UncleWan

Omg, what an incredibly challenging game. I began it unaided but the puzzles are so baroque and obtuse that I restarted it using the walkthrough as a guide on what path to take.
Despite all that, it still took me at least an hour, maybe more, to pass the Eugene's Lair screen. And it it was only at the very end that I finally figured out what was killing me.
Great game!
 

Dare I say, that I have started to write down notes for the new game and made one test room for it? I will continue with the "almost finished" games first, though. I can´t say any date for them at the moment. I hope the Mansion will be finished during this year.
 
While waiting for them, let me bring you some hype... 
If it will be realised in the future, it will be in colour, not mono. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Haha, that's a very interesting idea!😄
 

View File Willy’s Spring Festival
Hello，everyone！
To celebrate the Chinese New Year 2026, I made this mini-game.Here is my JSWED 48K game，an easy mini-game with six rooms which can be completed without losing a life.
Story：Willy had prepared a generous gift early, intending to honor his parents during the Spring Festival. Passing by the Temple of Wealth God ，he went in to offer incense and pray for abundant wealth in the new year.
Unexpectedly, a gust of wind suddenly blew, scattering all the gifts he was holding in different directions. Willy needs to go along the way to search and pick them up, retrieving each gift to give to his parents.
The game offers two languages: English and Chinese Pinyin.The only differences between the two language versions are the text and some sprites.TAP format only.

 
Submitter UncleWan Submitted 02/16/2026 Category Jet Set Willy [Remakes]  

I would like to share some comments on the subject of "versions" of the original MM and JSW versus "new games". I wanted to start it some time ago, but didn't have enough time to do it. 
I will start by copying (with edits) something I wrote as comments to Njenkin's review of "Jet Set Willy: Wet Sunday Afternoon Graphical Remix". I hope it's OK to copy and paste here from there - these are my own comments and it will also be useful for me to have them here for future reference.
On JSW Central I strive to keep an updated list of "Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy games", which I define as games using Manic Miner (MM) and Jet Set Willy (JSW) game engines, both original and modified. I make a clear distinction (it's an arbitrary, but I think easily defendable  one should someone question it) between "new games" created using these game engines on one side, and "versions and minor mods of the original MM" and "versions and minor mods of the original JSW" on the other.   Among the "new games", currently there are 50 games listed in the "JSW48" category (using the 48K original game engine of JSW, also in various modified shapes). Additionally, among the 48K games there are 6 games which I've classified not as "new games" but as "Advanced modifications of the original JSW" and 5 games classified as "Artistic modifications of the original JSW" (these are all JODI's JSW Variations). Then there are two JSW II games, 18 JSW128 games (using a 128K modified game engine developed by John Elliott), and 24 JSW64 games (using another 128K modified game engine developed by John Elliott). This is not to mention games using the MM game engine (there are currently 20 of them), games for the ZX Spectrum which can definitely be considered "Willy games", but use still different game engines, and some mini games.   Most of the above (with the exception of the "Advanced modifications of the original JSW" subcategory) are listed as "new games", as opposed to "Versions and minor mods of the original Jet Set Willy" of which there are currently some 26 listed on a separate page.   I am emphasizing the distinction between what I consider "new games" and "versions of the original JSW" (the same goes for MM), because it is very important. On the "mainstream" websites, such as World of Spectrum or Spectrum Computing, this distinction is not made sufficiently clearly (in fact, not made at all!). They list the "mods" together, due to which some people say e.g. that there are "about 117 different versions of Jet Set Willy". However, this doesn't do justice to what various authors did, and doesn't describe the reality accurately at all.   The distinction is so important because we are talking about totally different things. Please consider these two extremes:   1. A "minor" version of JSW which has, for example, just 1 additional room (like the historic "April Showers" version) or a technical tweak (like "Jet Set Mono") - a change that is minimal, perhaps involving just a few bytes, but has some effect on the whole. These are indeed "versions" of the original "JSW" and I wouldn't object to them being called "versions". According to my classification, there are some 26 of them.   2. A new game. Let's take Herve Ast's "Willy on a Transatlantic Cruise" as an example. Dozens of games could be taken as examples, but I'll just describe this one, because I can't describe them all. This is truly a NEW game. It is NOT a version of JSW. It has 128 rooms, more than twice as many as the original JSW. All of them are new rooms - they are not rooms from JSW tweaked here and there, or with just modified graphics, or something - they are brand new rooms, designed from scratch, according to a game map designed from scratch, which has nothing to do whatsoever with Willy's original mansion. The game has new room graphics, new guardian sprites, new items and a new story behind it. Furthermore, since it uses the expanded 128K JSW64 game engine, it features many things that the original JSW does not and cannot have: more cell types in every room, switches, diagonal guardians, etc.   The things that "Willy on a Transatlantic Cruise" shares with the original JSW are: the protagonist, the general idea of the game (avoid nasties and collect all items before time runs out) and the exquisite mechanics of the original (albeit expanded) game engine. Other than that, it is a brand-new game, which must have taken many months of intense work to create.   Calling "Willy on a Transatlantic Cruise" a "version of Jet Set Willy" is not even an understatement - it's an outright error! "Willy on a Transatlantic Cruise" is simply a brand new game that uses some elements from "JSW".   I am making these lengthy comments to try to drive this message home, because I feel that the talk of "versions of Jet Set Willy" or even "mods" or "clones" of Jet Set Willy makes many people dismiss them straight away - many people say "I'm fed up with all of these mods of JSW" and don't even look at them. The reality is, however, that the games listed on JSW Central as "new games" in the JSW48, JSW128 and JSW64 categories are NOT versions of JSW. Most of them are not even "mods" in my opinion - each of them is not a "modified" JSW, but a new game created using the game engine (original or modified) and, in some cases, some other elements of the original JSW, such as e.g. guardian sprites.   "Jet Set Willy: Wet Sunday Afternoon Graphical Remix" (whose review on YouTube inspired this discussion) is an interesting case, because it did give me some ontological headaches. I initially classified it among the "Versions and minor mods of the original Jet Set Willy", as it only has graphics modified. It does not feature any modifications to the room layout, guardians' paths or any other elements (such as music) that could be modified.   However, when some other "dubious" game files appeared - balancing between being "new games" and "minor versions" - I decided to create a new subcategory in the new games list: "Advanced modifications of the original Jet Set Willy", to classify them as seemed best. The few games that are currently listed in this category are, in my judgement, "modified too much" to be considered just "minor" versions, but at the same time "not modified enough" to be considered "new games".   They are somewhere in-between, but I would not object at all to "Jet Set Willy: Wet Sunday Afternoon Graphical Remix" or "Jet Set Willy: The Nightmare Edition" being called "versions of JSW", while I would strongly object to e.g. (just to mention the latest additions to the JSW48 list) "Madam Blavskja's Carnival Macabre 48K Edition" or "Willy does the Great Pyramid!" being considered "versions of JSW". They are not "versions" - in relation to the 1984 classic, they are truly brand new games.   A related topic is a distinction between whether something is "a proper game or a homebrew". Such division is VERY UNFAIR to the homebrew games, as it suggests they are NOT "proper" games. What a lie! Please look at "Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings", or "Maria vs. Some Bastards", or "where's woody?", or "Jet Set Willy 5: ZX Heroes", or "Willy and the Dodecahedron" or "Terry The Turtle" (again, just a few examples) and tell me they are not proper games! In each of them you will find something that is significantly more advanced than in the original "JSW": either improved game engine, or more rooms (the largest homebrew games have more than 4 times the number of rooms in the original JSW), or better graphics, or more interesting technical effects, or all of the above together. In comparison with some later games, the original "JSW" seems empty, easy and almost dull.   This is not to denigrate the original, of course. It was a work of genius, it started it all and it has a certain charm/sense of humour that most later games don't match (but they have their own charms). These later games were created using tools that made designing them a piece of cake (such as John Elliott's fantastic JSWED - if anyone wants to design their own game OR a version of the original JSW, they can do so easily using JSWED, without any coding knowledge, and it's free!), taking advantage of deepened knowledge and detailed analysis of the way the original game engine works, using improved game engines that built on that original, etc. Many later games are way more advanced than the original "JSW", but it doesn't mean that their authors have more "merit" than Matthew Smith.   However, if you just wanted to judge the games without looking at their history and time and circumstances of creation, I am sure that many "objective judges" (say, people unfamiliar with the history of JSW, who are suddenly given the original game and one of the new games and are asked to tell which one is better) would pick a new game over the original. Again, this is not to diminish the original in any way - this is to say that it is VERY unfair to distinguish between "proper" games (that would include the original JSW) and "homebrew" ("improper"?) games (that include the later creations).   A fair division would be between "commercially-released" or perhaps simply "commercial" games and "homebrew games". Such division would only refer to one aspect of the circumstances surrounding their creation and release, without entering into value judgements of whether they are "proper" games or not.   Comments? 😉

Update.
 
I have been bored to both games the last few months, thus they are not finished yet. 
There are some advances, though. 🙂 
 
The Diner game has few new rooms, mostly nearly finished. It has a finished title screen, too!
 
As it is mentioned in another topic, The Mansion title screen is finished otherwise, but it has some other problems, hopefully it will be solved in the near future, thanks to Danny! 🙂 
 
The Mansion also has some new graphic updates, too! 🙂 It took a bit of testing to make them work, I hope you´ll like them! 🙂 I will keep them as a secret for now, you will see them during playing when the game is finally finished someday. 🙂 

Hello
Here's the game image (attached for search engine optimization).
I'm making good progress on creating the rooms. I'm cruising along!
See you soon!
Hervé

Thank you for releasing the corrected versions, UncleWan! 👍 😊

I thought that too. Then I thought "That's clever - Fest-Vial! I bet Willy will have to collect some potions."
But from @UncleWan's reaction it seems to be a typo. But maybe you (unclewan) could consider solving the issue by changing some item graphics to vials, which in my (not so perfect) understanding of the English language are little bottles.
Maybe a stupid idea. I don't know. I'm pretty exhausted. I couldn't even make it past the second screen.
So my review is just: What I've seen looks really nice.

I'm so glad I clicked this link. I'm usually not a fan of AI images, but this might just be the greatest Miner Willy picture ever.
 
Happy new year!
 

With the sound of firecrackers, a year comes to an end.Tonight is the last night of the Year of the Snake.Wishing everyone good fortune in the Year of the Horse!
My mini-game has been submitted, and I also used AI to make the game's cover.🙂
Have Fun！

With the sound of firecrackers, a year comes to an end.Tonight is the last night of the Year of the Snake.Wishing everyone good fortune in the Year of the Horse!
My mini-game has been submitted, and I also used AI to make the game's cover.🙂
Have Fun！

It's your choice, absolutely. There are some rooms in the history of JSW games where such a challenge (time limit) has been introduced in the same way, by conscious design. So there's no reason to modify it if you like it this way 🙂 .
 
  
Great! 👍

Thanks for your valuable feedback, I'm really glad you enjoyed this mini game, Daniel！🙂
I will make adjustments to these issues as soon as possible.
About the time limit in that room, I noticed during the test, but I think it's also an interesting challenge to explore the universe before the oxygen runs out. Haha, that's a bad excuse, but it's better than the software project explaining that the bug in the "attic" room was a gas leak. 🤣 so I decided to keep it.

And some feedback regarding the English version:
There's one thing that would benefit from a correction. There is a typo on the title screen: the letters read "FESTVIAL" instead of "FESTIVAL".
The same typo also appears in the scrolling message, so it should be corrected there as well.
If you decide to correct it and re-release the game, I would also suggest correcting the following spelling issues in the room names and the scrolling message:
- "Ha!New year decorations on sale!" - I would capitalise "Y" in "year" (to make it New Year);
- "Outer Spacestation" - I would make "Space Station" two words.
- "Watching Fireworks with Family !" - there's no need for a space between the "y" in "Family" and the exclamation mark (it would be there in French, but not in English 😉).
- In the scrolling message, I believe there is no reason to capitalise the words "Gifts", "Area" and "Midnight" - I would start them all in lower-case letters.
Again, it's not criticism, but some suggestions to make your beautiful game, UncleWan, spotless ☺️.

Thank you SO MUCH for this New Year's gift, UncleWan! 🙏 I have just completed the Chinese version of the game. It's an incredible feeling to play a Chinese take on JSW!😁
For those who are wondering whether to have a go at it or not, I will say the following: Please DO! You will not regret it. The game has (what I perceive as) some very markedly Chinese elements - what a delight to see those in a JSW game! - and fresh new graphics and sprites, while at the same time it also features some well-known JSW sprites and some beloved characters from other ZX Spectrum games 🙂 .
So thanks again for "Willy’s Spring Festival", UncleWan! 🙂 And if I can just offer a tiny little bit of constructive feedback, I will mention that:
- IMO in the opening room it might be better to block the room exit on the upper right with a Fire cell (or delete the rightmost Water cell so that it does not create a possibility of exiting the room without jumping), because once the player exits there, they fall into a Multiple-Death Scenario (MDS) in the room to the right. 
- An MDS happens also when the player exits "Qiao Shang De HongBao" to the left at the upper level. If it were my game, I would also block the exit there (with Earth cells in this case because of the room design). One could argue that the player has just come from  "Ba Zhe Ba Zhe ! QuanBu Ba Zhe !" so they should know that's it's not safe to exit "Qiao Shang De HongBao" to the left on the upper level. That's a valid argument, but I would still block that exit to avoid a possibility of an MDS.
- In "HuanYing Lai Dao JiaoZi YuZhou!" there is a time limit, because after a while two guardians collide (the horizontal magenta one at the bottom and the vertical cyan one) and Willy gets killed. It's not a problem in terms of completing the game (because the player has enough time to collect all items if they exit the room temporarily to reset the timer, so to speak), but it might be perceived by some as inelegant - unless it's been introduced on purpose (as a time limit).
Again, I'm mentioning these elements in the spirit of constructive feedback, but please don't perceive them as criticism of any kind. I am absolutely delighted with "Willy’s Spring Festival"☺️, I believe the room designs are beautiful and smart, and the ending is fantastic! A great start to the Year of the Fire Horse, which I have every reason to believe will also be an amazing year for JSW games 😀.
Happy New Year, UncleWan and everyone! ☺️

With the sound of firecrackers, a year comes to an end.Tonight is the last night of the Year of the Snake.Wishing everyone good fortune in the Year of the Horse!
My mini-game has been submitted, and I also used AI to make the game's cover.🙂
Have Fun！

View File Willy’s Spring Festival
Hello，everyone！
To celebrate the Chinese New Year 2026, I made this mini-game.Here is my JSWED 48K game，an easy mini-game with six rooms which can be completed without losing a life.
Story：Willy had prepared a generous gift early, intending to honor his parents during the Spring Festival. Passing by the Temple of Wealth God ，he went in to offer incense and pray for abundant wealth in the new year.
Unexpectedly, a gust of wind suddenly blew, scattering all the gifts he was holding in different directions. Willy needs to go along the way to search and pick them up, retrieving each gift to give to his parents.
The game offers two languages: English and Chinese Pinyin.The only differences between the two language versions are the text and some sprites.TAP format only.

 
Submitter UncleWan Submitted 02/16/2026 Category Jet Set Willy [Remakes]  

Frankenstein is an interesting platform game. Get the bug fixed version as otherwise it will falter at about level 8 or so (had this back then when it was new) 
Surprisingly good perhaps one of the best compiled Basic games actually.
Although one post long ago along with others on the WOS forum helped spur the author into an updated version , I still sometimes prefer the original for its simplicity.
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1849/ZX-Spectrum/Frank_N_Stein
 

For me the closest match I have found are Meat Boy/Super Meat Boy that are puzzly, platformy and have quite minimal inputs. The next closest thing would be The Lost Vikings. Puzzly, platformy, but far from minimal inputs.
 
On the non-platformer side maybe Hill Climb Racing. I guess it`s mostly the three button inputs and difficulty in getting over obstacles.
 
What are your favourite somewhat-similar-to-MM-or-JSW games?
 

Penelope58, thank you for your post, but... are you a person?... or a bot??? 
I'm asking this because while I whole-heartedly agree with the comment you posted, its content is just an edit of my initial comment in this thread, slightly modified, as ChatGPT could have done.
So I wouldn't be surprised if you posted several such messages, to "authenticate" yourself, and then started to spam us with non-JSW related things...

from the post above 

Are you planning on doing JSW2 at any point? (For one, I always preferred JSW2 and secondly (and more selfishly), I'd love to look at the difference between the movement code between the first and second games.)

The code for JSW2 was not a rewrite of Matthews code. It was writen from scratch, using just visual information from the original. e.g. Look at the game mechanics, and write the code. JSW's method of movement was not even looked at (source code or dissassembly)

Hi everyone,
A few days ago, i read this great document on how Manic Miner's physics work and i tried replicating what i understood in Scratch. I've been adding some features, and while it isn't advanced enough to actually make a full game with it yet, i think it is still worth sharing.

2026-02-12 20-51-03.mp4    
Here's a short video demonstrating a small map i've made. I've also attached the project file if anyone wants to see the code. It can be loaded in Scratch, but i'd suggest using TurboWarp instead. (Load the project file by clicking File and then Load from your computer)
There's not really much to say about it, i just wanted to show my progress so far 🙂
 
mini jet set willy(1)(2).sb3

I wonder if the NCB had any words with Gremlin Graphics about this , thinking about it:
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/5617/ZX-Spectrum/Wanted_Monty_Mole
Actually saw a bit of an old TV clip of a mini interview with the author, for some reason I'd assumed (even then) he was much older. He was about the same age as me back then...

Great idea, so I added in a shader that does just that 🙂