IRF

Perfect! Hopefully also means that when falling from a great height into the portal in Return of Kong, you can turn the beam mid-fall to point it towards the portal. (Whereas in the previous version, with the additional check for the airborne status, the beam might have stubbornly reverted to point sideways?)

Will the latest change mean that if Willy points the beam straight upwards, then does a vertical jump, the beam will still point straight upwards? Because in that circumstance - if you're trying to inspect what is located a few character rows above Willy - you wouldn't necessarily want the beam to automatically align left or right to match Willy's facing direction. Sorry if I'm being picky!

I noticed it when doing a certain manoeuvre to collect the item on the right, halfway up the Central Cavern-style room - jump right off the crumblies, then before landing hit left+jump to perform a 'turnaround and jump straight up' to collect the overhead item, before proceeding to jump left onto the conveyor (and then onwards to the spiky bushes/clockwork robot, etc). I was expecting the beam to turn around at the moment Willy turned around, but because he does a vertical jump to get the item, during which he isn't actually moving leftwards yet, he was left facing into the blackness before I nudged him left. If that doesn't make sense I could do a quick RZX recording to illustrate.

I've noticed a glitch with the way that the torch beam works. Say Willy is standing still, facing rightwards. If you nudge the Left key once, to turn Willy around, his beam still points rightwards. Only if you nudge Left again to make Willy walk one pace leftwards does his torch beam turn round to match his leftwards facing direction. (And vice versa.)

I see what you mean (from the old 'rotate' file) about the items having an incongruous background in the 'non-black' rooms - now fixed.

Lantern and Candle modes are fab! Especially in the likes of the Cold Room where the background PAPER setting isn't black, so it really shows off the rotating torch beam. B)

That would certainly help. (Air supply static while Willy is static.)

The rotate effect is nice, and I appreciate the addition of the H and J keys to activate it. The ability to swap between black/blue using ENTER is also a nice touch. I know you said you weren't planning on making any further changes, but I have a suggestion anyway... Could the air supply in the cavern be made to drain at twice the rate if the background colour is set to blue? That way the player can choose to navigate in the easier climate of the blue background, but there is a reward (in terms of additional points at the end of the cavern) for the brave who venture forth into the dark...

Would it be a relatively easy task to add H and J as alternative keys for the task? I tend to play using my right hand for moving Willy [didn't think I'd manage to come up with a fresh double entendre for this genre all these years later but there you go!], using O and P for left/right and Space for jump. Trying to press K and L with my left hand simultaneously is a bit awkward. H and J would be easier, and still within the same half-row of keys.

Black Void is interesting/tricky - can't even see Willy unless you look up or down!

Was that the .tap.tap label you're referring to? I did wonder about that; luckily it didn't stop the file from working though.

'L' to look up and 'K' to look down?

The new and improved, brighter torch is particularly impressive in the caverns with non-black background (air PAPER) settings. :)

The ghosts are from Pac Man, to match the Pac Man style guardians. The item shapes are supposed to be bunches of cherries too I think, to match the theme.

We used several of the Tech Ted sprites in the jswmm.co.uk project 'Jet Set Mini'.

On a sort of similar theme, in the jswmm.co.uk release 'Manic Mixup', all the items in the Solar Power Generator cavern are shaped like sunglasses, and once you have collected them all, the solar beam (with its air supply-sapping power) is turned off - there's a kind of logic to that!

I think removing one earth cell would do it - namely the one which is directly above the two earth cells that open up when the first switch is triggered. It might look a bit odd with the gap present from the start, so perhaps opening up the wall via the switch could also cause the removal of a third wall block as well, by tweaking the special Kong routine?

The portals in the Kong caverns are unavoidably "in the way" - i.e. it's impossible to collect all the items without passing through the portal en route. So those layouts would need to be changed, in order to allow you to avoid entering the portal prematurely if it's fatal to do so!

Here's a suggestion - once Willy completes The Final Barrier, the whole cavern should be lit up 'properly', representing the daylight flooding into the cavern through the open portal. (i.e. the 'dark light' effect is switched off at that moment).

I think the sliding bonus routine is worth adding even if there are no bugs. It's a genuine novelty, as far as I am aware, and a suitable reward for the player managing not to lose any lives. :ph34r:

I presume those are bonus points added at the end of the game for each remaining life? (As opposed to scores you have to accrue to gain an extra life.)

The effect I referred to above can be seen in the first cavern of the two attached test files (same engine change applied in both files; the only difference is that the INK and PAPER settings of the crumbly cells are swapped round, which gives a slightly different visual effect). I think it makes it a bit more obvious for the player what they have to do in order to 'mine' out the items so that they can be collected. Embedded Items Merged with Background 1.TAP Embedded Items Merged with Background 2.TAP

Is a life still awarded for collecting 10,000 points? (If indeed it is even possible to collect that number of points, given that the game doesn't go back to the start after the Final Barrier, so there's a maximum theoretical number of points available.)

I should say that I had to sacrifice a life in 'Attack of the Mutant Telephones', because I went round and then realised that I had left one item uncollected which I couldn't then reach in order to complete the cavern. I had been playtesting on QAOP which seems to preserve only the most recent rollback point, and I had used rollback at a point in Mutant Telephones which was 'past the point of no return'. So whilst elsewhere I managed to complete the screens without loss of life via Rollback, in the Telephones cavern I wasted a life. The upshot of this is that my final score will be slightly inflated by the fact that I collected all the items in Mutant Telephones twice (bar the one item which I couldn't reach first time round). It would be possible to inflate the completion score more significantly, if you triggered Kong falling in one of the Kong screens (and collected all the items) and then sacrificed a life before reaching the portal - and if you did that for all of your lives bar the last one. Idea: It might be possible to avoid that scenario if you could 'roll back' the accrued score every time you lost a life to the score which you had upon entry to the current cavern. That way, the final score would truly represent how efficiently you completed the game, and it would not be skewed by losing lives and partially repeating caverns.