't coded to change direction upon collision with a sprite, and its predefined set of paths did not include one that bounced off the omitted sprite.
When we later tried to introduce the Solar Beam onto the Bob McFarlane remix level, it ignored the new structure of the level. It passed through sprites and wiped out platforms, following the same path as in “Solar Power Generator”. Not ideal and, for quite a while, the penultimate cavern on the second set was a carbon copy of the original. It's still not very different, but at least it's not identical.
From my point of view, everything about the Solar Beam seemed ridiculous, and symptomatic of what seemed to be frustratingly short-sighted coding... I'd had this grand idea to replace this stream of pixels with a stipple pattern, ideally alternating each display frame, to give the impression of being translucent... but now our definitive edition of Manic Miner for the SAM will be stuck with this weird effect because it was intrinsically linked with the rest of the code in far too many ways to pick apart.
Then again, I was looking back on a complete game written almost 30 years ago, by a relatively inexperienced programmer who just wanted to bring the SAM the best version of Manic Miner he could write. From that point of view, one really can't fault his thinking.
As it turns out, this also has possibly the most fundamental of precedents. The December 1984 issue of Sinclair User features the following, rather foreboding snippet in their interview with Matthew Smith:
The game used core code routines for most of the basic action, but special routines were introduced for particular events on each screen. "It upset the people trying to do a conversion to another machine", says Matthew. "People working on the Solar Power Generator become sick."
Bob McFarlane's remixed levels introduced three new elements to the game: half-sized nasties scampering about in “Bottoms Up Down Under” and “Patient You Must Be”, animated environmental hazards, such as the doors over the exit in “The Penguin Room”, and Skylab-style random falling hazard in “If You Go Down” and “Not So Sweet Sixteen”.
The first element is perhaps the most unfortunate. Since the Wonkypix version of the game runs at double the resolution of the Spectrum game, its half-sized sprites are the full size of the sprites on the SAM. I was even able to adapt one of them – the rat from “There And Back Again” – into the SAM version. However, the moving spiders on the ceiling of “Bottoms Up Down Under” became static hazards, and the scampering floor drones in “Patient You Must Be” were omitted since even one wouldn't have worked alongside the Skylab code operating in that cavern.
The second element was possible to introduced in a limited way, but the SAM version of Manic Miner was geared to animate all its elements at a fixed rate. This was variable between individual sprites, so they weren't all animating at the same speed, necessarily, but there was no facility for adding a pause in between animation cycles.
They essentially function as immobile 16x16px sprites, and so subject to the seven sprite limit on each cavern. Hazards like the one in “The Penguin Room” were instead set to simply deactivate and disappear once the final treasure was collected, while the trap platforms in “Stomp! Stamp! Stomp!” and ceiling-mounted crushers from “Cash Me Outside” were deemed impractical either due to the number of sprites already on screen or due to the limitations of the fixed-rate animation.
The second element was more tricky since, while the Skylab code may have been able to accomplish the effect, the collision detection routine prevented sprites falling through scenery. Honestly, I don't think they add much beyond the potential for more frustration, so they're not a great loss.
All these elements are under consideration for use in Manic Mansion.
The first batch of wholly new levels – designed by Phil Wilson, years ago, but never before seen in the game – included one named “Mirror Willy”, which was intended to operate in a similar way to the 2011 Spectrum game Alter Ego, where the player's movement on the left half of the screen were mirrored by a duplicate on the right half.
The provided description explained:
Miner Willy starts on the left and Mirror Willy starts on the right. There is a mirror running through the centre of the screen. Whatever you do, Mirror Willy does but on the other screen. Like you, he can cause platforms to collapse but he can't pick up items. Miner Willy and Mirror Willy can pass through the mirror and each other. The same goes for the seals. Basically, whatever Miner Willy does, Mirror Willy will do but in a mirror image.
While it's a great idea, and has the potential to be a particularly fiendish level, the existing mechanics of the game – not least the collision detection routine – didn't allow for such a gameplay feature, so this was filed away for potential use in Manic Mansion, where it could be planned in from the very start.
The super-fiendish cavern “The Sludge Walkers”, designed by Colin 'Quazar' Piggot, is the only one to feature multi-colour flashing treasures, more like those of the original Spectrum game. We were only able to use four colours, as per the palette cycling in all the other caverns, but it worked pretty well for the treasures... but not so much for the exit. We were able to add a trigger to change the palette upon collection of the final treasure, and this got me thinking about changing the colour cycling for loads of other levels, where it's basically grey. I eventually decided against, but there was also a limit on the number of switches in the whole game, so it wouldn't have been practical anyway. It did lead to some changes in the palette cycling in a handful of caverns though.
During the final phases of playtesting, it was discovered that a handful of caverns operated at completely different speeds depending on the audio setting. At first, it appeared that one cavern – “The Can Factory” – was running slow, so one of the static, animated hazards was removed as an experiment. That worked fine... until the game was played with sound effects only, rather than the looping music, at which point it ran at a vastly increased speed. Continued play using only sound effects identified at least three caverns in each set which were affected by the same bug, somewhere in the original code, which we were unable to fix.
On a related note, one non-graphical element that I do think is important to mention is the audio component of the game. One of the reasons that Manic Miner was so groundbreaking is that it was just about the first game on the ZX Spectrum to feature simultaneous music and sound effects during gameplay. Of course, the short, perpetually looping refrain from In the Hall of the Mountain King sounded horrific, even at the time, but Matthew Smith proved it could be done...
...So one of the many puzzling aspects of the SAM conversion was that it offered players the choice of hearing music or sound effects during gameplay, with a third option for playing in complete silence (ideal for late night play sessions, or when hearing the same music over and over again threatens one's sanity). Some of the earliest games on the SAM featured similarly rudimentary SFX while music was playing constantly in the background, so offering a choice between one or the other seemed misguided. Given that the SAM's sound chip has six stereo channels, I wondered if the code could be tweaked so that the music used fewer channels, allowing for sound effects to operate out of the spares.
Now, unencumbered as I am with any coding or musical talent, I was dimly aware that such a change was unlikely to be anywhere near as simple as it sounded... But one can hope, right? While it wasn't possible for The Lower Caverns, the idea was noted for Manic Mansion.
Additionally, the possibility of a whole new soundtrack came up around halfway through the development cycle, and there was one alpha build that featured the option to switch between the original music and a whole new piece, but it ended up introducing bugs, so it was scrapped, leaving only the original pieces.
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