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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 1704
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 11/01/2001
Subject: Re: The pain of creation
> Whenever I run JSWED, my head getsempty.
> So, how is it with you?
I keep a list of
JSW room ideas, which I add to whenever I think of
another. It's mainly a list of just room names, with the
occasional sketch, or note to include a particular technical
feature. I go through life on the lookout for MM/JSW room
ideas!
More specifically, I keep two lists for JSW: one for
the more `orthodox' room ideas that will end up in
games such as Party Willy and JSW Iva, and one for `We
Prettyish' room ideas for Goodnite Luddite, and possibly
further games in the Kari Krisn�kov� series (this list
has been on the go since We Pretty was conceived, and
has many room ideas that didn't make it into We
Pretty, some of which will be in Goodnite Luddite or
further sequels).
As for MM, with only Ma jolie
currently in the pipeline, I just have a list of twenty
room names for that (12 now in ink, 8 still in
pencil). I have a very ambitious idea to do an
autostereogram as a MM room, but in the likely event that it
doesn't work out, I have a 21st room idea. If the
autostereogram *does* come off to my satisfaction, I may submit
the 21st room to the MM Mass Collaboration (it is a
Eugene room - Ma jolie already has a Eugene room, namely
"The Hive of No Desire", but I intend to apply John
Elliott's MM patch anyway, which flags each room as Eugene
or not Eugene in a data-driven manner).
I
never sit down with MMSE or JSW CK for the sake of
writing a room, with no preconceived idea of the room -
that would lead to writer's block, I think. I always
load MMSE or JSW CK with the intention of writing one
of the rooms from my ideas lists.
However,
I'm considering using some more unorthodox writing
techniques in the future:-
As an experiment, I plan
to adapt Brian Eno's `oblique strategies' approach
as a process for writing MM/JSW rooms (although not
for any of the games currently under development -
possibly for a sequel to Goodnite Luddite). It's a pack of
cards, which you draw from at random. Each oblique
strategy tells you a way of working - sort of a technique
on each card. What I intend to do is to play through
all my (and possibly others') previous MM/JSW games,
and write an oblique strategy for every feature that
I like, be it technical, visual or atmospheric. I
will then apply this set of oblique strategies to
writing a new game, trying to use them as my major source
of inspiration. This should lead to some
extraordinary things, and some novel combinations of
features.
Another idea is to write a random room generator. This
may be as simple as poking random bytes into the room
data and then post-editing to massage the chaos into
order, or it may be more intelligent (perhaps merging
bits of existing rooms together, for example - a sort
of `cut-up' technique, as originally used by William
Burroughs in writing novels, and by David Bowie in writing
song lyrics). Or perhaps scatter items, guardians or
whatever, randomly throughout the game to begin with, and
then write the rooms around those (this idea is
inspired by typing JSW games into my real Spectrum - I
type in the guardian class table and the item table
before I type in the rooms). This kind of approach
should also yield some interesting rooms, I
think!
--
Andrew
Broad
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/>
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/>
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/>
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