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Message: 4176

Author: Alexandra

Date: 03/05/2004

Subject: Re: Andrew's beta-review of Role Reversal

 

> > I want to make a room with 3 or 4 of them in soon.
>
> That might be difficult, given the way ropes interact (because they
> use 16 bytes in the current room's expanded guardian-list, rather
> than the usual 8 bytes per guardian - i.e. they encroach on the

next

> guardian's data-space), and the constraints on which columns a non-
> swinging rope can go in without causing the `bug' whereby you are
> teleported to the room above.

John fixed that with a patch called 'Adjacent ropes' (or something
similar). So you can have all 8 guardians as ropes, if you like :).

However, I noticed in Strangel (and also ZX HEROES) that certain
ropes can sometimes 'teleport' you, usually when you just enter the
room. Maybe this is one of the things fixed in the new patch?

> Yes. Next up for me will be Adam Britton's _The Deadly Mission_ and
> _Willy's Holiday_ - I wonder if I could still persuade him to do
> Special Editions to go with _The Continuing Adventures_ Special
> Edition from 1998? :-) :-)

Crikey, you're still in the 80's then ;). I don't think you'll ever
catch up if you plan on playing all of them to completion. I've only
actually played a select few to completion.. Sometimes, just to look
around and see all the rooms, is enough :)

> > and besides, that hole is where you fall down thru from the room
> > above. I know falling thru a solid block would work just as well,
> > but I generally don't use that in my games unless I want to give
> > the impression of a secret 'passthrough' wall/celing.
>
> And why not, with the room above being one of Role Reversal's best-
> kept secrets! :-)

It's tempting, so I'll consider it :)

> >> I like the Promised-Land niche at the bottom-left (even though
> >> it's only two hops away, so not much of a Promised Land). I would
> >> definitely make the player /have/ to jump through the ILB!
> >
> > I may well crumble and do just that. Can't hurt :)
>
> Yais! :-)

I say I'm 'crumbling' because I originally intended to make the
gameplay include nothing other than standard platformgame fare, but
since ILB's are so well known in JSW this is not too much of a bend
away from the original intent.

> Yes, although it would be better if you felt you were supposed to

do

> it that way. Perhaps you could move the 256th item to "The Study"
> and have an extra wall there to separate it from the one behind the
> forcefield?

It's tempting but it would go against my original intentions. Don't
worry, in the next game I'll just go crazy with puzzles... Erix1-mode
has quite a few unexplored quirky features, such as being able to
jump off of the top right hand corner of a 'special' fire-block asif
it were a wall :). I have yet to try merging crumblers with other
blocktypes, even (tried ramps, works as expected).

> Aha! Well, it would be nice to let the player know that "The Stop-
> cock" is now unblocked, unlike the similar effect in _Willy Takes a
> Trip_!

I'll edit the text to let the player know, and also I'll make sure
there are spaces wherever there are characters on the screen, so it
doesn't kill you.

> Hackulator? Is that some sort of Erix1-mode editor, or are you just
> referring to the Erix1-mode game-engine?

It's a quick poke type utility for setting up the extra features of
each room. Very quick interface, does the job OK though :)

> Yes, Role Reversal actually isn't too bad in terms of Promised
> Lands - although many of them are, in fact, one-way exits (which I
> try to avoid with Promised Lands, even though the Promised Lands in
> Role Reversal are `fair' one-way exits AFAIR).

Again noted.

> >> [32] "The Dining Room": One of the better crumbling-floor rooms
> >> in this game, requiring a bit of timing and forward-thinking.
> >
> > Would be even harder in MM ;)
>
> Because items don't stay collected after you lose a life?

Yeah, and you can't flick the screen to reset the floors :)

> But you could consider knocking a hole in "The Fridge" (above " F"
> in the bottom row), clearing some of the static nasties at the top
> of "Deep Freeze" and putting an item there?

Maybe, though the red nasties serve the purpose of preventing you
from jumping up and landing squarely on the sticky conveyor, which
would of course ruin the illusion of ice and make it look more like
glue :)

> >> [38] "Toolshed"
> > Originally I wanted it to be kamikaziable (?!)
>
> kamikazeable? ;-)

Something like that :)

> I'm nearly sure I've seen all the rooms in _where's woody_, but I
> cannot remember "driller killer" now, nor when I wrote "Wiredlife"!

It's in the tower of babel (bagel) section.

> I do know that, but it didn't help me to cross "Onto the Roof" from
> left to right! ;-) So I ended up going left and taking a detour
> through a few done-and-dusted rooms.

That was pretty much designed as a one way system. You come up from
the Zen Room, then go thru Quirkafleeg II and round the Study and
back up thru Zen to go right and finish clearing the roof rooms. I
hadn't even considered the implications of coming back the other way
thru those rooms :). Though I have to admit now you point it out, the
way down to the Zen room on all those crumblers is pretty fun. I'm
wondering if I should change the layout a little to make it less of a
one way affair...

> I've always had a hankering to go to Paris and take a tour through
> the sewers, among other tourist-attractions there. But I doubt I
> will ever make a journey outside the UK again... save one.

I wrote to Jim'll fix it when I was little asking for him to take me
to see some sewers. To be honest, I would have probably been
disappointed once I realised that a real sewer is not like the sewers
in computer games ;)

> Only if there were ZipZone-style guardians in the crumbling floor,
> since, like a ramp, you'd still be on the same level in terms of
> walking and jumping (but not in terms of drawing and guardian
> collision-detection).

Oh I see yeah..

> Damb! That was a really cool quirky feature!

Sorry ;) I like the other way of getting the item more. I'll put that
quirky feature in my next game.

> > Yeah, that would be cool... No doubt you'll find a way to make it
> > harder too..
>
> Well, I'd start with a faithful reinterpretation and see how that
> turned out. "Eternal Flame" (originally from J4) had to be made

much

> harder to fit _Ma jolie_! :->

You could try a lateral inversion, maybe.. And I was thinking you'd
fill in the aesthetic walls with more playable stuff, since you don't
like wasting space.

> strangel is the one I admire the most, because of the multitudinous
> quirky features and the surreal atmosphere - much like We Pretty! :-

)

I'm very proud of it too. And I /will/ release the SE of it
eventually ;)

> I've been looking forward to Death TV for a long time now.

I work on it from time to time. I will upload what I have to the club
soon, along with my 10-screen MM game (or did I do that already?)

> Byte A of the item is at 65279, and currently has the value 126 ( =
> 62 + 64, i.e. Room 62, uncollected). The format of Byte A is
> YCRRRRRR, where Y is the most significant bit of the row, C is the
> `collected' flag, and RRRRRR is the 6-bit room-number.
>
> Byte B of the item is at 65535, and currently has the value 0 (i.e.
> the item is at 0,0). The format of Byte B is YYYXXXXX, where YYY

are

> the lower three bits of the row, and XXXXX is the column.
>
> So you could poke 65279 to move the item into a room that JSWED
> recognises (POKE 65279,222 moves it to the lower half of "The

Study"

> [30] if you subscribe to my suggestion above).

I'll, er, come back to that later :)

> > The end of the bed is supposed to be the 'toilet' which will
> > change into a sprite depicting Maria laying on the bed (ooh-er!).
> > But for some reason my 'toilet' (bed) has gone walkies and I can't
> > see it apart from in the editor.
>
> This is because you try to have the toilet in Master Bedroom, and
> the code that checks whether you are in Master Bedroom only goes on
> to check whether you are in The Bathroom if you are NOT in Master
> Bedroom:
> 38199: CP 27 ; in "Master Bedroom"?
> 38201: JP NZ,38298 ; if not then jump to toilet-drawing routine
>
> So The Bathroom cannot be the same room as Master Bedroom unless

you

> rewrite the code to also jump to 38298 when it's done handling
> Master Bedroom!

Ahh, I should have known it would be something along those lines :)

> Along as credit's given where credit's due! :-)

I like to think I'm very fair :). I pretty much bill JSW: RR as a
joint project anyway...

> If I had a copy of MvSB Revision D to hand, SPECSAISIE Compare

could

> compare D with E and tell us the pokes needed to fix the bug.
> Unfortunately my only copies of Revisions A-D are on a Mac-disk

with

> no Mac to read it. :-(
>
> I could compare Role Reversal with MvSB Revision E, but of course
> the changes would be buried in the many differences between the two
> games, not so easy to spot since SPECSAISIE Compare does not
> currently have an address-annotation facility!
>
> It's a nasty bug which should certainly be fixed. It crashes if you
> quit the game using CAPS SHIFT + SPACE, and I dread to speculate
> about what would happen if the coloured squares reached the playing-
> area! Fortunately I finished the game (as far as possible) before
> this happened.

I'm pretty sure Erix1 knows how to fix it. I did have the coloured
squares reach the playing area once in MvsSB, but I don't remember
what effect it had.

 

 

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