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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5414
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 08/01/2006
Subject: strangel: andrew's third playtest
this message follows on from message 5399.
a tough day for me today, as i hit a part of the game with lots of
one-way exits, and spent ages contemplating the collectibility of
the bottom-left item in "er tAp Darnce" [49], eventually
having to leave the area without either success or a proof of
uncollectibility :-o (could be a job for SPECSAISIE RoomReachJSW,
although it doesn't recognise teleporters yet... but then i saw the
answer in jswed, and extended my playtest to collect it).
phantom giZmos: 143 Tyme 11:35am
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room-specific comments
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[1] "Ins ( HADOW )": some nice quirky features, including having to
stop on a conveyor to jump straight up, and jumping over a fire-cell
to land inside adjacent water-cells, but i spent far too long trying
to jump left from /under/ the diagonal guardian.
_____the upper green butler has unidirectional animation - is this
intentional?
[5] "venDed F0OD": what a truly quirky invalid ramp! (direction =
85). is it the overhead ramp/floor-cell that dumps you through the
conveyor? an amazing discovery!
[9] "BAD HAiR daY": you have to jump into this room at the bottom-
right, but it's easy to encounter infinite death if you jump from
too far to the left.
_____i like the ascent-avoidance challenge at the top-right.
[20] "FUMbling in the DARk": a darth-melkorish room reminiscent of
the four extra rooms in pm-jsw, with its near-random cell-placements
and many items.
_____it's intriguing what black-paper air does to a game with
the "black willy" patch applied.
[29] "betTER shape UP": it's intriguing how the combination of an
ilb and a ramp gives you the illusion of being able to fall through
8 cell-rows without dying!
....|.
..|...
|.....
......
......
......
......
...../
..../
[30] "clueLEsS": visually unique.
[34] "not Everyone's Cup Of T": it's intriguing how the blind
entrance from the conveyor in "in THE spotLITE" [25] makes you think
you're still on a left-conveyor and induces you to run into a
guardian!
[35] "rHythm and blues Angus Steakhaus": an intriguing room of
quirky features once i got past the unfair one-way exit from my
first visit. particularly noteworthy is the cunning use of a sticky
conveyor, forcing you to make a pixel-perfect jump through the ramp-
cell:
||..........||
......--...-.|
|-$.../....$-|
|||========|||
however, there's an infinite-death scenario if you stand on the
water-cell at (7,28) and jump right into "clueLEsS" [30].
[39] "sisSy TOp": several interesting quirky design-patterns here,
such as:
(a) the jump through the overhead earth-cell needed to get up onto a
platform without hitting a fire-cell:
*...
|||.
...-
....
.-.-
(b) the way you can walk through the tall, blinking horizontal
guardian (technically two of them);
(c) the two different cell-rows in which you can land by jumping
left into the following column of earth-cells:
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.
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[49] "er tAp Darnce": an intriguing take on "The Bathroom"
from the original jsw.
[51] "M T rOoMs": an intriguing array of quirky features in the
middle of this room:
......|.......
*---|.........
-----------..|
|||>>>>>>>>>..
........-.....
........|*...-
.....*..|-...|
.../|||||||||.
but there's a pretty serious flaw in the geography, as you cannot
take both the bottom-left item in this room and the rightmost item
in "trICK STEP" [16] (two rooms to the left) before you are forced
to take the one-way exit down from this room (it takes seven room-
exits to get back here if you know the shortest route, which starts
with the nightmarish descent of "walK tHe paTH OF THE PRECiOUS 1s"
[71]).
[59] "the ART of FLYING": an inventive use of invalid-arrow pairs
to make the player fall through moving gaps from a great height
(there's a similar feature in the brilliant spectrum platform-game
_bruce lee_, which is basically jsw + ladders + kicking and
punching, with more intelligent guardians, but without the intricate
set challenges and quirky features of jsw).
[68] "fuLLy Clothed": jumping through the ilbs at the bottom-left
are nasty one-way exits if you haven't collected the items in the
correct order. i had to roll back to a not-so-recent snapshot on disk
to rectify the mistake i made on my first visit.
[79] "the BAL cony": this room reminds me of the spectrum-game
_freddy hardest_ (part 2), with its split-level screen-layout and
the monkeys(?) that look like they're brachiating along overhead
rails.
[86] "so yOu ThiNk You're Clev": a really cruel trick to make the
player think they should be able to collect the bottom-left item
in "er tAp Darnce" [49] this way - i spent ages agonising
over it before i gave up and left the area.
[108] "Strange BIRD": a delightfully `manic miner' atmosphere.
[111] "water is BlUE": a prime example of using an item to lure a
player to his/her death - it looks as though you should be able to
escape after jumping up onto the main wall, but you have to
sacrifice a life if you do it this way.
--
dr. andrew broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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