Sendy The Endless

My mixup regarding East and West lol 😅 This is what thinking about the reversed map as looking at it from the other side does. I don't normally get my left and right mixed up 😆

I know I'm posting a lot of questions for coders about patches and stuff, please let me know if this is getting annoying 😅 But would it be easy to make trampolines also function as a soft landing for Willy? That would double the functionality of these blocks and just be, well, really cool from a design perspective.

Is there a database of patch vectors and a tutorial on how to get rooms to, um, vector the patches? : ) With credits of course, so I can credit everyone I borrow from.

Danny, I watched your RZX - very impressive! Thanks for posting it. I notice collecting different types of object impacts the meters - water makes the bottle icon go up, food the strength one... Pickaxes make the... pickaxe, wait why do you even need a pickaxe, let alone multiple ones? It's not like you can dig through walls! Aaaand some of the items seem to do nothing, so going after them is a death sentence lol. I seriously think this is abandonware - publisher went bankrupt, coder thought "Looks like a passable game when you load it up" and it was pushed out the door. Just my hunch but obviously miles of guesswork going on here. I noticed the explorer guy doesn't seem to die from long falls. I haven't made many maps with this feature but I always liked how in Pyramania you had those little corridors and chutes you could go down, that in JSW would just kill you.

You named it the East Wall, but in my mind, I'm just viewing the whole map from the opposite side 😁 so it's still the iconic "West Wall" in my mind. I noticed the "conveyor air" in that room, but I couldn't see a quirky feature threatening to kill Willy. Is it a new discovery?

Oh, yes, you are right! Wrong "long conveyor" room I guess!

Just tried it myself, in at least the SE version of the camel room, the conveyor is flipping directions on a timer. Also took me a while to realize I was dying at the top of the East wall... guardians hitting an item while they're flashing white, lol. That's pretty devilish : )

I will definitely give it a go myself soon, but what I saw at 9:44 in Daniel's video here made me believe you could alter your direction on the long conveyor. Maybe it's something to do with interactions coming from the water blocks. I also like how the room goes black when you're encased in water blocks. I believe that's what's going on there. Off to play it myself now!

I've just had a look at a playthrough of it and yes, the rope swing start trick is really smart. I also noticed the "ice" conveyor. You can change directions, but never stop moving. A sort of "medium friction" form of ice : ) For complete iciness, perhaps there could be a check to see if Willy's on a 'veyor and moving, and if so, not allow the direction to change. But I also like this as an alternate type of platform. For a platform game nerd like me, you can never have too many gimmick blocks! Some awesome effects going on in the other rooms, too. Animated items, multiple item cells per room, the opening and closing floor... I wasn't so keen on the rooms where there was a lot of extreme colour flashing, but the way the Nightmare Room goes dark when you get the last item is a masterstroke!

That would actually be pretty trippy. Imagine some extra code that can alter your vertical room entry position based on that hyperbolic room stacking! The bottom layer could be just one room with multiple exits upwards to two different rooms, and so on... Think Pyramania on a lot of drugs! Exiting upwards on the left side of the bottom room would lead to various x2 modified positions in the above left room, and the right side the same for the rooms above on the right!

I've noticed WRITETYPER% speedruns ARE sort-of a thing, but yes, this is a way to destroy the illusion that I hadn't considered. Hopefully I'll have an ice patch I can use for my games by the time I release any games with ice in them! There's plenty of space for spare code in JSW64.

According to AGD I've pretty much used up every last byte, but if I can get it to spit out a 128k file, that will be no issue at all. Might even be able to get some Soundtracker music playing (I am an avid chiptune composer), and the 48k version could possibly have a simpler title screen. The graphics for the items might be able to be read directly from the game, I'm not sure if AGD compresses them (though it may well do). I believe AGD works in 128k mode and uses one half of the memory for your game, and the other half for the editor. Seamless editing/testing design cycle! It's all so generously clever! It would have been a best-seller back in the late 80s. Now I'm wondering when the 128 came out...

Yeah, I was gonna eyeball pretty much all of it to be honest, the tile patterns, the sprites, the layouts, and make adjustments to all three, so it won't be a 1:1 reconstruction, but will have a lot of my own "flair" added 🙃 I'll be using JSW64, one of the variants that only has 64 rooms, that's plenty to fill the map out a bit more and expand some of the locations, etc. I do want to keep the style and connectivity of the physical layout fairly faithful. I played this game as a kid and never got more than one screen deep in any direction, so think of this as my way of taking control of childhood trauma 😅 I'm interested in implimenting the superjump, but last time I tried it, I found you could phase through earth blocks and generally bug it out, get jammed in walls, etc, especially when falling and with no fall damage. I remember John Elliott kept fixing it and I kept driving him mad by finding ways to break it again, until he gave up. In the end it's mostly been used by authors in specially designed rooms - so there are workarounds that make it usable. I will probably just alter the game layout so you don't need to superjump at all, and I doubt I'll be adding any of the survival meters - though thinking about it, simulating strength and hunger and stuff like that was pretty advanced for its time!

Hi IRF, thanks for the welcome! I did indeed upload a single room Erix-1 Mode game to the old forums, with a crumbly ramp. As for the ice blocks, I've been using sticky conveyors with design considerations as per my ice blocks post, but I appreciate the mention : ) EDIT: Oh and now I think about it, changing the conveyor byte with player's movement direction is a very simple and elegant solution to the sticky problem! : )

It's been a while, but as far as I know the .tap file AGD spits out when you're done goes back to basic once you game over. The AY sound not working may be due to the fact that AGD games are 48k-based, but I was quite pleased with the few sound effects I made. I could easily replace these with beeper effects, which would make the whole thing a neater 48k package. AFAIK A simple basic program with some graphics and text and a wait loop that then runs the game again with a POKE is what is needed. I plan to have a bit of blurb about the "story" and am writing that now. The graphics will just be pictures and cute descriptions of the items you need to collect. I can send the files out to anyone on here who is interested in playtesting, or just looking at it. EDIT: Here's a mockup of the info I'd like to include on the title screen. The bottom "story" blurb could be relegated to the loading screen, a text file, or whatever, but I enjoyed thinking up silly satirical names for the items you have to collect : )

Here's a map of a game that looks pretty good in map format, but is borderline unplayable: https://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=Archaeologist In the future I'm hoping to use JSWED to create a remake of the game, staying faithful to the layout and graphics, but with some extra locations and of course, tweaked to not be an unplayable mess (anybody who's tried to play it will know what I'm talking about!)

Thanks Spider! I bought PGD as well but found it a bit limited. AGD on the other hand, has been expanded and expanded, has it's own procedural coding system that even *I* can use to make creative stuff, you can make your own block and enemy interactions and stuff... You're limited to about 30-50 screens, it uses run-length compression so you can make bigger games if you're less obsessive about adding little details and background details. It's up there with JSWED as the best 8-bit platformer making tools! His site: https://jonathan-cauldwell.itch.io/

This is pretty much ready to be released, I just need to get a basic title screen and loader because at the moment the AY sound doesn't work. Apart from that, the game is fully completed. It's pretty much just a 1985-style platformer, but it's mine, and the AGD tool was so easy to use that I was able to do quite a few cool things that surprised me!

Does anybody know if it would be feasible to replace the "timer clock" code in a JSW64 game to the scoring system used in MM, especially the part where you're awarded score based on how much air you have left? I have the beginnings of this game where single-screen caverns like in MM are mixed up with free-roaming segments, where you can choose which cavern you tackle next in an overlapping, branching system, sort-of inspired by Outrun. I'd really like to award the player for rapid completion, since I'm aiming for layouts that have speedrun routes or can be tackled more slowly and cautiously, and/or have free-er layouts where quick routing is an interesting challenge.

Someone's gonna have to try the patch(es) and experiment : ) I will give it a go soon. Ideally an ice platform would, in the case of no horizontal momentum, move him in his last moved direction. From a designer's point of view, that would be best for puzzles and wotnot. As for the truely sticky conveyor, I've only found one use for it that isn't just a cruel trap. You get stuck to it and have to survive enemies until an invalid arrow eventually erases it from under your feet. I used this in Strangel, and thought it was pretty nifty at the time.

Fantastic! I think I can set that up myself now. Thanks very muchly for your assistance, Norman Sword. You've made this lamer very happy : )

Thanks Norman! I'm not sure I'd know how to enter that into the hex editor, but it's an exciting future prospect to try out!

Thanks ^ _ ^ Just a note about using this trick in games that aren't JSW64. If you're using the standard room format, you can do the "attributes" trick of making your water/platform blocks the same colour as the conveyor cell. Use earth/walls for platforms, and now all your water blocks will be ice (insert physics joke here). Here's an example from Where's Woody. If anyone needs me to explain the conveyors as water trick, let me know.

So here's a trick I heard about while building Where's Woody, my second JSW game. Sticky conveyors! Originally, these were only obtainable by changing a certain byte in the room data with a hex editor to a value it shouldn't be; but as John Elliott expanded JSWED, these became supported in the conveyor options section of the room editor. Technically a sticky conveyor is one that is moving in both directions simultaneously. Whatever direction Willy steps onto it, he will continue moving in that direction until he touches something else. Note that he can still jump while this is in progress. This makes them behave like "ice" as seen in many other platformers of yore, but there are some caveats! "Sticky" conveyors will halt Willy in place if he jumps straight up onto one, or falls down squarely onto one (and survives the fall). In JSW and JSW128, there is only one contiguous conveyor allowed per room, and the animation is tied to that strip of blocks, so it's best to use either solid pixels or dithering on the first and third row of the cell graphic (lest it be mistaken for a normal conveyor). However, in JSW64, conveyors can be placed anywhere and the animation can be turned off. Create a cell that's a conveyor in any direction, go into the conveyor menu and select "Sticky". Now you can place these blocks around the room however you like, but bear in mind that these are still "sticky conveyors" which are technically conveyors moving in both directions at once! As stated before, you have to stop Willy from being able to land on one without leftward or rightward momentum, because he'll become, well, stuck, only able to jump in place and hope for the sweet release of death : ) I've attatched a picture of a room I made for fun. JSW experts will notice that (unless I overlooked something), you can never land on the bright white icy platforms (block number 3) without leftward or rightward momentum. This will almost always require adjusting and building other parts of the room around this to accommodate it - static nasties and solid walls help the most here, but you'll have to improvise and playtest to look for edge cases you might have overlooked. A lot of work for something that's functionally not much different from a conveyor going in either direction, but to me, anything that adds a bit of variety is welcome, which is why I use them. Just make sure your graphics are distinct and consistent - I tend to use the same 8x8 pixel graphic for all ice blocks within a game, as they're so unusual. Present them to the player in a low-risk situation before you start creating puzzle rooms with them! Any questions feel free to ask : ) Historically, I believe Andrew Broad was the first to report the phenomenon of "sticky" and "off" conveyors, but I believe I may have been the first, in Where's Woody, to use them as ice, rather than as a kind of fly-paper to trap the player.

Our hopes for this section of the forum is for people to discuss aspects of level/room/overall map design and structure, share pictures of rooms they've made for feedback on looks, design pitfalls etc, and even the aesthetics and "feng shui" of creating atmospheric locations in the (relatively) limited design space of MM and JSW engines and editors. Feel free to post pictures of works in progress and ask questions about the game mechanics of JSW and how they can be leveraged!