Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
Authors about their games
Bob The Polar Bear
About Manic Miner 40th Anniversary Tribute (MM40th)
About Manic-4-Noobs (M4N)
[submitted by Bob The Polar Bear in August 2023]
It's late 2020 and I'm playing Manic Miner on an emulator and thinking this might be more fun/easier with more staring lives, conveyors disabled, different graphics for the safe platforms in Skylab, a solid block added to the left side of the Warehouse to give Willy somewhere to rest during one of the hardest caverns, and no air time limit, especially on Solar Power Generator. Not all of these changes were made but this was the start of Manic-4-Noobs. While tweaking I saw that areas of the screen were not being used and the Extra graphic block was used very rarely. So decided to pad the caverns out a bit. Think the original was kept dark and sparse to prevent screen burn-in, but I didn't worry about this :).
There was some justified confusion over the name when it was released, because when peeps started playing it, they actually found it harder, but Manic-4-Noobs When You Look At All 20 Caverns Together is too long a title :).
About MANIC-minor (M-m)
[submitted by Bob The Polar Bear in August 2023]
Listened to the criticism of M4N still being quite hard and decided to make a kids version. M-m was built on M4N, so basically increased the colour and brightness of the caverns and made them easier. Made it as easy as I could while still trying to retain an element of challenge, as tweaking a ridiculously easy version had no appeal for me. I think it is a good version even for more experienced players if they just want to kill some time and try to complete it without losing a Willy. Made it loop only three times as wanted to encourage anyone who could do this to play M4N instead for more of a challenge.
About Manic Miner 40th Anniversary Tribute (MM40th)
[submitted by Bob The Polar Bear in August 2023]
It's early 2023, the 40th anniversary year of Manic Miner, and I decided to make a Tribute version. Spent all of one day on creating something from scratch, and it really hit me just how labour-intensive my method and tweaking game code and graphics really was. I'm not saying a team of monkeys could have produced a better result, but they could have come up with a better process for doing it. Still wanted to do something for the 40th, so looked again at M-m. It already had the best graphics I can do, so the goal for 2023 was to tweak the caverns so they would be the hardest I would like to play. Peeps who are better at platformers than me are going to find them too easy, and those less able will find them too hard, but if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no-one. This is very much my take on the game :).
To anyone who has an interest in tweaking games and really likes MM40th, I suggest you look at M-m and then M4N and see where the changes were made and how it developed. There is a balance between how a game looks and how it plays. With MM40th I leaned more to how it plays. So it might not look much harder than M-m if you just look at static screenshots, but trust me - it is :).
Finally, could not have done this without the help of others, and especially Matthew Smith who created a game that stands up so well it's still being played 40 years later. If MM40th is still being played 40 days from now, I'll be chuffed :).