Some significant new features were recently added to Intrepid Izzy. The first is the addition of a map system. This allows you to view the explored parts of the levels. This is still in the early stages of development, but nevertheless the maps already display a fair amount of detail.



Because the levels can be quite big, you can scroll though the map to view all explored areas. The white and yellow squares are placeholders. They will be replaced with icons later.

The second important addition is saving and loading - an indispensable feature for games in this genre. Saving the state of all the relevant data in the game (maps, dialogues, quests, items, etc) so that it can be correctly restored later is evidently easier said than done. The tiny amount of storage space on the Dreamcast made this even more of a challenge. Fortunately it was an interesting challenge rather than a frustrating one, and it all seems to be working as it should.

I am also happy to report that Izzy now has a crawling animation. This was still missing from the demo, where you you had to do a sliding to pass under low ceilings. The addition of crawling makes the controls more intuitive.