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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 4984
Author: Daniel
Date: 27/10/2005
Subject: "Jet Set Willy: Mind Control" released for the Club members!
Hello Everyone,
I am happy to announce the release of "Jet Set Willy: Mind Control"
for the Club members. It can be downloaded from my folder (Daniel
Gromann) in the Files section, file name: "JSW-MC-Club.tap". It will
be available for a limited period of time only the final version
will follow soon. Please, do not spread the file outside of the Club
and archive it only if you are a devout game-completist :-) .
Credits
The game is a joint effort by Sendy (Alex Cornhill) and myself. I
started creating it inspired by Sendy's rooms released in March 2005
in the package called "The Unlucky Seven" (message # 4738). I want
to express my deep gratitude to Sendy for letting me use her
excellent rooms from her various unfinished projects and incorporate
them into a finished, compleatable game :-) .
Most of the rooms were created by Sendy or myself. Several of them
are remakes, or near dead-ringers, of rooms from our previous games.
There are also two redesigned rooms originally by Richard Hallas
(from "Join the Jet-Set!") and two redesigned rooms originally by
Zoran Miladinov (from an unreleased demo of his). The game features
sprites designed by Matthew Smith, Darren McCowan, Sendy (Alex
Cornhill), Zoran Miladinov, Herve Ast, Adam Britton, Richard Hallas,
Michael Blanke and Arno Gitz, Andrew Broad, Greg Heslington and
myself. If I missed someone, do let me know I will try to be fully
precise when I write the text file. I should also mention the fact
that the game uses some design patterns from games by Andrew Broad
and Stuart J. Hill and from "Willy's New Hat", and some graphical
elements from games by Adam Britton, Stuart J. Hill and Richard
Hallas. Andrew Broad's games have inspired the use of a lot of the
quirky features seen in the game.
I would like to heartily thank all of the authors mentioned above
and anyone else I may have missed for their permission to use the
material they have created :-) .
The game was created using John Elliott's JSWED v. 2.2.3 and makes
use of his 128k game engine thanks a lot, John!
The Story
While basking in the sun in his New Mansion, Willy was suddenly
abducted by aliens. They carried him to an unknown planet and
marooned him there, with a strange helmet fixed firmly on his head,
probably to monitor his movements and control his mind functions
hence the title "Mind Control". Stupid fellows, they didn't know that
Willy is smarter than they can ever dream to be he starts to
explore the new territory vigorously and soon discovers that there
are a lot of shining items to collect. He climbs down the mountain,
he encounters a quiet plateau and a castle tower, he goes back, makes
a long fall and lands in the depths, where he starts to explore
tunnels, ancient factories and other weird places. Finally, after
many adventures, he arrives at the entrance of a house. There, after
further exploration, he discovers a launching pad, on which another
flying saucer is waiting to be used. Alas, Willy hasn't collected all
of the shining items yet, and he doesn't have the energy necessary to
run fast enough to enter the launching pad. Can you help him, so that
he can fly back to his New Mansion and get rid of the alien helmet?
The game
"JSW: Mind Control" has 114 rooms, of which 103 belong to the game
and 11 to the final sequence. You need to visit all of the rooms in
order to complete the game successfully. You should be familiar with
the quirky features of the game engine, otherwise some rooms may seem
very difficult / impossible to complete. There are 256 items to
collect. I guarantee that theoretically you can finish the game
without losing a single life; in practice you can achieve it by
saving snapshots on an emulator (every few seconds :-) ), and going
back to the last good one whenever you lose a life. If you get stuck
and become desperate, do let me know and I will be pleased to tell
you what the trick is :-) .
By my current standards, I would say that the game is very difficult
for a novice, and a moderate challenge for experts. I hope it might
be described as a mild challenge for top-level experts.
Notable features
In some of the rooms you can see the same combination of an overhead
wall-block and an ILB as in "JSW: The 2005 Megamix", which allows
Willy to drop safely the height of over five blocks. Andrew Broad has
recently confirmed that I seem to be the first person to have applied
this particular configuration. In "JSW: Mind Control" you can see it
in the rooms "Enigmatic One-Way Passage" (041) and "The Devil's
Workshop" (087). In the room "The Most Secret of All Places" (112) I
applied a variant of this combination watch Willy drop safely what
seems to be over six blocks which is probably the first time it has
ever been applied.
There is also an interesting combination of two quirky features
entering a room below after jumping through an innocent-looking block
and the necessity to keep walking after entering the room because
otherwise you get killed repeatedly between "A Little Room with a
View" (021) and "Playing with Yourself" (054). I don't know if it has
been applied before, but in any case I think it's cool.
The room "A Doubly Problematic Stairway" (034) exploits some
interesting quirky features relating to the superjump. I barely
touched the subject, but I have the feeling that it's a large new
field (or has someone explored it extensively before?) because the
superjump seems to modify significantly the way quirky features
relating to jumping through blocks work.
I believe that the final sequence is very nice and worth struggling
to reach. Do play the game, don't just look at it in the editor it
has many puzzles and surprises for you! (or so I hope :-) ).
Club Release versus final release
As the text on the initial screen of the game informs you, I would
like to release the final, "official" version of the game just
before Christmas this year. The purpose of releasing the Club version
first is, apart from honouring all of you :-), to give you all an
opportunity to contribute something. If you discover problems of any
kind with the game or have some bright ideas for significant
improvements DO LET ME KNOW I would like the final version to be
so good that there be no need for a special edition in the future :-
) . So e-mail me any kind of feedback you may have before December
18 I promise I will consider every idea carefully and implement the
ones I will think deserve it :-).
A special request towards the native English speakers do let me
know if there are any problems or imperfections in the room names or
the scrolling message! I will be very glad to correct them :-)
A couple of points for John Elliott
a)
I have various comments about JSWED, but no time to prepare them
properly (I will do it whenever I can). However, taking advantage of
the Club release of "JSW: Mind Control", I would like to mention the
following problem I've encountered while working on "JSW: The 2005
Megamix" (in one or two rooms) and on "JSW: Mind Control" (in several
rooms). Sometimes the shape of the ramp or the conveyor looks OK in
the editor, but during the game, when it is loaded into an emulator,
the shape is different than in the editor. Sometimes the solution is
to invert the shape and invert the colours of the ramp/conveyor so
that the final effect is the same. Sometimes it helps and in the
emulator you see what you want to see. But sometimes it doesn't help.
Also, the colours of the other elements seem to matter and affect the
situation - I have tried to establish a pattern, but have failed to
do so (perhaps I wasn't methodical enough).
Anyway, in "JSW: MC" you can see the problem in the room "Here's
lookin' at'cha, Kid" (058) the shape of the ramp is different in
the editor from what you see when you play in the emulator I have
left it as it is, because it doesn't look so bad after all. However,
in the room "The Haunted Log Cabin" (108), I have had the same
problem with the conveyor and I haven't been able to solve it to my
full satisfaction the only solution I found was to change the
conveyor's attribute to bright then it is shown correctly in the
emulator but when it's not bright, no matter how I invert it, it
becomes deformed in the emulator (which you don't see in the editor).
I had the same problem with the ramp in "He came from the sky..."
(029) and I have managed to solve it at last by playing with the
colours of various elements (earth, water, fire, etc.), but I am not
sure why it was solved. If you are interested, you can modify
(invert) the colours / shapes of one of the elements, and probably
after that the shape of the ramp will not be shown correctly in the
emulator any more.
I had the same problem in "Road to the Milk Factory" (056), but when
I inverted the ramp's shape and colour, it started showing OK in the
emulator.
I had the same problem in some other rooms, and probably solved it by
inverting the shape and the colour of the problematic element
(usually the ramp).
Sorry for the lengthy description, but I thought it might help to
make the excellently wonderful JSWED an even more perfect tool :-) .
b)
In the room "In the Sandhills" (023) the last pair of arrows which
appears (the fourth one, counting from the moment you have entered
the room, the arrows enter from the right) looks incorrect in the
emulator the arrows seem to have the upper part missing. In JSWED
they look OK, at least to me there is nothing to suggest there may
be a problem. Any idea of why this happens and (more importantly)
how to solve it?
Well, I hope you will all have the time and the desire to try the
game, and that at least some of you will enjoy it. I look forward to
reading your comments / contributions! I will be offline for the next
week, so don't expect an immediate reaction (whether you post in the
Club or write to me individually), but I will certainly respond
whenever I have access to the internet again.
Good luck with all your projects and "happy left- right- and jumping!"
Daniel
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