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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 541
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 14/08/2000
Subject: Re: Your rules for making Willy Games
soa1000 wrote:
>
> All those of you
who have or are making JSW/MM games,
> I was
wondering what criteria you work to when making
them.
> Personally, as a maker mostly of JSW games, I
have three rules:
> 1 - The bigger the better
(sorry Erix1)
I don't like marathon games,
because I have to play them in one sitting on my real
Spectrum, and I have an extremely busy life. 64 rooms is
quite enough; in some cases a bit too much. I certainly
don't plan on making a 256-room JSW128 game (although I
do plan to do a 128-room 128K version of Party
Willy). I consider a good-length JSW game to be one that
I can complete in just over an hour on my real
Spectrum.
> 2 - Difficult is good
Yes - as anyone
who's played my games will have realised, I have a
penchant for writing ridiculously difficult rooms! :->
It's nice to have some easy ones too, though, and I
think I found a good balance for We Pretty.
>
3 - Stealing graphics from non-JSW games is
okay
> so long as it stops you from repeating the
same
> tired old sprites (and you credit them
obviously)
I generally use only my own graphics (ripping some
from the original MM/JSW for some of my games). Each
game must have plenty of new graphics, but I may reuse
a few of my old graphics as I did for We
Pretty.
sendy_baby wrote:
> large, non-linear maps are good
(encourage exploration)
I used to think that would be
the case, and indeed We Pretty was originally going
to be like that, but games that are always tending
to spread can be very frustrating because there's a
lot you have to keep track of, and it's harder to
explore systematically as someone of my tunnel vision
likes to do.
On the other hand, completely
linear games can be very tedious and restrictive.
Obviously a happy medium must be sought.
JSW:LOTR is
inevitably very linear because it's a book adaptation, but
at least it has some branches because the book does,
and Books III and V break away from the linearity
within themselves, which is nice. We Pretty is also
quite linear, but again has several choice points - I
like the geography, but I think I should have used a
higher branching factor.
A really bad pattern for
JSW geography is one-way exits - where you leave a
room and have to take a long detour to get back
there.
A really good pattern for JSW geography is Promised
Land effects, where part of a room can only be reached
from a very different stage of the game than where you
are now. I try to get a lot of Promised Lands into my
JSW games. Being able to get straight back from the
Promised Land part of the room to the `regular' part is a
bad idea because it's a one-way exit of
course.
The kind of JSW game I think I'd like to see
geography-wise would be one which is broken down into several
smallish chunks (of 16 rooms or so), each chunk a sort of
mini-world which, however linear or non-linear, is
completely contained within itself (except for Promised
Lands and the link back to the central teleport
room).
> pushing the limits of the game engine in any way
possible
> to provide a varied gaming
experience
Absolutely. I try to use lots of quirky features in my games,
and looking back on We Pretty I'm amazed at the range
of new features it exploited. In fact, I'm going to
have my work cut out if I'm going to do a sequel which
lives up to it! ;-)
It's also very important
that a game should have a good atmosphere and have
visually attractive rooms, as well as being fun to play. I
like to write games with a very surreal, bizarre,
sometimes unfathomable atmosphere, of which We Pretty is an
outstanding example. I like to encourage the audience to have
their own, personal interpretations, and I like to
penetrate the subconscious.
--
Andrew
Broad
broada@...
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/>