Dizzy 4 (Magicland Dizzy) AMA

Hello all. My name's Neal Vincent and I'm the person to blame for designing Dizzy 4. Just establishing a thread here for anyone who comes along with any random questions related to the game. If I get notified, and I can remember, I'll tell you.

I was a Codemasters employee at the time, working in their office at Lower Farm House, Southam. My day-job was Stock Control Assistant, working under a lady called Anne who was the main Stock Controller.

As to how I ended up doing the design for Dizzy 4, my recollection is a little fuzzy on that now (it was over 30 years ago!) but Codemasters was still quite a small company back then with a cottage industry approach to things. As I recall, it was simply a case of David Darling or Tim Miller going around the site saying they needed a design for a new Dizzy game, because the Olivers were too busy with other projects to be able to do another one, and asking who fancied a go at it. So I stuck my hand up and said I'd have a go. I'm sure it wouldn't be that easy these days.

It seems unlikely, looking back on it, that they would have put all their eggs in one basket (haha) and left their top franchise in the hands of a Stock Control guy with no previous game development experience, so I'm guessing I was probably just one of several people who "had a go at it."

So I got seconded to Tim Miller's Portakabin and locked myself away for several weeks, planning out the game.

The funny part is that I'd never played a Dizzy game before. I was aware of the series, of course, but had never actually sat down and played any of them. So I gave myself a very quick crash-course in the previous 3 Dizzy games, deciding they were basically a hybrid of platformers and "point and click" adventures, with a fairy-tale vibe, and that those annoying one-hit deaths had got to go. I didn't meddle with the movement - the rolling around - because that seemed to fit with the egg-shaped hero, and changing that would've seriously altered the feel of the games.

So the aim wasn't to do anything drastic, just to pastiche what was already there. Basically, as long as I didn't end up creating a franchise-killer, I'd consider it a win. I had a surprising amount of freedom with it, and I had a lot of fun doing it - it was the kind of thing that I had in mind when I got a job at Codemasters - and people seem to have fond memories of it, so I think it was a win in the end :)

As I said in another post, The Oliver Twins requested just one change to the design that I'd done and, looking back on it, it was a very sensible and responsible one: originally, the shrinking and growing items were two halves of a large mushroom, and The Oliver Twins were concerned that children who played the game might copy what they'd done in the game in real life and maybe eat some mushrooms that they shouldn't. So I changed those to the EatMe and DrinkMe items, without even messing with the Alice references, and all was well.

It really is a joy to hear from you, Neal. :tup:  

Especially as Magicland is the second Dizzy adventure game I ever played and my first Dizzy adventure on the C64 with the decorated border.

Personally, I think the introduction of the energy bar to the series is most welcoming.  :yes:  
With the bats on the game, the one-hit deaths would've been a nightmare!

When I had the C64 version first, I remember my 8 year old self absolutely enjoying it, including the music, and the idea of being able to explore the area and find and rescue the Yolkfolk from their own troubles like being turned into a bush, or a frog or being encased in ice was certainly very memorable too.

At least the Diamond locations weren't a pain though, finding that certain 'Amazing Illusion' coin in Fantasy World was an absolute nightmare! :wall:  

I remember once trying the 'EatMe Cake' on Daisy after learning what the 'DrinkMe Potion' did.
It does sound amusing if they had decided to keep the two halves of a mushroom idea.
While on the subject of the 'EatMe Cake', how come it was randomly placed in mid-air above the water on "The Drawbridge" screen?

This was corrected on the C64 version, but I did find that strange when I played the Spectrum version for the first time.

Also, this just reminded me of what we have on the site's Document Archive.
Do you remember these? :)

:egg: https://yolkfolk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Concept_MagiclandDizzy_WhingeSheet1.jpg

:egg: https://yolkfolk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Concept_MagiclandDizzy_WhingeSheet2.jpg

Wow... That's an absolutely fascinating thing to see after all this time! I had no memory of that at all. In fact, I was reading down the list thinking "Who on earth got this involved with the details?" ... and then there's my name and signature at the bottom. I should've guessed it was me, though, because "Whinge-sheet" is very me :) I think I must've been doing my best to make what amounts to a boring "to do" list at least somewhat amusing for Big Red.

Dialling the wrong number and accidentally giving someone a blast of fax up their earhole certainly dates things, doesn't it?

Hmm, no, I've no idea what the cake is doing there. It would probably have made sense to have a mushroom be near water, but a cake not so much. It may have just been a temporary placement that ended up staying that way? The original design doc probably holds the answers to such questions...

Random bit of trivia, which I shared a while ago on RZX Archive's Magicland Dizzy walkthrough:

The starting screen - "Weirdhenge" - was a shout-out to Steve Turner's classic 1985 Speccy game "Dragontorc of Avalon" which I loved, and if you look at the map which came with that game (which actually spells it Wierdhenge, but whatever) then you'll spot that the location of Weirdhenge within that game's map of the UK pretty much exactly matches up with the location of Southam, where Codemasters were based, within the UK. So it seemed like a natural place for the adventure to begin.

[quote data-userid="3" data-postid="89919"]

While on the subject of the ‘EatMe Cake’, how come it was randomly placed in mid-air above the water on “The Drawbridge” screen?

[/quote]

To make it more challenging to grab the cake before the bridge moves out from under you, I'd assume! 😆 

[quote data-userid="30592" data-postid="89918"]

As I said in another post, The Oliver Twins requested just one change to the design that I’d done and, looking back on it, it was a very sensible and responsible one: originally, the shrinking and growing items were two halves of a large mushroom, and The Oliver Twins were concerned that children who played the game might copy what they’d done in the game in real life and maybe eat some mushrooms that they shouldn’t. So I changed those to the EatMe and DrinkMe items, without even messing with the Alice references, and all was well.

[/quote]

Here I would have guessed that players couldn't tell the two halves apart, or that it would seem derivative of Super Mario... But if this game and recently Wonderful Dizzy got away with overt Pac-Man references, that shouldn't have been a big deal!  (And hey, I remember Crystal Caves using mushroom powerups and a level with Mario backgrounds...)

Did you ever think of adding more Alice references, or was Wonderland Dizzy all someone else's idea?

[quote data-userid="3" data-postid="89919"]

Personally, I think the introduction of the energy bar to the series is most welcoming. :yes:   

[/quote]

Who came up with the bar, anyway? I've heard that style referred to as "Turrican health."

@bag-of-magic-food Dizzy 4 certainly ended up having quite a few Alice references but - from what I can gather - Wonderland Dizzy was The Oliver Twins building on Magicland Dizzy, so all of the additions and alterations in that game will have been theirs.

I think I was a bit naive at the time about the difference between public domain and pop culture. Obviously the fairy-tales were fair use, but Pac-Man, The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, etc., not so much - and apparently Disney are quite aggressive these days about claiming certain aspects of the Alice in Wonderland IP, so it's highly doubtful that the game would have the same casual attitude toward freely referencing such things if it was being made today. Anyway, the Alice stuff seemed like a particularly good fit for Dizzy, given the Humpty-Dumpty-ness of our ovoid chum :)

Changing to an energy-bar was definitely my doing. It seemed much more fun and forgiving than the frustrating one-hit deaths of older games, and the little bit of health that you got back for collecting the gems meant there was an extra gameplay reason for collecting them, beyond simply collecting things for collecting's sake.

I would probably have been playing "Turrican" at the time on my Amiga, but I think the energy-bar was probably another riff on Steve Turner's Avalon games (which had a rather nice flame-shaped one) but iirc energy-bars were already a well-established gameplay convention by 1990. The first Avalon game dates back to 1984, and I'm pretty sure that game was by no means the first game ever to have one.

Yes, I think you're right about wanting an item that you had to grab quickly. And the two mushroom items were going to be fairly obvious left and right halves of a mushroom, like a mushroom chopped in half down the centre, but I can't remember whether there was going to be any in-game clue as to which half would have which effect. I think I was going to leave it for the player to find out the hard way... It never made it past the on-paper design stage.

Hi there!

Thank you for designing this game :)

One question I have: Why diamonds? Two previous games had coins as their collectibles. What made you to swap them for diamonds?