Time for a Dizzy Thread!

It’s fair to say the @TheOliverTwins know a thing or two about making videogames. They started making them whilst still in school!

As such, being able to see this *massive* design doc for 1989's Dizzy 3 (or Fantasy World Dizzy) is a treasure.

Even though the doc does proclaim this as the DIZZY III, this wasn’t actually the third Dizzy game to be released.

That honour, in fact, goes to Fast Food - a spin off that saw everyone’s favourite egg racing around a maze that looked very similar to a certain Namco mascot...

(We would have loved to have seen that cross over, however I don’t think it would have turned out well when a hungry-mouth-that-eats-everything crosses paths with a tasty-looking-egg…)

Back to the design doc - this object tells us a lot about making games in the 80s. The amount of preparation and planning that happened before even coding a line is immense.

(Also, panel 109 is mysteriously blank...)

And how did the Olivers translate this and other pencil designs into Amstrad CPC code?

Perhaps they used the many tools available for crafting and animating character graphics?

Not exactly....

In the absence of commercially available development tools, they did what all entrepreneuring coding experts would do - they created their own:

Panda Sprites!

What does Panda Sprite mean?

Well, ‘Sprite’ refers to the name used in computing for character graphics. So Dizzy is a sprite (and also an egg).

And ‘Panda’ comes from the Olivers themselves - Philip and Andrew (P-and-A)!

Clever, eh?

This has been your daily Egg News Bulletin