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Message: 4029

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 25/03/2004

Subject: Re: Party Willy (Part 1) beta-version

 

A joint reply to two messages from January 2004 by alexandra and
soa1000:

[Re: Party Willy (Part 1) beta-version, Message 3869, 2nd January
2004]

alexandra wrote:

i haven't been doing much willy related stuff but i grabbed it and
had a few quick goes, and it's quite a treat... i'm quite a fan of
tasteful re-interpretations (but can't stand half-hearted ones with
a few unmeasured or irrelevant changes). aesthetically and gameplay
wise i prefer it to 'luddite',

I still consider Goodnite Luddite to be my great masterpiece,
although Party Willy is probably more accessible and not so
difficult (although it certainly has its moments).

and it's almost exactly on my difficulty notch for comfort and
challenge. the atmosphere is very good too, particularly use of
colour.

Thank you. I did take on board one of the main criticisms of
Goodnite Luddite, that it had too many garish colours, so for Party
Willy I've used more black-paper screens.

to me the nicest rooms, from my brief playtesting of around 30
minutes, are:

8 - skyways
11 - main entrance to bowieshire
21 - the time warp playground
24 - sky hooks (i like the puzzle with the ramps and the surreal
imagery)

"Skyhooks" is certainly a vast improvement on the JSW:MM original!
;-)

27 - sylvian's hideout (i wish those platforms would crumble
though!) Well, you're welcome to do a MM or MvSB conversion! :-) 28 - the blazing furnace. a room for atmosphere rather than
challenge (which suits me :)

Yes - sometimes simple iconic rooms work well, although I am a
maximalist by nature - I like to put every last character-square to
good use.

30 - the forest (reminds me of JTJS for some reason)

Reminds me more of Dragontorc - a wonderfully atmospheric game along
with its prequel, Avalon.

31 - la maison de jet set dick (don't ask me how, but i get a
feeling of monty on the run in this room. i think this feeling is
peculiar to me)

Now that you mention it, it does have a bit of MOTR about it! (not
by my intention).

38 - the magic faraway tree. text book example of a room that
looks asif it's more than the sum of it's parts (i.e. a room where
even a trained eye cannot or is tempted not to break down the room
straight away into it's composite and repetetive elements -
something i get a lot as a JSW/MM fan and a mind with a love of
spotting patterns).

I'm not quite sure what you mean here, as "more than the sum of its
parts" is really a meaningless buzz-phrase that's in vogue at the
moment (and I hope it dies out). How can anything ever be more than
the sum of its parts?

Do you mean that the components interact to produce a good technical
challenge, or that the elements combine to make it visually
attractive or atmospheric?

52 - back woods. because i like the part of JSW 2 it was inspired
by too..

"Backwoods" was not (at least not consciously) inspired by JSW II.
Which part of JSW II are you referring to - the "Willy's
lookout"/"Sky Blue Pink"/"Potty Pot Plant" triptych?

53 - the cave. i like the nasty grapic. kind of like an evil atari
sign ready to make you slip and impale you :O

Thanks for the personal interpretation! :-) Not something that had
occurred to me. In the JSW:MM original, there was only one
occurrence of the nasty in the room.

54 - esmeralda's bedroom. i love authentic looking rooms (rooms in
the sense of, part of a house), done in the original JSW style
(that's partly why i did JSW: RR).

I guess that's what I was trying to achieve with "Esmerelda's
Bedroom", although for some reason I think it's a bit DrUnKeN-
mAsTeResque.

59 - kari's blood bath

A great fusion of the world of Willy with the world of Kari
Krišníková! :-)

i thought in 17 - the battlements, the ramp/water blocks that form
the lower passage looked unattractive, and i would have used air
blocks for the passage instead of water, and capped off the bottom
of the vertical 3D projections with a solid block, which the
passage-taker would be able to pass thru at head height.

Thanks for the suggestion - you're right, it was a terrible room. I
have made the changes as suggested, and also added a top section to
the room to make it more interesting (and changed the player-sprite
from penguin to gliding Willy).

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The Battlements (with a Bell)

btw, all this reminds me, i have 2 projects to finish off and
release - JSW: RR (which also features re-interpretations of rooms
), and the SE of strangel.

I probably won't get round to playing Role Reversal until at least
24th April (i.e. after the final release of Party Willy), although
I've had a brief explore, and it's nice to see the amazing
innovations of MvSB (e.g. crumbling floors, horizontal lifts, and
apparently more than four basic elements) being continued.

ok, andrew, the way you latched onto my 'no caps' typing is funny
:). at first it looks like a sign of disrespect (non-capitalizing a
noun amongst normally capitalized letters to show a lack of
importance - don't ask how i learned this lol), but obviously it
comes from your habit of quoting outside sources in an exact,
photographic kind of manner (i guess?!).

Yes, I like to quote things very exactly, even when it's not
consistent with my typographical conventions.

the woody reference was funny (there is a woody reference in JSW-RR
hehe).

I do love a bit of parody.

personally i can't wait to see what you have to say on the rooms
of strangel, and how you would solve them.. i think you will enjoy
my combination puzzles *evil laugh*....... well i hope you don't
find them too easy anyway. i got little feedback on that game but
that's probably because it's brick lol

I have yet to play _strangel_ seriously, although it does seem a
most impressively We Prettyish game (both technically and
atmospherically). I played most of the rooms when I typed it into my
real Spectrum, although there were some I couldn't reach and didn't
have time to try harder. But I've started to play through all the
JSW games seriously, in chronological order, so perhaps I'll make
some detailed comments on _strangel_ when I get up to it.

[Re: dr. b's comments on room invertion and atmosphere, Message
3871, 3rd January 2004]

soa1000 wrote:

Andrew, I've not gotten that far into the Party Willy demo yet, but
I just had to say a few things:

1 - I really like your treatments of the Beatles rooms. They're
considerably better than mine (although my Fool On The Hill is at
least decent, unlike my Strawberry Fields which is to my mind
terrible). I take comfort in the knowledge that my rooms were
pretty much designed when I was still coming out of the very crude
approach of Time Hole

Thank you.

2 - is the toilet in La Maison De Jet Set Dick supposed to move
into place? I wondered if this was a glitch, or if it was a
deliberate act to stop the player thinking it was *the* toilet and
walking into it

Yes, it's intentional - I like to give my horizontal guardians as
grand an entrance as possible! :-)

Anyway, I shall have to kick back into JSW editing. I have a fair
few projects lying about, only two or three of which have any hope
of making it out of the stable. If I were you I'd drop the entry on
JSW Apocalypse down the list, since its completion - if ever - is a
long way off

Yes, I moved Apocalypse down the list at the time. There's no
precise order to my lists of future games - I go by (a) how probable
I think it is that they will ever be released, (b) how soon I think
they will be released, and (c) clustering future games by the same
author together.

--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/party_willy.ht
ml

 

 

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