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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5520
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 19/02/2006
Subject: Re: Spaceman Willy / Andrew's website updated
Daniel wrote:
>And I played it to completion today.
> Relaxing after hard work related to the release of Sendy's and
> mine "JSW: Mind Control", I played "Spaceman Willy" to completion.
> I completed it with the infinite lives POKE (and saving snapshots,It is. I completed it using only snapshots, John Elliott's room-
> which was useful several times with multiple-death scenarios), but
> I have a feeling that it should be possible to complete the game
> without losing a single life.
number patch, and a room-list generated by the latest alpha-revision
of SPECSAISIE RoomsJSW - which now marks the rooms with no items so
that I can tick off all the other rooms on a printout as I item-
complete them.
> Even though the game is probably not particularly impressive andHow indeed?
> certainly not difficult by today's standards, playing it was a
> very nice experience. I couldn't help thinking that it was like
> discovering a long-forgotten remote territory or something after
> all, it was created by Leslie Marwick 20 years ago, must have been
> experienced by some players at that time (not many of them, I
> imagine), and was then totally forgotten until Steve dug it out!
> (how does he do it...)
> The same thing as with R.D. Foord's "Dr. Jet Set Willy", butDr. Jet Set Willy will be the next game that I gamma-play, and I
> "Spaceman Willy" is much better, because it is complete and it has
> a concrete theme and atmosphere. You can see the author was very
> meticulous while designing it; he even included a nice loading
> screen and new title-screen and in-game music.
look forward to doing so, even for the fact that it is incomplete.
There's something intriguing about incomplete games - I want to
explore the game's limits and devise the simplest patch to make it
completable.
> There are 60 rooms in the game, plus another room (47) which canYes, there are two rooms called "The Comet"!
> be accessed only by Writetyper, I think (it is playable, it is
> almost a copy of another room, but you cannot exit safely - unless
> by Writetyper again).
....*........................... .......*........................
................................ ................................
.....................>.......... ................................
................................ ..*.............................
................................ ...........................*....
.......||||...--................ ...........|||..---.............
......|||||||....-..---..-...... .........||||||.......---.......
......||||||||.................. ........||||||||..--............
.....|||||||||-.--.*..-.....--.. .......||||||||||....--...--.-..
--...||||||||.......--...--..... --.....||||||||||.-.--..--....--
..-...|||||||.--..-............. ..-.-..||||||||||............-..
.......|||||..........---....... ........||||||||...--..-..--....
........|||.-...-.--............ ........||||||||.--.--..........
................................ .....*...||||||....-..---.......
..../..............-............ ...........||..---............*.
......................-..--..... .....................*....-.-...
___________The Comet [6]________ ___________The Comet [47]_______
SPECSAISIE RoomReachJSW confirms that [47] is unreachable. But you
can safely exit it by going right into "Psytronatom" [13], although
JSWED doesn't recognise this because technically the right-exit of
[47] is 205.
In JSW48, if a room-exit x is greater than 63, it takes you to Room
[x mod 64] (i.e. keep subtracting 64 from x until it is less than
64).
That is to say, Room [x mod 64] is loaded into the current-room
buffer, but the current room-number [PEEK 33824] is still x itself,
so any uncollected items in that room will not appear - a quirky
feature that I actually used a couple of times in Goodnite Luddite,
to suppress items until you approach the room from the correct
direction.
Obviously this trick does not extend to JSW128, where all 256
possible room-numbers map to unique rooms. I haven't tried it in
JSW64 (I suspect it may work as for JSW48 in Variants X, Y, Z and [;
while in Variants V and W, I would expect exits 128-255 to map to
Room [x mod 128]).
> The layout is carefully planned, with only one problem as far as II rarely worry about such issues. The original JSW is pretty
> could tell - there are seven rooms between "Oxygen Production
> Plant" and "The Reactor", and there are only six rooms below them,
> between "Filtration Plant" and "Under the Reactor", even though
> "Filtration Plant" is located directly below "Oxygen Production
> Plant" and "Under the Reactor" is obviously located directly
> below "The Reactor".
illogical itself, with just one room between "The Wine Cellar"
and "The Security Guard" (there are seven rooms which could be
geographically above "The Forgotten Abbey", but technically
it's "The Off Licence"), and "Out on a limb" taking you directly
to "The Front Door" if you jump off the left edge, not to mention
the illogical up-exits of "Watch Tower" and "Rescue Esmerelda",
which Darth Melkor believes were intended for Rooms 47 and 61-63.
Notwithstanding some grossly unfair infinite-death scenarios, the
geography of Spaceman Willy is pretty good.
The start-room, "On The Surface" [40] is also the hub that branches
off to the various major parts of the map, and you tend to end up
back "On The Surface" without too much worry (except if you have the
misfortune to end up at the top of "Shuttle Pad" [39], which is
directly to the right of "On The Surface", but requires a lengthy
detour to return there).
But there are flaws, such as the choice-point at "The Asylum" [30].
Whether you go left or right, you eventually end up back "On The
Surface", and have to go back through six room-exits to return
to "The Asylum", instead of ending up back at "The Asylum" without
having to worry about it.
So one guideline I have for map-design is: whichever exit you take
from a choice-point, the path should eventually take you back to
that choice-point. You might even mark each exit with an item, to
help the player remember which paths remain to be followed,
especially if there are many choices, or the player won't return to
the choice-point until much later.
Another guideline is: if the player has a choice between a one-way
exit and a two-way exit, then the two-way exit should always return
them to the choice-point even if the one-way exit doesn't. A nice
example of this is "The Acid Pool" [58].
> As jet_visy mentioned, there are some nice sprites which mightAbsolutely! I particularly like the jack-in-a-box (#9C80), the
> deserve being reused in new games.
safety-pin (#AF00), the dalek (#AF80) and the Mr.Men (#B400-B5FF).
If only JSWED allowed you to view addresses < #9C00 or > #BFFF as
sprites (Page #97 is free for sprites, as is Page #9B if the colour-
code routine is disabled).
It's also perfectly legitimate to trade any room for an extra sprite-
page (#C000-FFFF), and it can be most intriguing to view any page in
memory as though it were a sprite-page, even if it wouldn't be
appropriate to allow the user to edit it as such!
> A word of criticism would certainly have to go against some unfairJumping left from "The Ruins" [48] is a /fair/ IDS, because you have
> infinite-death scenarios, such as going down from "The Ruins"
> into "Down The Mine", or jumping left from "The Ruins" into "The
> Flying Saucer".
the option of walking in. Not to mention that you must have just
come from "The Flying Saucer" [0]!!!
> The ending is interesting, because evidently it involved someThat's right. I was amazed when I saw that patch, especially after
> hacking those of you who have technical knowledge would know.
> After reaching the bed (the point where the toilet-run normally
> starts), the game ends and the player is shown a congratulations
> screen, after which he/she is given the option of restarting the
> game. So, according to the definitions established by
> Andrew, "Spaceman Willy" is bed-completable, but not toilet-
> completable.
playing a game in which the guardians and items haven't been edited!
(only the rooms and sprites).
Unfortunately I can't record a bed-time for Spaceman Willy, as the
clock-handling code has been completely stripped out as far as I can
tell by disassembling #8A72-8AA7, and ASCIIfying #857F-8584
(normally the current time in ASCII text-format).
> Incidentally, in your document you say, Andrew: "A JSW game isAgreed. I have updated my Bugs in Specific JSW Games page (where my
> bed-completable if it is Maria-completable and you can reach the
> bed-column, triggering Willy to run towards the toilet." I think
> that taking the ending in "Spaceman Willy" into account, perhaps
> you might want to add something like: "A JSW game is bed-
> completable if it is Maria-completable and you can reach the bed
> -column, triggering Willy to run towards the toilet or causing
> another ending designed by the author". Just a thought.
definitions of completability reside) accordingly.
I have updated my Bugs in Specific JSW Games page in two other ways:
* to add hexadecimal versions of the pokes, in case anyone wants to
use JSWED's hex-editor to apply them, as they'll surely want to do
when I get up to the 128K games that require POKEs to banked
addresses!
* to update the cell-terminology (block -> cell, background -> Air,
floor -> Water, wall -> Earth, static nasty -> Fire).
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/bugsi.html
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