JSW with scrolling

[CPL]

About a month back a friend of mine asked me to recommend a coding language for their son which could act as a step up from Scratch. It happened to coincide with a conversation I had with another person about Jet Set Willy. So after discovering Game Make Studio 2 is free for personal use I used the idea of making a quick Jet Set Willy screen as a test bench to see what it was like. Then I got carried away.

🙂 Enjoy!

[Spider]

That's excellent. 🙂

I don't know if you've seen 'SkoolDaze' 'Contact Sam Cruise' or 'Bak2Skool' as they also have a scrolling playing area but it moves by eight columns at at time, I did with those try at one point to make it move one column but it just made a mess, was a long time ago mind you.

What you have looks really good. Before I saw the video I thought immediately of the CBM Amiga version of this (there's a video of it here) which does something similar however a serious problem with that version is there is not enough "look ahead" room so its very easy to have an accident unless you're 100% familiar with the guardians and even then its perilous!

I really like what I see. 🙂

[Heracleum]

Wow it looks fabulous! 👌

I love the classy fade in/out on background colour. Also the zoom-out! Is the zoom level controlled by the player? (or just a demo / god-mode option)

[Norman Sword]

Very similar to Tile Map for the pc. Which plays JSW and JSW2+, plus other spectrum games.

 

The included zip file is for 64bit pc's. 

TileMap-10-x64.zip

Edited September 29, 2021 by Norman Sword

[CPL]

Thanks for the nice comments.

Not seeing enemies in adjoining rooms is definitely an issue - I nearly hit the banyan tree saw making the video. I have quite a lot of control over how the camera behaves in a certain space - it has its own collision map. Some rooms need the camera locking otherwise it feels really odd. Other parts of the map it can flow more freely.

The zoom level is controlled by the player at the moment. My plan is to use it as more of location based effect at certain points on the map where the wider view is more interesting - the ledge over the front door, the top of the watch tower, the yacht, top of the megatree, for example. 

Because of the way the flip screen works in the original I've had to make edits to the map to make staircases line up. Where the map itself doesn't line up I've had to move rooms from the roof and put them in the basement - "Down on the Battlements" 😁 - it seemed a zany enough idea to work in this game although the whole Hunchback joke is now somewhat lost. I've also added in a couple of rooms from JSW2 and one from Manic Miner to get it to all line up. I've added platforms here and there to allow the player to explore more freely. "Rescue Esmerelda" is now accessible from "Emergency Generator" for example. I'm considering adjusting "The Security Guard" and "The Wine Cellar" to allow exploring the basement in either direction.

That TileMap app is really interesting! I didn't know about that. Funnily enough Starquake was another game I was considering giving the same treatment.

Edited September 30, 2021 by CPL

[Heracleum]

@CPL zooming out reveals the unexplored surrounding area (ok we all more or less already know the whole map but let's imagine a newbie player). So what about hiding rooms you haven't visited -or got nearby- yet? 

Depending how you stored map data the rooms could either more roughly appear as room block or -cooler- by explored 'radius', turning on single cells.

[CPL]

@Heracleum It's just one giant open tile map. There's no real reason the rooms or have to be the size they are other than me wanting to recreate the original game for nostalgia's sake. I don't think increasing the size of the map would be an issue either. There's nothing to say you couldn't have differently sized rooms if you were building a new map rather than a semi-direct remake. That said, there are a few things I DO calculate the equivalent room co-ordinate for - the room name for example. I also use a room co-ordinate to generate the enemies - it made it much easier to translate the data from the original game into the new map.

The map isn't exactly huge by modern standards though. Exploring it and discovering rooms for yourself is part of the fun for a newbie player I think. Covering up unexplored screens is an interesting idea to allow manual zooming out without spoilers. It would act as a kind of map feature. I might look at doing that!

[MtM]

This looks excellent! There is real scope here to make a modern combination of a standalone JSW if you want, and maybe

a combined version of all the official Miner W games, into one big map, linking them all properly. It would be work, but say

for instance all the official rooms were combined into a big map, there could be a room where say you enter the Central Cavern

then have to play through all 20 screens before you escape into a room back in JSW etc. I think it could be awesome!

 

Just my opinion anyway, but I hope you get it all into a releasable state for the public. Please post it here too!

 

Spider makes a good point about the Amiga version of JSW, I still have the original of it here on my shelves, it too used scrolling, it was atrocious, one of the worst games ever ported to the Amiga, and I love JSW like everyone here, so scrolling in itself is not just a gameplay feature that guarantees a 'better' game, it needs to be done well like it seems to be here, and adds to the game.

 

Edited October 2, 2021 by MtM

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks for making it and sharing info about it, CPL, it does look excellent! 👍

Forgive me if I am missing something obvious here, but - the game is not available to be played or downloaded right now, you've only shown us the video, right?

If this is the case, I share MtM's hope that you will get it into a releasable state for the public. Do keep us posted about your progress 🙂 .

[jetsetdanny]

On 10/2/2021 at 11:23 AM, MtM said:

(...)

for instance all the official rooms were combined into a big map, there could be a room where say you enter the Central Cavern

then have to play through all 20 screens before you escape into a room back in JSW etc. I think it could be awesome!

Variants V and W of John Elliott's JSW64 do exactly that 🙂 . From JSW you enter the MM caverns and have to go through all of them before exiting back to the JSW game map.