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Message: 5758

Author: dm_boozefreek

Date: 27/03/2006

Subject: Re: You robot demo / Criticisms of JSW64

 

In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, andrewbroad wrote:

dm_boozefreek wrote:

Hello in an uncharacteristic sweep of kindness I have released a 5 screen demo of You-Robot!

Thanks for sharing this.

It is a little out of character for me pre-release demos aren't
really my thing but there's a first time for everything.

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.

----------------------
Room-specific comments
----------------------

[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.

This room is intentionally minimalistic, it's just the way I wanted
it. I may add or remove or switch around a few things for the actual
release. The screen is like this to kind of illustrate the decay of
the central cavern over a long time (possibly centuries).

[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.

I was thinking of using a final barrier for this screen, but since it
was just rock in the background I decided against it as I need the 2
pictures for later on in the game. I admit the amount of guardians is
a bit hefty I mention something about this in the readme but I was
unwilling to post this as well as it gives away so much I might as
well not release the game at all if you all read it.

[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. :-)

The HGs are a bit problematic as is the room itself if you wrap
around to collect the top right items as it counts it as entering the
room again. The guardians are that way now because I can't set them
up to have 8 moving correctly, I tryed room with 4 but it was far too
easy. This room is pretty much finished but there are a few little
things I'd maybe like to iron out for the final release.

[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.

No quirky features for this room I'm afraid, unless I get the feeling
of being evil. As for the portal, if you look all the portals are
actually the MM portals for the screens these rooms are based on. I
wanted to keep something from the original MM present so I didn't
change the portals. So far most of them are positioned roughly where
they were in the original too, something else familiar I wanted to
keep.

[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).

I'm happy the bottom left got you, I was hoping it would get
somebody, but I'll be honest I didn't think it would be you Andrew ;)

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
you can't go any further at all.

[5] "New Processes?": it is possible to miss the Water-cell under
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.

The room is literally a shell, maybe I should've looped the demo
after the 5th screen so you didn't actually end up here.

About the speed (slowdown) issue, I didn't realise how bad it would
be, I use ZX32 and it only slows marginally on the rooms with more
than 8 guards. I have noticed slowdown on a few games out there but
nothing that ruins the gameplay. I would use realspectrum as I've
downloaded several variants of it and I can't get any of them to
work....oh well!

Also I was toying with the idea of releasing a demo of "The Man Who
Sold the World" but I decided against it. I'm too far into that game
now to be releasing demos of it.

Cheers

DrUnKeN mAsTeR!!!

 

 

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