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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5752
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 26/03/2006
Subject: Re: You robot demo / Criticisms of JSW64
dm_boozefreek wrote:
>Thanks for sharing this.
> Hello in an uncharacteristic sweep of kindness I have released a 5
> screen demo of You-Robot!
I see it's a JSW64 Variant [ game. According to Section 11.1 of the
JSWED manual, Variant [ can only have four guardians per room, yet
this game clearly has more. So this table needs to state that
Variant [ can have up to 63 guardians per room by using the "free"
area (and likewise for Variants X, Y and Z):
http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Jsw/jsw64room.html
I get the impression that the game runs very slowly - certainly
compared with MM48. I think the number of guardians per room really
affects performance here.
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Room-specific comments
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[0] "WHY AM I?": A visually attractive room, but minimalistic in
terms of gameplay, and it suffers from the "what will this cell-
class do to me?" issue which is by now all too familiar in JSW64
games. I mean, it's pretty obvious to the lay player what you have
to do, but >I< like to explore all possibilities - I just have to
know what happens if I fall onto the green sludge, or jump up into
the stalactites.
[1] "Percy! Petey! Pingu! Pulverised!": The black-on-blue
stala{gmites/ctites} certainly add atmosphere, but since they're
implemented as guardians, this comes at a heavy price in terms of
slowing down play to the extent that it becomes tedious.
[2] "Our Replacements": This room is painfully slow - again because
of the number of guardians - and the slow, jerky HGs at the top make
it a singularly unpleasant experience.
_____But there is an interesting quirky feature here, which I didn't
think was such a big deal before: the items cannot be collected
while Willy is in the colour-attribute of an inkless guardian-
sprite! At first I thought they were Crumbly-protected, and then
it 'hit' me. :-)
[3] "The Uranium Workings": Quite an attractive room, despite having
even more guardians (29 of them) to slow it down (what does JSWED do
after Z, I wonder?). The portal is a neat reminder of the original
MM. This room could do with some quirky features to spice it up.
[4] "Dearly Departed": The best of the rooms in the demo, this is a
nice example of switches and opening walls - and making the player
think about the order in which items have to be collected (I got
stuck in the bottom-left on my first attempt, and had to commit
suicide).
_____My criticisms of this room:
1. Cell-class 9 (Earth) has a garish colour-attribute (cyan on
yellow), which brings down the overall ambience of the screen.
2. The opening walls take too long to open. This is really a
criticism of the JSW64 engine, where an opening wall opens in
series, one pixel-row per time-frame, whereas MM48 opens both
Earth-cells in parallel (the upper Earth-cell opens upwards, the
lower downwards - you only have to wait 8 time-frames for both
cells to open).
One solution would be to have a separate opening-wall guardian for
every cell, so that all cells in the wall open in parallel, taking
only 8 time-frames rather than 8 times the number of cells - but of
course this would increase the number of guardians even further,
which would slow down the time-frames themselves!
It would be better if the JSW64 engine opened each cell of an
opening wall in parallel (with just the one guardian), preferably
alternating upwards- and downwards-opening cells to be faithful to
MM48.
> I haven't bothered to tidy it up so when you hit the 6th screen[5] "New Processes?": it is possible to miss the Water-cell under
> you can't go any further at all.
the cyan guardian by one step if you time the jump correctly, but
not to land on it, so the room as it stands is unpassable (unless of
course there are some invisible cells - which I doubt). It's also
infinite death or fall forever if you go down from this room.
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Epilogue
--------
JSW64 has much to offer the most artistic authors, but it comes at
the price of either:
* uncertainty over cell-behaviour (if many cell-classes are used in
the name of art);
* slowing the game down significantly (if many guardians are used).
I would rather see many cell-classes than many guardians - and
preferably in parts of the screen that aren't reachable.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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