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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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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
>
5
> dm_boozefreek wrote:
> >
> > Hello in an uncharacteristic sweep of kindness I have released a
> > screen demo of You-Robot!
It is a little out of character for me pre-release demos aren't
>
> Thanks for sharing this.
really my thing but there's a first time for everything.
>
This room is intentionally minimalistic, it's just the way I wanted
> 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.
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).
>
I was thinking of using a final barrier for this screen, but since it
> [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.
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.
>
make
> [2] "Our Replacements": This room is painfully slow - again because
> of the number of guardians - and the slow, jerky HGs at the top
> it a singularly unpleasant experience.
didn't
> _____But there is an interesting quirky feature here, which I
> think was such a big deal before: the items cannot be collected
The HGs are a bit problematic as is the room itself if you wrap
> 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. :-)
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.
>
having
> [3] "The Uranium Workings": Quite an attractive room, despite
> 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
No quirky features for this room I'm afraid, unless I get the feeling
> MM. This room could do with some quirky features to spice it up.
>
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
I'm happy the bottom left got you, I was hoping it would get
> 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).
somebody, but I'll be honest I didn't think it would be you Andrew ;)
>
of
> 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
> course there are some invisible cells - which I doubt). It's also
The room is literally a shell, maybe I should've looped the demo
> infinite death or fall forever if you go down from this room.
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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