================================================== | Manic Miner: A ten-cavern challenge | | | | Game Builder: Andy Ford | | | | Contribution: Daniel Gromann and Ian Rushforth | | | | (jswmm.co.uk) | ================================================== The initial idea of this game was to take a different twist on the release of the "Manic Miner - Hi-Score Challenge" game, which, although was reasonably successful in itself, did have some quite limiting factors, namely being forced to either POKE or reload to change the cavern, which meant multiple cavern completion times were not possible. With this in mind, Andy decided to make a cut-down version of “Manic Miner”, featuring a mere ten caverns. For the sake of traditionalism the first and last caverns (those obviously being “Central Cavern” and “The Final Barrier”) were kept. It was then necessary to decide which eight remaining caverns to choose to fill the space as such. Very easy caverns such as “The Vat” and “The Cold Room” were excluded, as were near-duplicates. For example, there are two ”Amoebatron” type caverns and two ”Kong” type caverns present in the original. With only eight cavern spaces free, there was no need to duplicate them here. A tiny bit of renaming was needed for a few caverns to ensure they remained sensible to read, for example the "Kong" screen used in this project was "Return of the Alien Kong Beast" simply as its slightly harder than the first Kong cavern. However, that exact title could not be used as-is as it implied Kong had already been seen. The following caverns were chosen to be used for the game itself, with their minor name tweaks where required: Central Cavern Eugene's Lair Attack of the Mutant Telephones The Alien Kong Beast Ore Refinery Skylabs' Landing Bay The Warehouse Amoebatrons' Assault Solar Power Generator The Final Barrier It was then necessary to manually make some changes to the core code to allow the caverns to function in different memory locations, as quite a lot of the logic is hard-coded to cavern ID numbers, which obviously now did not match up! Also, some changes were needed to the collision routines too, as these themselves also slightly relied upon a cavern ID in some instances. Other changes included relocating some of the graphics data, as this again used to live elsewhere. A couple of small bugs were also fixed at this stage and some cosmetic changes were introduced, such as the missing pixel in M.W's car windscreen frame and the piano key layout. After much testing and Miner (see what we did there?) adjustments all was well. A neat and tidy new font was added at this stage. This was chosen with a bit of care from the many available to both be easy to read and fit in with the game itself too. The next thought then turned to difficulty of the game itself, as at this stage we simply had a fully functional "ten-cavern Manic Miner" and nothing else really. It was decided to simply create two other, new versions of it based on what we had, so we would have a total of three games. The new ones being: An ”easy” version and a ”hard” version. The thoughts here were to make the ”easy” version a little bit more player-friendly than the original and the hard version slightly more trouble for the player. The "fair" version being the standard ten levels without any changes. After some thought and discussion on how to make the required adjustments for each new variant, the following ideas were decided upon: Easy mode: Seven lives, increased fall height, more air time per cavern, friendly Eugene, some slower guardians. A few less hazards generally. The beam in Solar power is also a little bit less intense. Fair mode: The standard game with three lives, nothing extra added or removed. Hard mode: No extra lives are given upon reaching 10,000 points. A few extra hazards are scattered around, some guardians are a bit faster and their paths are extended where possible to make the game a little bit more difficult. It should be noted the increased fall height is not by any means a simple “fall any height” cheat, it merely allows M.W to fall a couple of blocks further than normal and survive said descent. This means he is able to, in some cases, take a shortcut to cavern completion. For a practical example of this: in the standard game (and ”Fair” / "Hard” modes) he would lose a life falling off the conveyor in “Eugene's Lair”; however, in "Easy" mode he can just survive this level of descent. The extra air time given in "Easy” mode only is approximately sixty seconds, which will allow the player to take a little bit more time and was a sensible and practical method of making sure Solar Power Generator did not pose too many difficulties. The title-screen tune is also slightly altered for "Easy" and "Hard" modes to give each new variant a different tone. Much credit to Ian for this suggestion and providing the changes to do it. At this moment we had three complete stand-alone game files and a neat, simple and tidy loading screen was created for them. However, after some delay and further detailed discussions, rather than release them "as is” we felt attempting to combine them into one "pick your skill level” was a much better option, although it did involve quite a bit of extra work to do this, using SPECSAISIE from Dr Andrew Broad. Much credit goes to Daniel for this and to Ian for general help and feedback during the later stages of game development. The choices/loader was written by Andy. The original loading screen that had been created for the "3 tapes” release was sensibly recycled and used for this "difficulty selection” page, as a brand new loading screen was created for the combined game by Daniel. This does make it slightly easier for the end-player, as now there is just one single tape file for the whole game and upon loading you simply select which skill level you wish to play. A re-load is necessary to change this, however. There is a very small anti-tamper routine built in to ensure the player does pick a skill level when requested. Bypassing this manually would make the game play slightly differently again although without ending, it was placed there mainly to ensure that the skill level was properly chosen rather than to be any form of annoyance. The curious among you may wish to explore this 'feature'! After some deliberation it was decided that the game would be launched together with “Jet Set Willy 25-100” as a double-bill release, given the conceptual similarities between both projects. We hope you enjoy this game as much as we did putting it together and look forward to seeing your high-scores, reading any comments and/or feedback on it. We feel it is an interesting slight twist to the original in offering the choice of skill levels to play at. If you have any queries, comments or general feedback, please contact us on the email address below, or come and visit our Jet Set Willy & Manic Miner Community at jswmm.co.uk to join in with Willy-based discussion, game development and fun! Andy Ford, April 2019 projects@jswmm.co.uk