Manic Miner: The Lost Levels

[JianYang]

16 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

with 4 more appearing as extras are gained.

So JSW64 supports extra lives? Do you think there could be a better way to grant lives instead of just giving the player plenty at the start?

[JianYang]

On 6/8/2024 at 4:03 PM, The-Red-Bayron said:

I would have to reduce the amount of items from The Deeper Caverns and Down, Down, Deeper and Down as the editor will not allow me to put in more items after 256.

Then maybe it's not worth it?

For most of us loading times are now less than one second. Compromising quality for this minor convenience doesn't sound too good to me.

Maybe just assemble the best levels that together stay under 256 items?

[jetsetdanny]

6 hours ago, JianYang said:

So JSW64 supports extra lives? Do you think there could be a better way to grant lives instead of just giving the player plenty at the start?

Yes, to quote from JSWED's manual:

"Bonus Room If this is ticked, each item collected gives Willy an extra life."

If I understand correctly, if this option is ticked in JSWED's GUI, each item collected in the room where this option is ticked will give Willy an extra life. So if there are e.g. 5 items in this room, Willy will receive 5 extra lives if he collects all of the items.

This would be one way of doing things. Other things could be done, too, but would have to involve manual modification of the game engine (e.g. using JSWED's Hex Editor).

I'm not sure the question quoted above is directed at me or @The-Red-Bayron. I don't have a strong opinion here. I do think adding extra lives along the way could be used, by all means, but it's Byron's call if and how to modify the game further.

[jetsetdanny]

5 hours ago, JianYang said:

Maybe just assemble the best levels that together stay under 256 items?

Personally, I'm not fond of this idea. It would contradict (what I feel is) the original premise behind the whole project, i.e. presenting (all of) the MM levels that were 'lost' for the ZX Spectrum (because they only existed on other platforms). If only some ('the best') levels were chosen, the ones that were left behind would continue 'lost' in a sense... Furthermore, choosing the 'best' levels would have to lead to some arbitrary and possibly controversial choices regarding which rooms to include, and which to leave out.

That's just my personal feeling about it 🙂 .

[JianYang]

Good points.

There are several options:

- Put all the SAM-levels in one file (we already have that) and all the non-SAM-levels in another

- Put all levels in one file but remove some items

- Put almost all levels in one file and remove the worst ones

- Fix the engine to allow for more items

The last one would probably be the gold standard, but right now I don't see it happening.

All the other cases are aesthetic trade-offs. In any case nothing will be lost unless Bayron goes crazy and deletes all his work so far. We just have to load different versions of the game.

I guess I favour to remove some levels because there are some levels that I think don't belong in a Manic Miner game (The two Twilight Zone Levels from the SAM and In a Deep Dark Hole(?) from the Oric come immediately to mind) and feel more like Nintendo/Mario levels.

In the end it's an artistic decision and the artist is Bayron.

I trust that Bayron can find the 10% good ideas between the 90% nonsense that I suggest. And I appreciate you supporting him/her in the process.

 

[The-Red-Bayron]

At the moment I'm working on making a 128K version of the Lost Levels as I can put a lot of the features that were missing from the 48K and avoid having 2 separate games.

Here is my working list for the levels;

Not Central Cavern
The Dragon Users Bonus
Home At Last?
Back To Work
Down The Pit
In A Deep Dark Hole
Eddie’s Forest
The Hall Of The Mountain Kong
At The Centre Of The Earth
The Channel Tunnel
The End Of The World
The Space Shuttle
Where's The Hyperspace Button?
The Meteor Storm
The Airlock
Flunky Punky Munkie
The Catacombs
Mummy Daddy
Nightmare Before Last Night
Helium House on the Highlands
Metropolis Bingo
Eugene’s Other Lair
Tokyo Uh Oh
Jester Under the Bed
Clockwork Satsuma
The End
The Final BBC Barrier
This, folks, is the Last Cavern
Ending TBA

So Far all the levels have imported into the editor and I will change them to make them as close to the original platforms as possible. The progress is going well and I can see a light at the end of this tunnel!!

If there any suggestion about the running order or additional features please let me know.

All the best, B

 

[jetsetdanny]

I have just added "Manic Miner: The Lost Levels" and "Manic Miner: The Lost Levels DS" (as one entry) to the list of MM games on JSW Central. I have also created a separate page for the game with a complete screenshot gallery of both variants of the game. You can also download my RZX walkthroughs of both variants, showing the completion of "Manic Miner: The Lost Levels" with a score of 35,787 points upon the first re-entry into the first cavern, and the completion of "Manic Miner: The Lost Levels DS" with a score of 35,376 points (I will make videos of them for the JSW Central YouTube channel once it seems certain that Byron will not make new versions of the game.

JSW Central is still missing "Manic Miner: Deeper and Down". I hope to add it there, with a dedicated page, in the near future.

[IRF]

On 6/10/2024 at 4:54 PM, jetsetdanny said:

Yes, to quote from JSWED's manual:

"Bonus Room If this is ticked, each item collected gives Willy an extra life."

If I understand correctly, if this option is ticked in JSWED's GUI, each item collected in the room where this option is ticked will give Willy an extra life. So if there are e.g. 5 items in this room, Willy will receive 5 extra lives if he collects all of the items.

This would be one way of doing things. Other things could be done, too, but would have to involve manual modification of the game engine (e.g. using JSWED's Hex Editor).

I'm not sure the question quoted above is directed at me or @The-Red-Bayron. I don't have a strong opinion here. I do think adding extra lives along the way could be used, by all means, but it's Byron's call if and how to modify the game further.

How does the Bonus Room feature work in a Manic Miner game, where each collected item in a room (or technically, cavern) is restored when you lose a life and needs to be recollected? If you collect more than two items in such a cavern and then lose a life, isn't there a danger that the extra lives gained could start to spill over beyond the bottom of the status bar, causing corruption of the playing area (as happens in Terry the Turtle)?

I think the Bonus Room feature was designed with JSW-style gameplay in mind, where each item can only be 'cleared up' once per game. (I guess that's why it's called the 'Bonus Room', not 'Bonus Cavern' feature.)

Edited June 13 by IRF

[IRF]

On 6/9/2024 at 6:19 PM, jetsetdanny said:

Using the JSW64 game engine, it is possible (and easy) to add extra lives.

I would just caution against adding too many of them, in order to avoid what happens e.g. in "Terry The Turtle", where it is actually necessary to lose lives during the gameplay to prevent potential game corruption. Initially, the player has 7 visible spare lives, with 4 more appearing as extras are gained. With the 15th spare life acquired, flickering begins on the bottom left turtle icon. Subsequent extra lives cause flickering on additional turtles. Once the life count exceeds 28, room name display is affected, with letters disappearing starting from the left. Having more than 28 lives can slow down or crash the game due to issues like paths blocked by "rogue" cells. Therefore, it is advisable (especially if you're playing using Rollback or saving/loading snapshots and do not normally lose lives) to repeatedly commit suicide throughout the game, especially when the life count approaches 28.

It's just occurred to me that a specific solution for this problem for the game Terry the Turtle - given the fact that the Terry sprite is less than one character-row in height, would have been to modify the game engine so that the remaining lived on the status bar only occupied a single character-row. That way, twice as many remaining lives could have been fitted in without causing the spillover/corruption that you describe.

Edited June 13 by IRF

[jetsetdanny]

10 hours ago, IRF said:

How does the Bonus Room feature work in a Manic Miner game, where each collected item in a room (or technically, cavern) is restored when you lose a life and needs to be recollected? If you collect more than two items in such a cavern and then lose a life, isn't there a danger that the extra lives gained could start to spill over beyond the bottom of the status bar, causing corruption of the playing area (as happens in Terry the Turtle)?

I think the Bonus Room feature was designed with JSW-style gameplay in mind, where each item can only be 'cleared up' once per game. (I guess that's why it's called the 'Bonus Room', not 'Bonus Cavern' feature.)

It's a good question!

I'll start my reply with the contentious bit ;). I really don't think that it's called the 'Bonus Room', not 'Bonus Cavern', feature because it was designed with JSW-style gameplay in mind. I know you always make a point about the distinction between rooms and caverns, but I don't think it's universally accepted or applied. 'Room' is the most generic word for a screen in the game and I'm pretty sure that's why the feature is called the 'Bonus Room', without any deeper meaning to it.

Moreover, the distinction between JSW-style and MM-style games (and also rooms) is blurred in JSW64. You can have a room with a portal which is the only way out, but you can also have a room with a portal that simply acts as a teleporter, because you can also exit this room through one or more "JSW-style" exits. JSW64 is a "place" where the distinction between rooms and caverns as per your definition is particularly vague.

Anyway, I've carried out some testing in response to your query and the result is that there is an easy - although admittedly imperfect - solution to the problem you've envisaged. It's keeping the "No Kamikaze" option deactivated.

Let's start from the basics for anyone interested. Both the "Bonus room" option and the "No Kamikaze" option can be activated or deactivated (ticked or unticked) in the following way: right-click "Rooms" (a menu appears), go to "Room options" (JSWED's manual mistakenly calls it "the Room properties screen" - this should be corrected as it's confusing) - another menu appears - go to "General", there they are.

With the "No Kamikaze" option ticked, the game plays in the room in question as in MM, i.e. if you die after collecting an item, when you respawn, the item (or items) you collected before dying are restored and your item count is adjusted to what it was before collecting them. If you collect more than one item in such a room and then lose a life, you will have a net gain of at least one life (more if you have collected more items) and so there is a clear and present danger that the extra lives you keep gaining in such rooms (if there are many of them) could start to spill over beyond the bottom of the status bar.

The easy solution to this is to have the "No Kamikaze" option deactivated. With this, the game plays as in JSW, so after you have collected an item, it's not there any more also after you lose a life. However, this doesn't affect the ability to leave the room via the portal - you collect an item, you die, the item is not there any more, but once you have collected all the other items in the room, the portal starts flashing. The program remembers that an item has been collected.

I know, it eliminates the challenge of having to collect all the items in the room without losing a life. Oh well...