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Message: 6726
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 13/03/2011
Subject: Re: UK magazine alert: Jet Set Willy II in Retro Gamer
>> I checked out Issue 84 of Retro Gamer in WHSmith today, and notedI got my copy this week, and was certainly not disappointed by Martyn Carroll's six-page article: "The Making of Jet Set Willy II".
>> that Issue 85 will have an article on Jet Set Willy II, apparently
>> based on an interview with Derrick Rowson.
>
> Well, it wasn't in Issue 85, but Issue 86 says it will be in Issue
> 87, which should hit the shelves by the second week in March.
The story starts in June 1984, with Software Projects directors Alan Maton and Tommy Barton relocating their teenage employees Matthew Smith, Stuart Fotheringham and Marc Dawson to a house on Holt Road, Birkenhead, to write The MegaTree. Sadly, they "failed to come up with anything close to a finished game, and the project was scrapped three months later".
Software Projects hired Derrick Rowson and Steve Wetherill to convert Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy to the Amstrad CPC. "Their version of Manic Miner was almost identical to the Spectrum original, but with Jet Set Willy they went a little crazy, expanding Willy's already substantial mansion by adding 74 rooms to the original's 60. This new, super-sized version was subtitled The Final Frontier, as they'd placed a rocket on the roof, which blasts Willy into outer space and beyond."
It was Matthew who added Derrick to the payroll. They were close friends, and according to Derrick, "Of all the bunch at Software Projects, Matthew stood out not for being a boss, not for being in a world of his own, but for being an honest, likeable person. When the coding was taking place, he would pop in and out of the building, and most conversations resulted in diversions down other paths. He'd show me madcap books about how to grow grass on walls and other weird things. His mind was ticking over at a furious rate. Other times he seemed confused.
"The saddest bit is that he could have designed all of the new rooms if he had wanted. In fact, just before it was finished, he asked Steve and I if we wanted help in designing rooms, but by then it was too late, so we declined."
Derrick and Steve converted MM to the CPC without any source code to refer to. Steve used a disassembler that Derrick had written to extract the room-, sprite- and block-data from Spectrum MM.
Alan asked Derrick to convert the CPC version of JSW back to the Spectrum as Jet Set Willy II. Steve didn't work on this backport, but Derrick considers Steve to be as much an author of JSW II as himself and Matthew, as Steve wrote many of the sprites, the routines for moving floors, suggested the scenarios for the new rooms, and cowrote them.
The extensions to JSW were initially inspired by going up from "Watch Tower" and "Rescue Esmerelda", which, in Spectrum JSW, unexpectedly take you to "The Off Licence" and "Ballroom East", respectively. So they bolted "The Belfry" on top of "Rescue Esmerelda", and the rocket on top of "Watch Tower".
Derrick said: "Each of the rooms in space was basically a skit at someone or something, or was us trying to see what could be forced from the game engine. Eggoids was to see how far we could push our sprite routines. The Incredible Big Hole In The Ground screens were Steve implementing sprites that only appear in one direction."
Derrick and Steve also added many rooms to fill in the gaps in Willy's mansion, including "Dumb Waiter", which "poked fun at Imagine's Wacky Waiters and made me add the lifts."
They also added a vast basement between "The Forgotten Abbey" and "The Security Guard". The lower rooms are based on Steve's experience as a pit trainee.
They also made some of the rumours about the original JSW a reality, such as The Yacht sailing off to a desert(ed) island (as per Robin Daines's letter in Issue 7 of Your Spectrum). The Trip Switch was originally intended to turn off the lights for a few seconds, but that idea was abandoned due to the difficulty of illuminating Willy with a circle of light, and the switch is used to activate The Yacht instead.
The Central Cavern makes an appearance in the ending sequence of JSW II, but was left unplayable because it would have been too much work to implement crumbling floors, or indeed the other 19 MM caverns. "At what point would it have turned from Willy's nightmare to mine?"
Derrick goes into impressive detail about the technical challenges of porting the CPC version of JSW back to the Spectrum. On the CPC, each pixel has its own colour, and CPC JSW relies on those colours for collision-detection, whereas on the Spectrum, each pixel is either INK or PAPER. "My new method was to copy the relevant screen area to a small buffer, then remove all of the playing graphics from it, and if anything was left then Willy died."
Derrick optimised the code to make it more efficient and also much smaller, as well as compressing the room-data. He contrasts this with Matthew's original, where the code is written "like prose", the data are uncompressed, and the whole screen is copied into a buffer, where the sprites are added before copying it to the video RAM.
"Cartography Room" was added to enable Derrick and Steve to visit any room quickly. In the CPC version, typing "HIEMMRAIDNAPRRRTT" and pressing Escape displays the Cartography Room with a moveable cross to select a room.
Derrick added: "I wish I had allowed the player to have started in either the Cartography Room or the Bathroom, and perhaps granted extra lives for the number of items collected so far."
Matthew's reaction to JSW II: "The sequel was all Derrick and Steve's work. While they were doing that, I was supposed to be doing The MegaTree, so I was very hands-off. I'd just pop in and say hello and see how they were doing. I was very impressed with the compressed screens, because I was sceptical about compression at the time, and it took a long while to convince me that it was worth the effort. They also addressed the major gameplay flaw in JSW, where you jumped from one screen to another and died straight away and then lost all of your lives. They fixed that by making you reappear in the last safe place. So the sequel was more like a second edition double the size and with all the bugs removed."
Except, of course, that the JSW II fix for infinite-death scenarios actually introduces a more treacherous one: when the last 'safe' place happens to coincide with a guardian's start-position, you instantly lose all your lives!
The article describes the CPC version of JSW (and hence JSW II) as "superior to the Spectrum original in almost every regard", which made me spit out the water I was drinking! Granted: it's faster, and has all those extra rooms, but as well as introducing the new infinite-death scenarios, it lacks all those quirky game-mechanics that make the original MM/JSW magic, you can't turn around and stand in just one character-column with your back to a wall (a feature intended to make Willy more agile: he can jump in the opposite direction as soon as he lands), and all Air cells are constrained to have black PAPER, robbing rooms such as "Cold Store", "The Beach" and "The Front Door" of their atmosphere.
The article also discusses ports of JSW II to other computers:
* In the Commodore 64 version, you can jump into the toilet to reach "Now Your In It" and "To Thy Grave". "The Commodore 64 conversion was handled by John Darnell and Steve Birtles: two other inhabitants of the company's coding block known as the 'Zoo'. We all worked in isolation from each other, and were very territorial."
* The Commodore 16 version is missing around 50 screens due to lack of memory, and those that remain are split across four separate loads.
* The MSX and Tatung Einstein versions add "The Maze" and "Transmat Testing Bay".
* The BBC Micro tape-version consists of just the new JSW II rooms, plus "Fallout Shelter" and "Ethel the Aardvark", with the map cleverly altered to skip the original JSW rooms. The disk-version is more or less the full game.
* "The Amiga version, released belatedly in 1992, introduces updated graphics, and screens that scroll rather than flip. The map is faithful to the original, although it looks and feels like a very different game."
As well as the original Amstrad CPC version of Jet Set Willy (subtitled The Final Frontier and equivalent to Spectrum JSW II), Software Projects also got Derrick to produce a stripped-down version of CPC JSW for the They Sold a Million compilation, with all the new rooms deleted, the original 'up-chuck' ending reinstated, and a high-score table added.
Finally, the article reveals that Derrick actually started work on Miner Willy Meets The Taxman (which was believed to be the same as The MegaTree until Matthew said that they were two different games).
The magazine also has an article "The Making of Revenge Of The Mutant Camels", in which the bespectacled Imagine coder Eugene Evans (of "Eugene's Lair" fame) makes an appearance (as a 19×15-pixel sprite). The magazine also says that Chuckie Egg II owes more to JSW than to the original Chuckie Egg.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
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