Posted March 24, 2021 by Queex
One of the recurring features of Dizzy games is the need to collect all of a certain type of item in the game. Coins, stars, cherries and so forth all feature. After solving all of the puzzles in the game, you needed to show you had all those items in order to get to the ending. Sometimes, these collectibles were conflated with health items, and would restore some of your precious energy lost to touching monsters. In Spellbound Dizzy, you could also consume your collected stars to free the Yolkfolk after you had solved their puzzle.
Many of the collectibles were in plain sight, but many were hidden in various ways. How there were hidden varied game to game. Early games took advantage of a quirk of the engine, whereby pickup items were always rendered in front of coin items. The coin would be completely hidden by the object, until that object was picked up. The item itself was always a red herring, and not related to any item puzzles, so you could drop it straight after collecting the coin. With this method, some of the hidden coins bordered on the pathologically difficult to find. The items hiding them were usually indistinguishable from the background, so you had no recourse but to mash the action button in front of every piece of scenery you could.
In some versions (I think some games on non-Spectrum platforms, if memory serves), there was method 2: you would 'find' the item without having to pick up a bit of scenery - you just had to use the action button in the right place. No red herring item, but quite similar to method 1.
A third method was to have the coin in plain sight, but on a screen the player wouldn't necessarily realise was there. They either had to make a leap of faith, or explore very thoroughly, to discover it.
Needless to say, approaches where you can see nothing that betrays the presence of a coin feel a little unfair in hindsight.
For Lost Temple Dizzy, I used a mixture of methods. I took advantage of the fact that items and scenery don't fully mask what's behind them in the DizzyAGE engine to hide some coins in places where you could see them poking out from behind. A keen eye serves you well. I also had background scenery that stood out from the scenery around it, whereby there was a clue there was something to find there (item or coin). Looking back, I think it would have been better to stick with just one approach, for consistency. What was a better idea, though, was having some coins protected by puzzles, of the traditional sort for Dizzy games. Unlike the main puzzles, they don't block progress. The player can come back to the puzzle later on, after they've had some idea about how to solve it while doing other things.
Iron Tower Dizzy used a similar approach, although the smaller scale meant I could hand-craft things like glints in the dark to show there was a collectible there.
Provisionally, for Splintered Realms, I'm using the following:
A feature of Lost Temple that I could have made more of was information about where the coins were. I made the game so that each area had exactly 10 coins to find. Of course, unless the player knows this ahead of time and counts how many they get as they go, that's not very helpful for finding the last missing collectibles. So, for Splintered Realms, I'm putting devices in the main hub that you can use to tell you how many coins you have still to collect from each area. Because this is tracked separately from your main total, I'm also mimicking Spellbound and requiring the player to spend some of their accrued treasures to free characters.