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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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