“There are also level specific mechanics that we
reworked to function like certain elements of those games. The strength testers in the Fairground world were largely just an attempt to see if I could replicate the Traffic Light Blocks from the City world of Celeste!” Another thing the team had to keep in mind while designing the new version of Zool was that porting the game to other platforms had never been an exact science in the first place, with the various 1990’s versions of the adventure having quite a few differences between them on every platform the game came to. This meant remaking people’s memories, rather than perhaps what they had actually played.
work had been done to modernise the old games’ movesets without losing the original feel. If you play those games as well as Redimensioned, you can see how they influenced me in regards to the new moves like the Heavy Landing Dash which bears some similarities to the Drop Dash in Sonic Mania. I think Celeste influenced a lot of less-visible game feel, with features such as jump buffers and ‘coyote time’.” [Coyote Time is a term in platformer game design that relates to how long a player can stand on nothing and still make a jump before falling. It references the famous cartoon Roadrunner’s long term antagonist and his gravity defying antics.]
“The original Zool has a very fast and loose feel to the character. It’s almost slippery, which I think is part of why the original game has always been compared to the classic Sonic games rather than the Mario games of the same era,” says Lyons. “I think to capture that, I really focused on ensuring that players would be able to build up a lot of momentum and, if they were skilled enough, maintain that momentum over an entire level. But because there’s not a single definitive version of the original – the Amiga, SNES, Mega Drive, Master System and Game Boy versions of the game all control differently – it was more important for us to replicate the way that the controls made the player feel, rather than the exact metrics of the original games.”
They also had to factor in the tastes of modern audiences, and worked to accommodate for different tolerances for just how punishing retro game design can be. “A big priority for us was opening up the different
48 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2023
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