“Every year at GDC there is an arm-wrestling competition between the owners of 8-bit software houses from the 1980’s, and Ian Stewart had been eating his Weetabix all year…” laughs Jacob Habgood, director of education partnerships at Sumo Digital, and former Gremlin Interactive programmer. “It’s all about history and geography. Sumo Digital was founded by ex-Gremlin staff, and the Sumo Academy had access to the IP through Ian Stewart, who has always been a generous supporter of my educational projects,” recalls Habgood. “Zool certainly fuelled Gremlin’s success back in the 90’s and Sheffield’s games industry probably wouldn’t be as strong today without Zool’s contribution to its growth. I think most of the apprentices at the academy have all required some convincing on Zool to begin with - many are younger than him! - but some have a stronger connection with the ‘Ninja from the Nth Dimension’ now than us old Gremlins.” A remake of Zool for modern consoles had been pitched to Ian Stewart before, but had been passed on a few times. It was one student’s grasp of the core ‘game feel’, however, that convinced Stewart that now was the time to move things forward. “I gave the Zool assets to Owen [Lyons] as a bit of a skills test and it just snowballed from there really,” explains Habgood. “He did a great job of capturing the movement
mechanics of Zool – in fact better than any student before him. This isn’t the first time I’ve used Zool as part of an assignment, but it’s the first time that Ian was convinced enough to commit to making a remake.
The development team that worked on the new version of the game was fairly small, only growing when the scope of the project demanded it. “There were five programming students who made the original PC version of Redimensioned - including writing the engine from scratch - with support from a student artist and a couple of programming interns towards the end,” says Habgood. “There was then a group of Sheffield Hallam programming students who worked on porting the engine to the PlayStation 4 and then five more programming apprentices and a junior artist that added the multiplayer game modes and shipped it on PlayStation.”
COYOTE TIME MANIA While taking the opportunity to reimagine Zool for new consoles, the team looked towards two of the best modern platformer games for inspiration and guidance. “When we were making Zool, I was getting interested in speed running and had picked up Celeste because I really loved the movement in it,” says Owen Lyons, programmer on Zool Redimensioned on PC. “I’d also been playing Sonic Mania and appreciating how much
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