Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
Archive of the
Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group
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Message: 2444
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 12/12/2001
Subject: Randomness
It's nice to see this club so active again!
:-)
The mention of those horrible random crushers in
Monty On The Run has got me thinking about the
potential for randomness in MM/JSW.
With the
exception of the randomly-moving killer blocks in Geoff
Eddy's Willy Takes a Trip, Spectrum MM/JSW games are
completely deterministic: the same sequence of moves always
results in the same outcome.
(Actually, there is a
bug whereby Willy gets killed for no reason from time
to time.)
Adding random elements has the
potential to create a much scarier game-playing experience,
with the drawbacks of being unfair and
frustrating.
The scariest platform game I've ever played is Booty,
where parrots and rats appear at random from the sides
of the screen.
JSW could have random arrows:
rather than being implemented as guardians, each room
could have a frequency (an arrow appears at a random
vertical position and random left/right every n
time-frames) or probability (an arrow appears with probability
p on any given time-frame).
MM/JSW could
also have horizontal guardians that turn around at
random, as in Magic Mushrooms for the BBC: a platform
game with a built-in editor!
--
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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