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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 3010
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 29/09/2002
Subject: Re: Soul Miner, Goodnite Luddite & Ma jolie
dan_richardson_uk wrote:
>Wow, I'm really looking forward to Soul Miner now - Radiohead-
> I played it, and loved it :)
>
> It reminded me of We Pretty, but a lot easier to explore :P
references and all! :-) It doesn't work on my emulator (MacSpectacle
1.8.2), which doesn't handle 128K mode properly. So I'll have to wait
until March 2003, after I've typed into my real Spectrum Skint Willy,
JSW - The Sun Is No Longer Producing Heat, JSW: Spectrum Computing,
Fantasy World Willy, and Manic Miner comp.sys.sinclair (it was great
to end the 31-month wait for a MM game since MM 2000! :-) ).
> Anyway it's good work, and I realize it's the sort of JSW game thatThere's nothing like the elegant simplicity of a Spectrum game, and
> could only be done on the Spectrum version.
from what I've heard, all the non-Spectrum versions of MM and JSW
lose my beloved quirky features
[http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/features.html ]. Does
Soul Miner use quirky features?
Goodnite Luddite is the sequel to We Pretty, so it has a similar
atmosphere, but with a more coherent plot. It's set in a Selesian
monastery, but has some very surreal rooms. The rooms fall into three
major clusters: inside the abbey, outside the abbey, and the hidden
`Antiselesian' section which contains the most We-Prettyish rooms. I
think the geography of Goodnite Luddite is more rational than many
JSW rewrites: Goodnite Luddite unfolds into clusters and subclusters,
and avoids those horrible one-way exits that plague many JSW games.
Goodnite Luddite is considerably easier to explore than We Pretty -
even lay players should be able to see ten rooms before they can get
no further! ;-) Goodnite Luddite is full of quirky features in almost
every room, including a few new ones! 8-) But it's not my tightest
game in terms of needing pixel-perfect collision-detection and frame-
perfect timing. Only a few rooms are what I consider mentally
distressing, and those rooms are generally only used to guard items,
or in the case of "THE GLASS ASYLUM" to block the passage to one
otherwise-unreachable room.
Ma jolie, on the other hand, is the most mind-bogglingly difficult MM
or JSW game ever written. It requires pixel-perfect and frame-perfect
moving, and isn't even very pause-button-sympathetic because of the
conveyors and crumbling floors (it's difficult to register every key-
press when you're unpausing and pausing between every time-frame! :-
> ). Crumbling floor certainly adds a new dimension of difficulty toMM games.
Yesterday I wrote my first MM room for almost 18 months, and when I
played through Ma jolie, I was amazed at the fiendish rooms I had
come up with, and wondering how to maintain this standard for the
remaining seven rooms to be written! ;-) At best, a room will just
flow out of me, and often turns out to be more difficult than I
imagined in the editor. Then, after the first playtest, I might tweak
it either to be as difficult as possible, or just to be possible! ;-)
--
Andrew Broad
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/download/
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