the Academy who worked on the remake to get their ideas about the design of the game. Ultimately, it came down to using the building blocks that made up the original levels, and mixing the themes so that the new modes and content would seem fresh but feel familiar.” “A student artist called Sandesh made a lot of the new interface screens in the front end while on a placement with us from Sheffield Hallam University,” explains Habgood. “The new pixel art for the multiplayer modes was made by Martyna, our very own academy artist. If you can’t spot which bits are new then she’s done her job well.” Working to a clear end goal of creating a version of Zool that was on par with (or better than) the versions of Zool that already existed, meant that issues encountered during development were few and far between. Except for a hurdle involving licensed lollipops, anyway. “Lockdown was a bit of a challenge for us, but let’s
pretend that never happened,” winces Habgood. “We had some interesting legal hoops to jump through when a certain brand of lollipops had to be retrospectively removed from the emulated version of the game. I felt like a king of all hackers when I managed to do it, but was soon brought down to earth when we realised that the US version of the game never had them in the first place!” “The game did start crashing intermittently at one point in development and the cause was at first pretty difficult
to pin down,” adds Tshuma. “It took our collective efforts scrutinising the crash dumps and debugging the memory to make sure that the issue was gone for good.” “We definitely had lots of big ideas about the different
directions that we could go in with the project early on,” continues Tshuma. “But as we learned more throughout the apprenticeship and it gave us a better idea about the size of the challenge, we started to look at things that were a bit more feasible. Just finishing off a port of Zool: Redimensioned for the PlayStation 4 was a big task and we were excited about the prospect of bringing some extra content to the game along with it.”
WHAT’S NEXT? As a third-party mascot character during the heyday for that sort of thing, Zool was no stranger to appearing on any console that would have him, as often as the platform holders would have him. Zool Redimensioned has added at least three more systems to the somewhat lengthy list of game versions available, and has been received warmly by almost all who remember the ninja gremlin, and even some who are encountering him for the first time. “People who remember the original Zool game fondly (and even some who don’t) have been very complimentary about Redimensioned,” says Habgood. “It feels great!” adds Tshuma, enthusiastically. “I was happy with what I was able to contribute and what we were
50 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2023
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