Sendy The Endless

5 hours ago, MtM said:

I downloaded Strangel from Danny's site Sendy, those colours are very strong, not the easiest colour scheme on the eye. However, different.

The bright colours are pretty much THE defining feature of the Strangel series. Perhaps you need some 🕶️ sunglasses : )

Ok, I got the normal ending on the easiest mode! Still one teleport area I haven't unlocked. I have a clear map in the Cartography Room, with no red blocks on it, and it feels like I've been everywhere : )

Here are my post-game stats. Minor spoilers for number of rooms and items in the game!

Here's a start I've made to Strangel II. Just feeling out the general tone of what I want to go for...

Thanks for digging that stuff from Andrew Broad up, Daniel! Some of this feedback will be invaluable should I decide to go ahead with a Strangel SE (Special Edition). The thought of Andrew having played the game on a real Speccy brings me joy. I'm thinking of getting my own retro gaming setup so I can play homebrew speccy games on a crappy TV, just like god intended : )))

Regarding the difficulty and audiences, I see Strangel, at least in its current form, is way too impenetrable for most players. I'd hazard a guess that no more than 5 people in the world have probably ever beaten it, but those few that did enjoyed the challenge.

Strangel 2 is going to be much, MUCH easier, so much so I might even name and story it to be its own canon. Not sure yet as I only have one room designed for it at the moment.

Re: Cuckoo's Nest, I think we might need a name for places that you can go within a room, but you don't need to. The top right platform in Top Landing is a good example, while the two to the left of it are obviously FHGs. I like these little spots and tend to think of them as an integral part of room design. They can fill up space and make rooms more interesting and less predictably functional, giving a space flavour.

I tend to call them Park Benches in my head. I put one in JSW: RR. It's in the screen "Down a Manhole", that's a narrow vertical room you descend through, but you can stop off on a little alcove with a pipe and a waterfall and for some reason I think it's a cool place to stand and maybe take a screenshot : )

This actually takes me onto the concept of ambient platformers - has anyone played the game Knytt or Knytt Stories? Most of the former and a good chunk of the latter is entirely Park Bench territory. It's a very relaxing game with lots of cozy little spots like that!

So I've been thinking about a follow-up to my game Strangel.

Has anybody on the forum played it, or seen it in any other way? If so, what did you like or dislike about it? Does the difficulty make it hard to enjoy?

My plan for Strangel 2 is to set out a few aims from the beginning. Firstly, I will be sticking to the bright and surreal colours of the original Strangel game, although due to the increased block count in JSW64 (the engine I'll be using) I want a nice mixture of abstract and representational areas in the game. So there will be structures, buildings, sewers and the like, and the map will make a lot more sense than in the original Strangel; whilst there still being many bizarre room ideas and of course a surreal "drawn on white paper" aesthetic throughout all areas.

Regarding gameplay, I'm setting myself a few design goals and intend to spend all my energy on manifesting them properly:

1) The game will be beatable by me, without cheats, and there will be no frame-perfect jumps and dodges. I will design the challenges to be humanly doable, and the opposite of overwhelming.

2) I will use quirky features as puzzles, but they will be tutorialized as they are introduced.

3) There will be a lot of crumbling floor puzzles.

4) Failing a puzzle or a series of obstacles will, where possible, not result in instant death, but will instead lead to situations where losing a life is avoidable. In other words, I want to give players a feeling that they can get out of a bad situation on many occasions.

5) I will probably turn off fall damage for the player sprite.

6) I'm hoping to have horizontal lifts and possibly moving holes/disappearing platforms, as seen in JSW: Role Reversal.

I'll post some screenshots when I have something I'm particularly proud of : )

I really like the meta to this game. The Perk Points system really opens things up and lets you make progress in a way that seems impossible when you start playing. I have explored 255 rooms now and have 320/??? items collected.

I'm playing on the easiest difficulty but might upload my next playthrough on a harder difficulty to youtube. More people need to see this game!

It's relevant to the game : )

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about removing Infinite Death Scenarios, rather just giving the player some down-time when they're killed, so they can take their fingers off of the controls and regroup. So a simple delay loop before you respawn, basically.

I like the idea of safe restart points. I used them in my game Trundle's Trials. The only problem with them is that they can let you "death warp" through Promised Lands room boundaries : )

@Pixel Stonk Just to say, I am still enjoying your game, and keep finding new stuff. I expect I'm going to be enjoying this for a long time to come.

Last night I unlocked a game mode called The Tower, which crashes the game when I select it. Has anybody else got this problem?

Here's a bit of a pet peeve of mine with the JSW engine. When you die unexpectedly, if you're holding down any movement keys, you will instantly move/jump when you respawn, often into a nasty or guardian or off a cliff, wasting several lives until you realize what's going on.

I actually quite like how in the Softricks version, the screen flashes red briefly. Gives you a moment to register that, oh, something killed me, but ideally the pause should last for about half a second.

Thanks for the feedback... That's ok then, I just wanted to be sure.

Going forwards, my plans for the Special Edition of JSW: RR are

1) Some extra platforms to make some of the one-way room transitions less abrupt. Eg: The Balcony has no way back up it should you want to exit back to the left, The Newsagent needs an extra couple of platform tiles to stop you falling on the conveyor belt as soon as you enter, etc

2) A day and night version, either seperate files, or as a choice as the game loads. I will need the Hackulator for this as I intend to change the outside colours to dark and sunset colours. The night version will also function as an easy mode. I will limit this set of changes strictly to deleting enemies. For example, at night, the Busy Road screen will have less traffic. The most annoying guardian in each room will be removed.

3) The Local Ruins screen - I want to completely redesign this room as it became somewhat of the ugly duckling of the bunch once I lost the Hackulator, and I had no real way of redesigning it.

4) Perhaps use Erix1's loading screen.

This won't be for a little while, and is presuming that the changes that Daniel made to the file will still jibe with the Hackulator.

Believe it or not, the official release that came out was ALREADY difficulty-balanced. I removed a lot of guardians, for example, The Fridge level used to have 7 or 8 guardians, including a pair of vertical guardians in each of the vertical shaftways where now there is only one. Going forwards I want to create easier games so that more people can enjoy them!

It's a little bit disheartening that one website's review of my game is simply that it's about a woman having to clean up after a man, and that's pretty much the only aspect of the game mentioned... I should have perhaps made this clearer in the readme (hindsight being 20:20 and all), but this was supposed to be more a critique of how house staff of old were often forced to navigate cramped, hazardous stairwells and passageways, which fits the theme of a frustrating platformer. It was also bourne of a simple thought: Maria IS the housemaid, shouldn't, from a purely capitalist realism point of view, she be the one being worked to death? That and the fact that Erix1's Maria sprite was so fun to play as and I was wanting to do a "mansion remake" of JSW at the time I started it, the theme just sort of fell into place.

That said, if anyone else feels the game is in some way overly patriarchal, or is giving off those kind of vibes, please let me know and I'll make it clearer in the story of the readme. Those aren't the vibes I want to be associated with 😬

Jet Set Willie, it's cool, it sounds like you're going through a lot of trouble to make this screen for me and I already have two of them now. I'd still like to see what you've made but please bear in mind, the game is already released. I will include your screen on the tape file of the Special Edition if that ever happens (which it probably will at some point) but can't promise any more for your hard work. So please proceed based on your own will to continue, and thanks for your efforts!

4 hours ago, IRF said:

"1=day, 2=night" It sounds like the idea at one point was that you would press a button during the loading process, and depending on what you chose, the BASIC loader stepped in to change the program data. (I haven't looked into what changes would have been made - dark versus light background, perhaps?)

Yes, it was going to change the background colour of the "outside" areas of the map, either to black, or various purples and dark reds (for a sunset effect). I don't remember which.

Daniel was very helpful in making the credits in the Readme file, but I believe your work was essential to his work on my game, to make it finishable!

It's common for authors to underestimate the difficulty of their games, so while I class the game as difficult, it may in fact be "almost impossible", so feel free to use tools/cheats if it helps ; )

I've been playing it a lot, and am hoping to one day complete the whole game in a video on Youtube (with live commentary), certain parts take a lot of practice but get easier when you have a reliable method.

Erix1's alternate title screen for Strangel is also awesome - it fits the mood of the game so well, and I'd completely forgotten about it. I'd also forgotten that I was planning an "easy mode" of Strangel, lol. I'll probably use this screen for Strangel 2, which is an idea I've been mulling over in my head for a while now!

Erix1, do you still have the Hackulator tool? Unfortunately I lost it in a hard-drive crash. If you still have it and will upload it, it would truely be a red-letter day for the JSW community! 🥳

Here it is! Have at it! I hope I have done this right... filling in forms and stuff isn't exactly my forte : )

Hi Erix1, so nice to see you here! I've already finalized the files, including a plea for your return in the readme lol. I literally just uploaded them, but no doubt this calls for a Special Edition version of JSW: RR in the near future, with your loading art and possibly the day/night mode!

You've also done the JSW modding scene a solid by releasing the Hackulator. I'm anticipating a wave of new Erix-1 mode games : )

I'm just off to announce the release of JSW: RR now! It HAS been a long time, hasn't it? I prefer not to think about it : ))

I hope you stick around, and I'm excited to download the zip-file and look through it.

Hi Willie and everyone else... Just to say, the release will be any day now... Most likely by the end of the week. Danny and myself have playtested the crap out of this thing, tweaked every last little detail, he has provided some custom code, bug fixes, suggestions and even made a loader with a good loading screen!

Willie, did you ever finish the screen$? If so I'd be interested so I can pick the best one. If you've only drawn Maria perhaps that could be merged with the screen Daniel made. What I'm saying is, last call before this thing goes live!

7 hours ago, Jet Set Willie said:

Sendy, I might try it. Just give me time, ok? 🙂 If you want to personally discuss more about the loading screen, please send me a PM(s).

Thanks! Feel free to have a go, but I can't guarantee I'll end up using it, and I don't want to waste your time. As it stands it's up in the air as to who's gonna do the art. If I end up with multiple screens to use, they could perhaps go on the tap file as supplimentary files.

Multiple post

Multiple post

18 hours ago, IRF said:

Well, I've asked the question, and I'll let you know if I hear anything back. However, Vidar's last comment on Twitter dates from last September, so I don't know if they'll pick it up any time soon... 

Thanks IRF, I appreciate that. Imagine if he could be coaxed into releasing the tool he gave me to use all the features of Erix-1 mode? That would open the door wide for a new breed of 48k JSW mods. When he gave me a copy of the vaunted "MvsSB hackulator tool" he said he wanted it to be a Sendy-exclusive, but it's been a long, long time since then.

19 hours ago, MtM said:

I agree about the platforms. Games have gone the way of films, big sequels, franchises, it doesn't excite me like it used to do. Oh well.

I don't think we've changed, the media landscape has. Take some comfort in that. People know things aren't right anymore. Enjoy Coke. 👽