Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5998
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 20/12/2006
Subject: Re: Andrew's backlog / Flash MM / Specialisation
[Re: Various things to various people from Daniel]
Daniel wrote:
>No - the MM/JSW emails are mainly messages from this Group. As of
> 2. To Andrew Broad
>
>> Due to real-life commitments and tennis-distractions of
>> unforeseen magnitude, my MM/JSW activities have been severely
>> curtailed, and I have almost 500 unread emails!
>
> That's a HUGE amount! Do they all concern MM/JSW?
now, I have processed up to Message 5950. In other words, the MM/JSW
backlog is less than 10% of my total email-backlog. The rest is
mainly tennis.
> How is the processing going?Well, today I finally managed another cut at my email-backlog, and
managed to get it BACK DOWN to 500!
Unfortunately for MM/JSW, I am still allowing tennis to claim the
lion's share of my time. The 2006 season may be over, but I have a
huge backlog of match-reports to write up, where I spend many hours
of each day analysing every point as intricately and precisely as a
game of chess.
That's what makes me unique - my compulsion for thoroughness.
But it doesn't half eat up my time! Yes, it bugs me that AMJT is on
hold, and to see another calendar-year pass without the gamma-release
of a Broadsoft-game (Ma jolie SE was, I suppose, a delta-release).
I have thought very seriously about giving up writing my tennis-
reports, but that thought makes me deeply unhappy, so I'm not going
to do it until I get a job (which would almost certainly spell the
end of my MM/JSW-editing career anyway).
My passion for tennis is about the same as my passion for MM/JSW, but
tennis demands a lot more of my time to keep up with it - especially
when my players do as well as they did this year, generating so much
work for me!
I'm working manically to clear my tennis-backlog before January's
Australian Open, so that I can free up some time for MM/JSW between
February and May. But it's inevitable that there's going to be a
significant overspill - I plan to work on that part-time in February,
and if the Australian Open generates as much work for me as it did
this year, I would expect to be free of the growing backlog by April
2007.
And then I plan to resume work on AMJT until my whole tennis-cycle
begins again at the end of May - assuming that I will not have found
employment by then.
> Congratulations on your Flash Manic Miner records :-) . I can seeCavern 26 already? Drat! I don't have time for a serious assault on
> that jogo76 has just taken the lead again.
Cavern 25 for some time...
> Does it mean you already know how you will spend your free timeI know pretty much exactly what I will be doing every day of my life
> during the holiday season? :-)
until the end of January, and even beyond. I'm on a very tight
schedule with about three days' slack...
> And who is jogo76 anyway? Is he (she?) a Group member?I suspect jogo76 is the same person as rap75 - my previous rival for
the #1 spot in Flash MM. I've no idea whether that person has a
presence in this Group, or whether it's someone we know.
> What amazes me most is the degree to which one might want toI play other (non-MM/JSW) games casually from time to time, but
> specialise. I've been into MM/JSW very intensely for the last
> two-and-a-half years, devoting most of my spare time to it.
> I would love to play other games, such as Boulder Dash, which
> evidently is very exciting to some of the Group members, and
> hundreds of other fantastic games out there (Spectrum and
> non-Spectrum), but I can't do it, because if I dedicate time to
> them, I will have no time for JSW.
nowhere near the breadth and depth to which I played them before I
was into tennis and the Internet. I've got a briefcase full of old
maps and lists that I made for Spectrum-games.
Nowadays I keep abreast with Miniclip.com (Acid Factory is
essentially Manic Miner in 3D, with a gun), and have also been
dabbling lately in chess - I sure hope that doesn't become one of
my /obsessive/ interests! ;-)
> I have never even tried to design a MM or JSW64 game yet, and II have found the skills required to write MM and JSW games to be very
> know that if I take up this challenge, it will take me a long time
> to first learn to work with them in JSWED (even though JSWED is
> intuitive and user-friendly), and then to learn all the tricks
> that make a game interesting. So designing /MM and JSW games/ for
> the Spectrum sometimes seems too large a field to me. Designing MM
> games only could be just enough if you want to produce top-quality
> results.
much interchangeable. There's a massive overlap between the game-
mechanics, including most of the quirky features.
JSW64 is a bit harder if one wishes to make full use of the new
technology in terms of drawing new cell-graphics, writing patch-
vectors and so on. AMJT is very much simplified by the fact that it
reuses cell-graphics and patch-vectors to avoid unnecessary variety
which may confuse the trainee player.
Igor Makovsky wrote:
>If you're referring to your email of 27th September 2006, its current
>> ...and I have almost 500 unread emails!
>
> - And one of them is mine, I suppose.
status is "read and flagged for a response". And I have added what
you asked me to do to my (very long) to-do list.
I apologise to all concerned for my lack of replying to emails - it
bothers me deeply that I have a backlog of emails-waiting-for-a-reply
stretching back to 2000, but I can't achieve the priorities of my
life by replying to a lot of emails.
> I didn't know that Andrew doesn't have a job, I thought that suchUnfortunately (well, /fortunately/ for the MM/JSW scene), even a PhD
> a highly educated man like our Andrew has a very good one.
in Computer Science isn't a passport to a job! Especially when the
requirements of both parties are so specialised.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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