The Lower Caverns certainly took longer to develop than I'd expected. We began in July of 2018, exhibited the latest work-in-progress builds at RetCon each subsequent year (bar 2020, where the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic), and it felt tantalisingly close to being done for well over a year before we actually finished the playtesting and tweaking. A combination of real-life tribulations, illnesses, injuries and responsibilities artificially extended the development period. Unfortunately for the coder, this had the side effect of giving me perhaps a little too much time to second-guess myself and nit-pick almost everything I had created for the game.
There had been a few times during the process where, once a set of new graphics was incorporated into the game, I found fault with the very next build, and supplied amendments immediately. This occasionally led to confusion over which disk image file was the latest, since I neglected to date stamp them for the first few years. However, the late changes must have been the most frustrating, as both sprites and scenery blocks which had been in place for several years suddenly needed to be replaced purely because I decided I could do better. Some of the changes were fairly minimal, some were just fiddly to re-grab. One of these days, I'll either learn to be satisfied with my own work, or at least start to label things more consistently.
When we presented early builds of The Lower Caverns at RetCon, and when I showed it at my local computer club – alongside the original SAM Manic Miner for comparison – I got very little feedback on its appearance. To be honest, and somewhat dishearteningly, I often didn't even get the impression that anyone was really registering the difference. Several people noticed it was faster and smoother, certainly... but nothing was ever said about the overall appearance of one version versus the other.
More recently, while I had been looking into games on the ZX Spectrum Next, I happened upon some comments that gave me pause for thought. As critical as I have been about games on the SAM generally, and of the conversion of Manic Miner specifically, the quality of games on the Next has been truly baffling. Considering the pedigree of some of the names from the historical Spectrum scene now developing for the Next, many of the games look dull and amateurish. It seems almost analogous to the early days of the original Spectrum... which might make sense if all the developers were novices, as everyone still was back in the early 1980s, but that's clearly not the case.
Obvious clones like Dungeonette and Montana Mike have graphics that look as though they were designed oversized and scaled down for use on the Next, leading to excessive anti-aliasing, and their play mechanics are atrocious. Even the much-vaunted luminaries of the Spectrum world, now developing for the Next, have yet to equal, let alone surpass, their own output from the 80s and 90s. And then highlights like the Next conversion of Aliens: Neoplasma appear to have very little in the way of graphical upgrades on the standard Spectrum version.
And that's where things got weird... because, having noted this lack of significant improvement on the Spectrum Computing forum, one of the people involved in the game responded that, according to their research, most Next users want games to have Spectrum-style graphics, just without the attribute clash of the original machine. They wanted to retain the 'feel' of the old machine, but take advantage of the faster processor, and the improved handling of sprites and scrolling. Given the spectacular graphics the Next is capable of displaying, I found this baffling...
But it did get me wondering if I'd perhaps missed the point of the SAM Coupé version of Manic Miner and its original flat, simplistic graphics. In taking inspiration from the Game Boy Advance and the Windows-based game created by Wonkypix, had I taken The Lower Caverns too far away from its humble origins? In trying to make better use of the SAM's graphical capabilities, had I created something that would no longer 'feel' like a SAM Coupé game?
Consider the handful of games released for the SAM, the graphical side tends to hover through various levels of mediocre – some are packed with bright colours, others look rather flat. Some overdo the shading, some have none. Some take full advantage of MODE 4, others are barely distinguishable from MODE 1 or 2. Is that what SAM users want and expect from the games they play?
It's a disquieting thought... And it really doesn't take much to make me think I've made a horrible mistake, in any given situation.
Time will tell, I suppose... but I'd like to think my contributions to The Lower Caverns will be seen as improvements.
To Be Continued...
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