Willy does the Great Doughnut

[geoff]

This might be an interesting challenge: make a viable JSW game in which the rooms form a rectangular grid which wraps around at the top and bottom, and at left and right, i.e. on the surface of a torus. It should be possible to move freely from any room to all of its neighbours.

 

For bonus points, try a game on the surface of the Software Projects logo.

[Spider]

I'm not sure on the second idea simply on the basis of the map design almost being 3D 🙂

I do love the first idea however! 😄

Did you mean an 'empty' rectangle as in more or less a square O shape or a full grid ?

 

 

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks for the idea, Geoff! 👍

It's good to see you around. I should soon (=in the next few weeks) be able to get down to recording an RZX walkthrough of my unofficial bugfix of "Willy the Hacker", which I prepared reflecting what Robin Clive had done to fix the game, and, if its completability is confirmed empirically, to ask you for your blessing to make it "the official bugfix" 🙂 .

[geoff]

@spider: it's a bit mathematical. If you imagine a chessboard, then roll it up one way so that the opposite ends join up, then twist it around so that the circular ends join up, you'll get the idea. Alternatively, imagine a chessboard which wraps around at the edges, like in the original JSW you can get to The Hall by jumping up from Rescue Esmerelda. The result is that no two squares (i.e. rooms) are more than four squares apart diagonally, so you can get around very quickly.

 

@danny: I have to admit to never being too fond of WtH, since I didn't spend as much time on it as I should have done, but if someone cares enough to fix it, I'm happy to endorse it 😀

[Spider]

2 hours ago, geoff said:

@spider: it's a bit mathematical. If you imagine a chessboard, then roll it up one way so that the opposite ends join up, then twist it around so that the circular ends join up, you'll get the idea. Alternatively, imagine a chessboard which wraps around at the edges, like in the original JSW you can get to The Hall by jumping up from Rescue Esmerelda. The result is that no two squares (i.e. rooms) are more than four squares apart diagonally, so you can get around very quickly.

Ah I get it now, thank you. A sort of 3D block with lines joining each room, a bit like in some ways an adventure game room is laid out on paper. Yes I understand. 🙂

[jetsetdanny]

Thank you, Geoff! I'll get back to you on this soon 🙂 .

[jetsetdanny]

On 4/20/2022 at 12:58 PM, jetsetdanny said:

I should soon (=in the next few weeks) be able to get down to recording an RZX walkthrough of my unofficial bugfix of "Willy the Hacker", which I prepared reflecting what Robin Clive had done to fix the game, and, if its completability is confirmed empirically, to ask you for your blessing to make it "the official bugfix" 🙂 .

  

On 4/22/2022 at 7:53 AM, geoff said:

@danny: I have to admit to never being too fond of WtH, since I didn't spend as much time on it as I should have done, but if someone cares enough to fix it, I'm happy to endorse it 😀

 

On 4/23/2022 at 12:49 AM, jetsetdanny said:

Thank you, Geoff! I'll get back to you on this soon 🙂 .

 

The "soon" turned out to be four and a half months, but now I've done it. I have played my unofficial bugfix of "Willy the Hacker" to completion and can confirm that it is perfectly completable. So hereby I officially ask Geoff for his kind endorsement of it 🙂 .

Some background:

The original release of "Willy the Hacker" is incompletable due to a critical bug in the room "The Right-Hand Edge of the Map" (27). In 2007, Andrew Broad suggested a fix for it (in a post on the JSW/MM Yahoo! Group, which used to be here, but is not online any more).

In May 2008, Robin Clive submitted a recording of the game to the RZX Archive. This recording is still hosted over there. Robin applied a different fix than that suggested by Andrew in order to be able to complete the game. Strangely enough, he also modified the game to show only 7 remaining lives, while in the original game there are 16, occupying the whole bottom part of the status bar (as a matter of fact, the game has the infinite-lives POKE turned on by default, so it doesn't really matter to the player how many spare lives there are left, and their number does not decrease if a life is lost, but it does make a significant visual difference on the status bar).

While creating the game's page on JSW Central, I prepared a bugfixed version of the game, which applied the same fix that Robin Clive applied, but it was done in ZX-Blockeditor so that the rest of the game was unchanged, while the game was made completable by eliminating the critical bug. As mentioned above, my bugfixed version can be downloaded from here, and I will upload it also to this forum once Geoff endorses it.

As I found out when playing the game to completion and RZX-recording it, the player must lose one life in the room "Purple <hic>" (29), as the only way to collect the two items on the mid-air platform is to jump for them from below, which kills Willy upon falling from an excessive height. This doesn't matter for the gameplay, since the infinite-lives POKE is turned on anyway.

Robin Clive fixed this issue before recording his walkthrough (by modifying the platforms), so he didn't lose a life there. In my bugfix, this is not modified, as the idea was to only fix the (sole) critical bug which made the game incompletable. The necessity to lose a life in order to complete the game, while not my personal preference, is also present in some of Geoff's other games, so it's nothing extraordinary (in fact, it is also present in the Software Projects-fixed original "Jet Set Willy"!).

I really enjoyed playing "Willy the Hacker" and recording it 🙂. Finding an optimal route was the biggest challenge, but I think I did quite well in the end.

I had to complete the game twice, because in my initial recording I missed three items that should have been collected in the early stages of the walkthrough. I re-recorded the game, collecting these items at the right time and also improving the fluidity of some of my movements in the other rooms. 

The resulting RZX recording is fully up to my standards, and it will be uploaded to the game's page on JSW Central very soon, on the same day I publish a JSW Central YouTube video of it. According to a plan I have, it will be video No. 68, and I have just uploaded No. 65 today ("Pip The Pipistrelle"), so "Willy the Hacker"'s upload will happen within the next two weeks, probably closer to ten days.

Among the many things I like about the game, I would like to highlight the sailing ships' sprites in "Throat-Wobbler Mangrove" (59). I really like them, I appreciate their fluid movement and I think they are the best ship sprites I've seen in a Spectrum JSW game (please correct me if there are other competitors! 😉 ).

So Geoff, thank you for creating this game close to a quarter of a century ago and I will be very grateful for your endorsement of the bugfixed version 🙂 .

[geoff]

Consider it endorsed by default!

[jetsetdanny]

Thank you so much, Geoff, I truly appreciate it! 👍

[jetsetdanny]

The bugfixed version of "Willy the Hacker" is now available for download also from this forum.

The video of my walkthrough of the game is on the JSW Central YouTube Channel.

And the RZX recording of that walkthrough can be downloaded from the game's page on JSW Central.

Once again, huge thanks to Geoff for endorsing the bugfixed version of his game! 👍