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Message: 5830
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 06/05/2006
Subject: Death TV v0.3... Andrew's fourth playtest
(This follows on from Message 5822.)
I completed my Death TV playtest today, collecting the last of 137
items at 10:00am (it would be nice to see the total number of items
in what JSWED so inelegantly calls the "Objects Collected message"
(everything is an object - not just items!).
---------------
nightmare world
---------------
The room-connections of Rooms 64-71 are completely disjointed, as
though they were residue from a previous game, although I do not
recognise the screen-layouts from anywhere else.
The style of the rooms, and the fact that Room 66 is called
"nightmare world", suggests that they were probably written for
nightmare world, but without proper room-names or connections yet.
The only item in this cluster is in "dingefest" [71].
The following room-titles are from _where's woody_, but the room-
numbers are different, and the screen-layouts bear no resemblance to
the rooms of the same names in WW:
[64] "teleportation manifestation"
[65] "what's that smell?"
[67] "mystic drainage ii"
[71] "dingefest"
My detailed room-by-room comments:
[64] "teleportation manifestation": The cyan VG looks as though its
sprite-page were unintentionally overwritten. You can't take the
lower-left exit because you can't jump between the two stationary
guardians.
[65] "what's that smell?": It's nice to see the skeletons from
Willy's Afterlife making an appearance! A vicious challenge of HGs
which go beyond the edges of their platforms, so you can't just
stand in at the very edge of the platform to avoid them - you have
to jump up, at the risk of collision with the HGs above!
You can reach this room by going left from "teleportation
manifestation" [64], but I guess the intention is that you enter at
the bottom-left and exit at the top-right (although the toughest
challenge is to cross the lower half of the room from right to left).
[66] "nightmare world": An atmospheric reinterpretation of "moorhtaB
ehT" from _ylliW teS teJ_! :-) Not much point to it as it stands
though, and the unidirectional fish looks out of place.
[67] "mystic drainage ii": This room kills you on entry because the
guardians collide with each other, which is a shame because the
effect looks really neat in JSWED or using a harmless-guardians POKE
(Message 5816).
[68] "thirty-one seconds..": What does the room-title mean? The
bottom can only be crossed from left to right, but it's actually
more interesting to cross it from right to left - except that you
cannot avoid the leftmost HG.
The sloshing-water sprite is probably unintentional, but I
actually think it looks quite good just as it is!
[69] "you're going down": An atmospheric room. In the DTV2_taster
revision of 13th May 2005, the blue VG sprite is most intriguing -
is it some weird creature playing a harp, or just random data
interpreted as sprites?
I like the way you have to jump into an overhead Earth-cell to
walk left into the ground...
>>>|..--||---|..--||
----WW|--|
||--WW---|
||--||--||
...but there's no reward for this (such as an item at (13,12) or
(13,13)).
[70] "barrier": Is this a prequel to "barrier 2" in strangel?
This room kills you on entry because the stationary guardians
collide with Earth-cells.
Using a harmless-guardians POKE reveals that quirky stop-start
guardians effect that I still can't explain: it's not Rigor Mortis,
nor is it triggers, stoppers or switches (there are none in the
room), nor is it patch-vectors (both patch-vectors just point to
#869F: RET for this room and, I guess, all other rooms in DTV).
I like the way you can jump over Fire-cells and land in
horizontally-adjacent stand-onable cells in this room, but I'm not
sure I'm going to like the one-way exit that the bottom-left causes:
||..
....
....
|||*
[71] "dingefest": The colour-scheme for this room certainly isn't
dingy - it's very attractive apart from the corrupted guardian-
sprites! Guardian 4 is a green-ink VG with blank sprites (there are
also blank guardian-sprites in Rooms 64 and 69).
But you have to sacrifice a life after collecting the item:
......||
......||
......||
......||
..-..$||
.....-||
......||
........
........
......||
----||||
-----------
Egypt World
-----------
At last some proper room-connections again! ;-)
Since the majority of this world is set around a pyramid, perhaps
"Pyramid World" would be a more appropriate name. Radiohead renamed
"Egyptian Song" to "Pyramid Song" before its gamma-release, after
all!
This is a very simple, yet hugely atmospheric world, which works
well on the outside edges of the pyramid, but the interior
definitely needs a lot of work.
In Rooms 79, 80, 81 and 89, the way the palm-tree cells (Cell-
classes 6 & 7) turn white when Willy passes through them is
unattractive. This could easily be rectified by changing the cell-
type from Air to Trap (JSWED v2.3.1 doesn't allow you to set a cell-
class's cell-type to Trap, but v2.2.9 does), if you don't mind the
quirky effect this has on Rooms 80 & 81 (viz. you fall through Traps
even if you're on a stand-onable cell).
Trap is a useful alternative to Air in aesthetic terms when the cell-
graphic contains INK-pixels.
[79] "Egypt World": Is this supposed to be the start-room of Egypt
World? To my mind, that river is just crying out for a boat
(horizontal lift)!
[81] "Egypt World": Will the big hole inside the pyramid be
reachable, or is it just Forbidden Holy Ground? (to the right
is "What game is this from? I DONO" [90]).
[82] "Egypt World": I like the contrast of the 'hot' colours (bright
red and yellow) on the outside to the 'cool' colours (dull yellow
and black) on the inside, but the item is unreachable (to the right
is "Snooooop, bad doggy dogg!!!!!!!!" [91]).
[83] "Egypt World": The fast-crumbling cells are deceptive (thanks
for the invisible Fire-cells in the top-row that prevent infinite
death!). They're a bit blocky and unattractive, though - a cell-
graphic such as the following...
########
########
........ INK 2
........ PAPER 0
######## BRIGHT 1
........ FLASH 0
########
########
...would make the screen both more attractive and more deceptive (it
looks the same as Water, but an observant player should spot that it
is two pixel-rows lower) upon entry, if you don't mind the look of
the ghosts (which have the same colour-attribute and behaviour as
Air once the bottom two pixel-rows are gone).
[84] "Egypt World": Clearly this room needs a lot of work before the
items in Room 85 will be reachable. As it stands, I think it's
unattractive that the Water-cells have the same PAPER-colour inside
the pyramid as outside.
[85] "Egypt World": The items are unreachable, even if it were
possible to enter at the bottom, standing on the green cells -
they're Air!
If you jump right from the right edge of the pyramid in this
room, you land in [84], which is harmless but geographically
inaccurate.
I don't like the way Willy inverts over the Ramp \ cells, which
aesthetically should have the same colour-attribute. I've faced this
issue several times already with Ramp / and \ cells in Advanced
MM/JSW Trainer (AMJT), and my patch to reset cells' FLASH-bits (see
Message 5757) has proved to be a useful solution.
The patch to reset FLASH-bits, as presented in Message 5757,
has the disadvantage of overwriting the "extra-life colour-cycling"
(used by JSW64 when collecting items in bonus-rooms). AMJT doesn't
overwrite this code - it calls a subroutine instead, which you have
to find space for in your memory-map. But AMJT's patch also draws my
chequered cell-grid, which is more than you'd want for DTV, i.e.
half the solution is in Message 5757, the other half in TECHNICA.TXT
of AMJT.
You probably wouldn't want to apply this patch /globally/ in
DTV, because of the flashing Fire-cells in Rooms such as "Miner
World" [16]. So you could use the room-setup patch-vector to 'poke'
the call to the subroutine on or off on a room-by-room basis (cf.
Message 5783). (Note to self: Or would the subroutine actually work
as a main-loop patch-vector?)
Unless you're hell-bent on not slowing the game down at all in
rooms which don't need to call the subroutine, you wouldn't even
need a default room-setup vector - just one subroutine to turn the
patch on in rooms such as [85] which have flashing cell-classes (or
portals), and another to turn it off in rooms such as [16] where
FLASH is to be reset.
I'd be happy to help with coding this up - it's just a matter
of when I could find the time.
[88] "Egypt World": Going left takes you to "What game is this from?
I DONO" [90], and then infinite death in "Miner World" [0].
[89] "Egypt World": Going right takes you back to [84], which is
geographically inaccurate, and gives you a way back up the pyramid
which wouldn't be possible otherwise. Perhaps this room is where
you're supposed to leave Egypt World?
[91] "Snooooop, bad doggy dogg!!!!!!!!"
[92] "I do it to all your games. FOO"
I just realised how amusing it is to view these rooms in JSWED!
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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