As you may remember from previous updates, it was our goal to have the Sega Dreamcast version of Intrepid Izzy ready this year. Despite our best efforts, it has unfortunately become clear that this will not be possible. However, we have made great progress which we are eager to share with you.

We had actually planned to post this monthly update in the form of a video. However, recording a clear picture from a TV screen proved difficult, which is why this update is posted slightly later than usual.

Anyway, here are a few screenshots from the would-be video. One in widescreen mode, and one in standard mode.





Challenges

Since the Dreamcast doesn't have quite as much power as today's hardware, it should be obvious that it takes a bit more effort to get everything running properly. The biggest hurdle is the Dreamcast's tiny RAM, which measures only 16 MB. That's less than 0.1% of what you'll find in today's consoles!

Fortunately Roel has developed a good sense of what the Dreamcast can and cannot do over the years. Intrepid Izzy is running very well, sporting a cool 60 fps almost all the time (the frame rate may drop a little when there is a lot of splatter on screen, but that's fine).

But there were also some problem areas. When it came to changing outfits in the game, and consequently trying to cram thousands of new Izzy frames into the console's tiny memory, it couldn't always handle it. But this was solved in two ways.

The first solution was to place a newly discovered costume in a smaller level, since Intrepid Izzy mostly consists of very large levels which take up a lot of memory. This means that A) the game doesn't crash any more, and the game now has extra content for you to play!

Unfortunately the problem also appeared in Awesometown, which we did not want to split up into smaller levels. This brings us to the second solution. This was a lot more technical, and involved re-writing about 2000 lines of code. Characters and their animations are now loaded in smaller chunks rather than all at once, which may seem obvious but is in fact much more complex than it sounds. But it was worth it, as peak memory usage is now down by about 20%! This eliminated all known memory problems.

We still have some more bugs to squash and tweaks to make to get Intrepid Izzy running as smooth as possible. So unfortunately the game will not be ready for Christmas, but it should be in your hands early next year.