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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Paul Equinox Collins
About JSW: The '96 Remix and It's Wet Jelly
It's Wet Jelly - Room descriptions
About JSW: The '96 Remix and It's Wet Jelly
[submitted by Paul Equinox Collins in May 2019]
Jet Set Willy is an old, blocky, noisy and very buggy game that no modern "gamer" would spend ten minutes on. That's a fact.
But on the other hand...
JSW has always had a certain fascinating mystique for me. I was only a few years old when it came out, and even when my family got a Speccy +2 in 1986 we didn't have JSW. It was my parent's friends who had an old rubber-keyed 48K that they would dig out for me when we visited, and that's how I first encountered the game (and, I think, Atic Atac): I knew that their Spectrum was somehow a different model from ours but equally the font and graphics made it clear that it was the same basic machine.
The exploration angle was particularly appealing to me. Many early games repeated similar patterns (waves of invaders in the same empty space; or the same maze refilling with dots after each clear), and anything with an actual human-designed map and individually titled rooms was a joy to roam around — even if it had stupid "infinite death", where you re-enter the room at the same point after dying, and can therefore fall to your death five times in a row. (The wonderfully terrifying Rick Dangerous was another favourite, where each newly discovered chamber was loaded with spike and arrow traps, with no way to know where they were except by gut-wrenching experiment.) Finding out what's around the corner is delicious, and I also remember the heart-pounding tension of two-player games of Bubble Bobble with my sister, wondering if we'd get lucky with the power-ups this time and see a new screen layout, perhaps even a new type of enemy.
But you only get a few precious lives in each game, and there were certain rooms that I just couldn't do. So, as a kid, I played JSW ritualistically, always repeating my familiar trek to the southwest of the map, through the kitchens and the Cold Store, avoiding the strange dead-end at the eerily silent Back Door, then roping it over the cyan-skyed Beach (often losing my last life here and having to start again) and, hopefully, proudly strutting onto The Yacht. There was nothing to do at the yacht except turn back, but that is how I played the game, like Masefield: "I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky..."
Growing up, I started to teach myself BASIC from the Spectrum manual. I learned to make my own simple little graphics (UDGs) and created an 8x8-pixel character called Kiwi, a cute green alien with twin tentacles, based (in my head at least) on a kiwi fruit, but no doubt really inspired by the saccharine kiwi-bird Tiki from New Zealand Story. The first Kiwi game only allowed you to move along a few screens of long straight platforms (PRINT AT 21,0), but I pathetically tried to reproduce the atmospheric blue chill of the Cold Store, with a motionless vertical rope that Kiwi climbed automatically.
By the mid-'90s the Spectrum had died commercially — I was certainly one of its younger users — and we were left with fanzines. It was, I think, Andy Davis of the Alchemist PD library and AlchNews diskzine who first sent me a couple of JSW fan games. One was Willy's New Hat, a JSW mod of unknown authorship and with no moving guardians at all, relying on mazes and awkward platform layouts for its challenge. More JSW mods soon came my way, and Andy was only half joking when he said, in reference to the editor tool, "We must destroy all copies!"
Not long after that, I got hold of the editor myself and started messing around making what was to become JSW: The '96 Remix. I based it mainly on people I knew from the latter-day Speccy scene: zinesters, swappers, demoscene groups, and so on. Then I made the mistake of sharing an early version as a preview. That's partly a mistake because it kills enthusiasm for a project ("they've seen it now, and I've got my praise!") but also, in this case, because one well-intentioned pen-pal leaked it onto the Internet. So that never got finished.
At the tail-end of the '90s I went to university and had Internet access for the first time, including the funny and anarchic comp.sys.sinclair, and more Spectrum games than I could play in a lifetime. (Just kidding. I've played most of them by now.) The JSW magic was evidently powerful because fan games were still being made — and, I think, still are today in 2019. Andrew Broad was the main culprit, and I will admit I sometimes saw his baroque, glitch-filled, unplayable Rube Goldbergs and thought (with a certain amount of awe) "here is somebody who probably needs to take a step back".
That I am here now, writing this little essay, suggests that perhaps the step back from JSW is not so easy. ("You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!" How many rooms in the Eagles' Hotel California? Probably not as many as JSW's 60-odd sprawl multiplied by 100-odd sequels.)
My game It's Wet Jelly was put together as late as 2008, sparked by a suggestion from Matt Westcott (better known as Gasman in the Spectrum demoscene), who was familiar with my love of anagrams and other wordplay. I remember scribbling permutations of some of the room names while travelling on an aeroplane; others came out of an Internet anagram generator. And, given the improved editor tools available on the Windows platform, it didn't take me too long to turn those ideas into a game.
My other almost-contribution to the world of JSW is JSW Studio, a Windows-based editor of my own, which boasted a fast and easy point-and-click user interface light-years beyond anything we have even now, a decade later. Sadly, I didn't finish it. Story of my life :) The source code is out there, but the code is a mess: just compile and run the thing, and see how easy life could be...
I don't think JSW is a game that can really be explained to people who didn't grow up in that era, beyond "it was good at the time — trust me!". As I said, it's blocky, buggy, and grossly unfair; and even we Spec-chums may fail to see the appeal of comparable games on alien platforms like the VIC-20, which just don't "feel like home". But, with its barrage of zany enemies and quirky in-jokes (screens like "Nomen Luni" and "Dr Jones" make little enough sense to a savvy adult, let alone a child), and its niche but profound cultural history ("attic" = death!), JSW is totally unforgettable to those who were there at the right time.
What follows is a room-by-room exposition of It's Wet Jelly: nothing too involved, just some comments and memories as I watch the play-through by Daniel "Jet Set Danny" Gromann (another obsessive — I mean it in a good way — who has compiled the most comprehensive Web site on these games, glitches and all). I'm aware it's a little self-indulgent and will interest perhaps twenty or thirty people on the planet. But let's go down to the sea one last time.
It's Wet Jelly - Room descriptions
[submitted by Paul Equinox Collins in May 2019]
General notes
Although I had a few fixed ideas for specific rooms, most of my early editing was done around the start area of the map, and I worked outward from there, and created appropriate enemy sprites as needed.
Anagramming the title and in-game music wasn't as hard as you'd think. I took a list of the notes and wrote a little program (in C#) that would play back those pitch values from an array. Then I jumbled the notes around more or less at random, but respecting the basic groupings: for example, the introductory Moonlight Sonata is heavily based on groups of three notes, so I ensured that the "anagram" preserved this pattern. (The piece was composed in C# minor, by the way. C#, Miner...? Never mind.)
Anagramming the short introductory text scroller was also fairly simple for someone who has spent enough time with these things. There are a redundant words (like "twee" and "ooh") where I was able to use up extraneous letters without disrupting the flow.
One small point that still annoys me, since I'm a boring pedant, is the fact that I didn't capitalise the room names consistently. The original JSW uses title case ("The Front Door") with a few rare sentence-case exceptions ("A bit of tree"). I prefer sentence case, but occasionally used title case without thinking ("Rye Organ", "Lost Coder"). Mixing up the casing is at least authentic.
Rooms
The Ram Booth (The Bathroom)
The little "room" where Willy is positioned is the booth, and the two roaming guardians are rams, though elsewhere in the game I used the same sprite to represent deer. Initially I had some trouble animating the yellow ram sprite, but since he's on a conveyor belt it looks perfect — like he's stumbling along. The item is a 4K RAM chip and it is under barbed wire.
A hateful swept hallway (Halfway up the East Wall)
The guardians are brooms and the items are piles of dust.
Sterile shop (Priests' Hole)
This is meant to represent a super-clean pharmacy of some kind, hence the gleaming white-cyan walls, green cross symbols, and scrubbing toothbrush guardian. The items are syringes.
Green gene crematory (Emergency Generator)
The guardians are DNA double-helixes and a microscope; the items are funeral urns. There is a nasty trap in the top left-hand corner where you can easily jump into a little room holding an item but can't jump back out without bashing your head and falling to your death. That item must be collected from below.
Secure seed alarm (Rescue Esmerelda)
The green vertical line at the bottom is an unusual guardian that is invisible for part of its "walk", which (because of collision detection based on solid pixels) means you can safely walk through it while it is not visible. This was intended to suggest some kind of laser security system.
Shoe upon the foot (On top of the house)
The apparently solid wall at the top is in fact a corridor to one of the hidden rooms.
Mode 2 Madness
A hidden room. The double-width pixels are inspired by the fat but colourful MODE 2 of the BBC Micro's screen display, and the general appearance (especially the green brick walls) mimics Acornsoft's BBC game Magic Mushrooms, an old favourite of mine.
For I'm sure I've seen this bee (I'm sure I've seen this before..)
A hopefully obvious parody of The Birds and the Bees, another game from Bug-Byte.
Temple aquifer makes fur grow (We must perform a Quirkafleeg)
I think this is one of the more successful rooms in the game. It wasn't easy to find a good anagram that would fit 32 characters, but an abandoned temple with water flowing beneath it works quite well. The items are, of course, the growing fur.
Cat we throw (Watch Tower)
A bit of fun! Not much to say, except that the trousers of the left-hand cat-thrower are actually the conveyor belt for the room.
Bath elopement stunt (Up on the Battlements)
A more or less identical copy of The Bathroom, the first room of the original Jet Set Willy, but shifted slightly to the left so that you can see two robbers stealing the bath. The fallen tap as an item was a nice touch.
On her foot (On the Roof)
A giant Maria. There is an invisible rope swinging in this room, which allows you to climb up to one of the hidden rooms, despite the presence of some solid wall blocks. The rope can't be seen because the blocks have identical ink and paper colours.
Banyan Returns
A hidden room, a pun on the film Batman Returns and essentially a much nastier offshoot of The Banyan Tree from the original Jet Set Willy.
The room wraps horizontally so you have to climb your way through the tree on two levels. However, there's a fake non-solid wall at the bottom so you can actually skip all that hassle and just walk directly to the item.
Mole in UN (Nomen Luni)
Limited anagram potential! This is one of two rooms with a Tony Blair guardian: here he is addressing the United Nations and you have to take his microphone. The other guardian is a UN flag; and you can see a mole at the bottom left. (Of course, "mole" is also slang for somebody who infiltrates a political organisation.) I think I considered using the classic Spectrum character Monty Mole here, but decided against it.
No fourth deer (Under the Roof)
Not much to say except that I feel the lurid yellow background offers a nice change of scene, a sort of evening sunset.
Teat itch (The Attic)
One of the rooms I was less happy with, because of the contrived anagram (I suppose it beats "Tit cheat") and uninteresting layout. The huge pink thing at the top is an udder, bearing numerous teats; the items are hands, which might scratch an itch there.
Blind jeweller veers into hive (Dr Jones will never believe this)
Another of the longer room titles, yielding a bizarre but fun anagram. I didn't test this room adequately, so it is impossible to get the items without losing a life on the way down — the only place where a life must be sacrificed in completing the game.
A convertor for soy (Conservatory Roof)
I originally intended the player to cross the conveyor belt to collect the items, but when I found it was impossible to escape the belt, I left it that way: you have to collect them by jumping from underneath. The crusher seems to have been inspired by the Monty Mole games, and the devil guardian is a "Satan girl" (an angry girl with horns): she was probably inspired by a sadistic ex-girlfriend of long ago, who used that nickname online. The items don't look like much, but you try drawing soy.
Rye Organ (Orangery)
Another room I wasn't really happy with: there are no guardians and not much action, though the organ motif and rye items are clear enough.
Navigationally, somehow this anagrammed room "feels" the same as its original, the Orangery.
Looming wimps (Swimming Pool)
The scrawny muscle-men in glasses are the looming wimps, and those guardians don't appear anywhere else in the game. The long conveyor belt requires walking steadily in the opposite direction, which makes it rather hard to reach the item (dumbbells) without touching any of the rising and falling guardians. This is the only room to have a magenta background, because that's nasty :) I wonder if the deadly item was intended as a cobweb.
Net near the bay (The Banyan Tree)
A nice simple but picturesque room, vaguely reminiscent of the original Swimming Pool (and far less troublesome than its original, The Banyan Tree).
Fog Town wires (West Wing Roof)
Good use of the conveyor belt to produce animated smoke from a chimney, though the fog itself (limited to Spectrum attribute squares) doesn't look great. One of the rare uses of a flying arrow in this game.
Web over the Doom Beast (Above the West Bedroom)
One of the cuter anagrams. I'm surprised that so few JSW remakes (in my experience) have used the trick of combining BRIGHT and non-BRIGHT colours in one large guardian: I think it can work well on a black background. Jumping through the ramp to the left (onto an invisible conveyor) leads to a hidden room.
B ROAD L Y S PEA KING
A hidden room, a clear homage to the surrealist and sometimes violent JSW works of Andrew Broad (including the fractured title). I had wanted to make this the hardest JSW room ever devised, so that even the experts would struggle — but that was a bit beyond me. Still, it takes some freakish timing and positioning, and involves a fall-through-the-floor glitch. Andrew Broad finally ditched his long obsession with JSW around this time, so I don't know whether he ever saw it. The topmost guardian is Broad's Kari Krisnikova, and the items are tennis rackets and balls, a nod to his idol Monica Seles.
Stewed broom (West Bedroom)
It's funny how some very specific guardian sprites ended up being useful in multiple places. Here's one example: "A hateful swept hallway" and "Stewed broom" both require brooms. This room is supposed to resemble a big saucepan full of bubbling soup, but I wasn't really happy with its final appearance. The items are rising trails of steam; again, they don't look too convincing.
Wet swing (West Wing)
For all intents and purposes, an empty room. The rainy background makes a change, but also precludes the use of guardians (since they would instantly collide with the rain pixels, and any such collision automatically kills Willy). The swing frame is missing a solid top section because I didn't have any block types left for it!
Wacky air-bats (Back Stairway)
This room's layout is closely based on "Wacky Amoebatrons" from JSW prequel Manic Miner. It is amusingly easy to think you are playing that game, and jump into the welcoming flashing exit at the top left — which in this version is actually fatal. Oops!
Bad crook (Back Door)
Grab the swag but watch out for the robbers. The flying arrow in this screen is made to look like a bullet, which I don't recall seeing before in any JSW game.
Toeholds (Tool Shed)
The tiny platforms make this screen quite hard to navigate, and you need good timing to cross the green conveyor belt. Don't be fooled into jumping when you collect the item in the middle of the room! Something about this screen — probably the main wall texture — reminds me of the platform game Odd Job Eddie, bundled with the Spectrum +2 (and actually a rip-off of the earlier game Pyramania).
Bee Hatch (The Beach)
The hatch is the central gap that the yellow bee passes through. The items are honeycombs, and the deadly red thing is a stinger. The conveyor belt texture reminds me of Acornsoft's Magic Mushrooms again: coincidence or not?
They chat (The Yacht)
Not a very interesting screen to travel through, but the visual concept is funny. The two nerds are communicating on their laptops and asking each other "ASL" (age, sex, location) in a chat room.
We both (The Bow)
Another little homage to Andrew Broad and his JSW game We Pretty. Here, "we both" could refer to that game, or to the player's Willy and the evil Willy clone, or to the synchronised movement of the Willy clone and Kari Krisnikova. (You can't get anywhere near her platform; she is only there for terrifying effect.) The items represent the Roman numeral II, for two.
The new IRA cell (The Wine Cellar)
The bullet-shaped arrow makes another appearance in this room, which alludes to the Irish Republican Army. The guardians are pints of Guinness and a lucky four-leaf clover, a symbol associated with the Irish. There are also guns and grenades scattered about the place. The mysterious step at the bottom right leads to the fourth hidden room, but you must enter from the east.
Get Tony a beef broth (The Forgotten Abbey)
Tony Blair makes a second appearance, and apparently wants a bowl of soup. Jump from the rope at just the right moment to land "inside" the floor and walk west to the hidden room.
Where's Willy?
A reference to the Where's Wally? series of comic books, where the reader is challenged to locate stripey-shirted Wally in large crowds of people on each page. The white-on-white texture makes it hard to see where you are in this room, and there are some long invisible walks best handled by measuring the distance and timing how long it should take — lest you continue too far and touch something deadly.
Lost Coder (Cold Store)
The jump to land beside the black skier and collect the items requires some skilful timing.
Chef's kite town (West of Kitchen)
A kitchen location in the original game, this remains the province of the chef character, whose Gallic moustache I always used to take for a glumly downturned mouth. We will learn about the chef's melancholy love life in another room of this game.
Teeth chink (The Kitchen)
The items are some kind of yucky gum residue where teeth have been removed. I remember messing around with the raised (lip edge) blocks at the bottom to try to prevent the glitch where you can fall through the floor; I'm not sure I managed it.
Into the sketch / Maria was tiny (To the Kitchens / Main Stairway)
I anagrammed the two halves of the room title separately, which led to an interesting and good-looking screen (I would say). I vaguely remember having some problems with the white background of the notepad: there is still a bit of colour-clash weirdness when the pencil guardian enters that area. I also remember my then-girlfriend Stacy commenting on the stout frame of the original Maria sprite, saying that she really wasn't tiny.
Daft girl's inn (First Landing)
In a way this screen resembles the original First Landing, being dominated by a northeast-southwest ramp, but it's a bit more colourful! I think I accurately captured the feel of a cheap hotel with retro wallpaper and sticky carpets. The little table at the bottom is, of course, the conveyor.
Metre-high moon rat (The Nightmare Room)
I remember having a few different anagram options for this room, because the letters are statistically malleable, offering words like "hemorrhage", "hermitage", and "hatemonger". One option I considered at the time was "Megaton hero mirth", which would have been some kind of parody of the "Hero Worship" screen from JSW2, with a giant figure of Willy in fits of laughter. Layout-wise, the screen isn't too fascinating but involves a few long jumps. The deadly item is a broken glass bottle, and overall it's intended to look like a sleazy back alley at night. The items are cheese!
Cheat Help (The Chapel)
This is of course a reference to the JSW cheat mode, activated by typing WRITETYPER on the First Landing: that's why the big arrow points west. The screen itself is not very interesting, but the combination of guardian, conveyor belt and overhead brickwork provides some challenge.
Lowermost Lab (Ballroom West)
The messy green brickwork gives the intended impression of a Frankenstein-style underground laboratory. I never felt too good about the ladders: JSW doesn't allow for ladders you can climb down, so while they might look good, they restrict movement around the room beyond what I would have liked. The items to be collected are test tubes, but watch out for the deadly flasks nearby.
A marble stool (Ballroom East)
Another of my less preferred rooms, because the marble stool isn't well integrated into the room construction, but hangs in the air like an "exhibit". The single-cell conveyor is supposed to represent a flash of light from the very shiny polished marble stool.
Hat Hell (The Hall)
This was one of the earliest rooms I designed, possibly the very first. The red background is supposed to suggest hellfire, and perhaps I chose top hats because that's the kind that Willy wears — or else because they are more distinctive-looking and easier to draw than other kinds.
Tenth roof rod (The Front Door)
Apparently "roof rods" are a real thing in construction, but I doubt they are vertical. This room's layout was constrained by the need to include ten rods, but I think it's quite effective: the piles of debris and sticking-out nails break up the regularity, and I managed to exploit the conveyor and ramp graphics to hint at dim shapes in the background.
A heretic rug study (The Security Guard)
With its soft carpet and crackling fire, this room actually looks quite cosy — more "study" than "heretic". The block-based steps in the middle are slightly annoying, but you only get one ramp per room! The inverted cross on the wall is a reference to The Chapel in the original game.
The Satan Encoder (Entrance to Hades)
The idea here is that the various machinery (coloured lights, and binary numbers as items) exists to assemble Satan — the scary god guardian from JSW's Chapel — who, in this room, is in two pieces that repeatedly join and separate. The exit hole at the bottom left is a trap, since any attempt to reach it will lead you into a deadly item. (Players are informed that the room layout is the same as that of the original game, so this shouldn't be a big surprise.)
The Diver (The Drive)
A modified version of the original JSW's Swimming Pool, with a diving board and, of course, a (scuba) diver. The pipe on the left offers a route west, and the two items at the bottom indicate the presence of a room beneath.
Heat toffee moat together (At the Foot of the MegaTree)
Two happy flames are heating the deadly toffee moat. (It's very possible that the unofficial Spectrum port of the puzzle game Fire 'n Ice, by n-Discovery, had put smiling fire sprites into my head.) There is a castle because you can't have a moat without a castle; and it serves as a useful way to climb to the screen above.
Under the skiing team (Inside the MegaTrunk)
Quite a few rooms in the original JSW are defined by their spatial relationships ("West of Kitchen", "Above the West Bedroom", etc.) and it seemed fun to create a surreal anagrammed room in the same vein. The three skiers on their conveyor belt are quite frustrating to pass. The item is a trophy that they have presumably won.
Cute socks on (Cuckoo's Nest)
Who doesn't love a giant little girl? (After "Shoe upon the foot" and "On her foot", you may be starting to detect some kind of paraphilia; but the anagrams made me do it!) One of the socks appears to be missing an item, and this is because you wouldn't be able to collect it without jumping into the (deadly) leg. The thigh shape is formed by a couple of stationary guardians, since featureless straight legs look weird, and I had already used the conveyor and ramp for the skirt. The chessboard floor pattern is a reference to Alice through the Looking-Glass (who also had a giantess episode) — nah, I think I've just made that up.
Oh no, the bird cavern rave (On a Branch Over the Drive)
Probably one of the funnier rooms, with its stupid but fluent title, and the use of the horrid FLASH attribute for almost the entire screen. It is lit by disco-style mirror-balls, and the use of flash allows the platforms to appear and disappear by turns, making this perhaps the likeliest "infinite death" fall in the game. (I mostly tried to avoid those.) The items are "Es", or Ecstasy pills.
To Peter (Tree Top)
Here we are climbing up through the clouds to the gate of heaven, where St Peter awaits with his bunch of keys. Few other anagrams were possible.
Built a moon (Out on a limb)
A starry background causes some colour clash as Willy walks along — and, as in "Wet swing", prevents any guardians from being used, but why would there be guardians in space? The holey yellow pattern of the moon is meant to suggest cheese, and so are the items. To make things a bit nastier, the moon texture is also a ramp, which means you're bobbing up and down as you walk on it, and can easily fall to your death. I don't know who built the moon: not Willy, or anyone else found in the game.
The Dungaree Meter (Under the MegaTree)
The pointer guardian that moves up and down the ruler was created for this screen, though it appears in one or two other places. I think there is something inherently funny about dungarees, and I liked this anagram.
The Bed Rig (The Bridge)
This is supposed to look like an oil rig in the ocean, except that there are some mattresses and pillows involved. One of the pillows is a ramp. You can't die by touching the deadly item: it's used as a graphic to allow the metal "legs" of the rig to fade out attractively, and is positioned out of reach.
Chef I once left (The Off Licence)
Remember how I said that I thought the chef's moustache was a sad mouth? If you can see it that way, this room will work better. The chef didn't do anything wrong but somebody broke his little heart. You have to be fast here, because there's an item to collect and the mouse (or metre-high moon rat?) only travels west: it won't leave the west wall after getting there. Question for JSW nerds: is the chef actually Andre from "Andre's Night Off"?
Did he ever turn? (Under the Drive)
An awkward anagram, resulting in a fairly boring room with rope as centrepiece. The long conveyor belt prevents Willy from turning; however, things are easier if you drop onto the right-hand side of the conveyor just under the pencil guardian (which I never intended). The items are U-turn arrows, to reinforce the room title.
Otter ore (Tree Root)
Another awkward anagram. I was not happy having to draw otters, but at least it gave me a chance to reuse the nondescript curled-up animal from "Cat we throw".
Basalt Weasel (East Wall Base)
Nothing to do here except climb! I like the gleaming black eye of the weasel.
God in plant (Top Landing)
This jungly screen with dangling vines and red flowers is inspired by some of the arcade games of my early childhood. Donkey Kong Jr. was probably an influence, though it doesn't look terribly similar.
Doormat embers (Master Bedroom)
The remains of a burning house. I can't remember why I left that alluring gap in the middle of the smoke clouds at the top, but it's useless, clearly too high to traverse by jumping. Note that Maria has been shifted one room to the west.
A bitter foe (A bit of tree)
This is the "Maria room", shifted west from the usual "Doormat embers" (Master Bedroom). You can drop in and take a look from above ("No fourth deer") but the only access to the game-winning Maria section is from "Doormat embers", when all items are collected. Willy will then run across the room and wave his hat in victory (a change from the toilet puking animation in the original JSW).