Jason Jupiter (20th anniversary)
Jul. 11th, 2009 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnIt turned into something in the end after all.
As I explained none of it last time - this is a Java port of Jason Jupiter by Neil Drage, which was one of the first games that I can remember playing. I put it together as my first real test of Multimedia Fusion 2's applet export feature - it's looking good so far, but to achieve my original plan of grabbing levels from files as I upload them is going to take some work yet (Java applets have slightly strict rules about accessing external files - this applet just has a big list of levels stored as text).
The original eight levels are in the game, though, as faithfully as I could make them - the only major change being that after a large dilemma over the level called "Your Bound to Lose a Life" I decided to correct it in the interests of sanity. You notice all sorts of things when you have to examine a game more closely than you would - in this case I think I just found that the original author was getting a bit fed up near the end, because the colours stop changing after level five, and the later ones are a lot more simple in layout than the first few.
So I now have a level interpreter that I can just add on to - it's very nice to not have to worry about spreading events over an entire application for a change. A version with an editor and level set stitcher-together should be the final product from this.
As I explained none of it last time - this is a Java port of Jason Jupiter by Neil Drage, which was one of the first games that I can remember playing. I put it together as my first real test of Multimedia Fusion 2's applet export feature - it's looking good so far, but to achieve my original plan of grabbing levels from files as I upload them is going to take some work yet (Java applets have slightly strict rules about accessing external files - this applet just has a big list of levels stored as text).
The original eight levels are in the game, though, as faithfully as I could make them - the only major change being that after a large dilemma over the level called "Your Bound to Lose a Life" I decided to correct it in the interests of sanity. You notice all sorts of things when you have to examine a game more closely than you would - in this case I think I just found that the original author was getting a bit fed up near the end, because the colours stop changing after level five, and the later ones are a lot more simple in layout than the first few.
So I now have a level interpreter that I can just add on to - it's very nice to not have to worry about spreading events over an entire application for a change. A version with an editor and level set stitcher-together should be the final product from this.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 07:56 pm (UTC)D.F.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:20 pm (UTC)Certainly I know that I couldn't get anywhere with it at first when I was five - but I do vividly remember when my dad triumphantly called "I'm on the next screen!" from the study, and we saw the second level for the first time.
jj
Date: 2009-08-09 02:15 pm (UTC)Re: jj
Date: 2009-08-09 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 10:31 pm (UTC)andy
tomfo2003@yahoo.co.uk
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 10:52 pm (UTC)Jason Jupiter 2 next?
Date: 2009-12-02 04:21 pm (UTC)I'm the Neil Drage that wrote the original back in 1988/89. I can't believe you've ported it to Java! It really does look and feel the same. Does it have the original infinite lives password?
I'm amazed people remember this game. I just threw it together during the first year of my degree - it gave me much needed extra cash to live on :-)
Neil
Re: Jason Jupiter 2 next?
Date: 2009-12-02 04:38 pm (UTC)I've been happy to see the number of people that remember it as well - it seems like a lot of people my age grew up with games taken from their (or their dad's) IT magazines as well, and there was something really memorable about Jason, perhaps because it was one of the first games that I can remember seeing. To make the Java version it took a lot of recording the game at very slow speeds to work out the pattern that you'd made for the jumps - even after that I think there are still slight differences because the behaviour's different when you're jumping into the breakable tiles, if you jump starting with a ceiling over your head and so on - you wrote something surprisingly complex there for something that looked so simple.
I only regretted I didn't include the jump and falling tones, that changed depending on how high up the screen you were - working with the PC speaker rather than wave sound makes some things oddly easier :) And speaking of sound, I just want to mention that the "YES!" sliding sound effect used to terrify me when I was five - I made sure to include an impression of that played as loud as comfortable as a revenge of sorts.
The infinite lives password is also missing, but as part of my looking at the game again to make the port, I finally resolved to find out what it was after twenty years :) It took opening the EXE in a text editor to eventually get it, and I couldn't believe my eyes when it worked - hiding it in the form of an innocent-looking phrase was very clever, with the only clue being that it was the only complete-looking string in the file. With the password even out of the reach of Google (no results come up for it when I search along with the game title), you've probably still got one of the best kept secrets in any game there.
I'm glad you like the port - and to have provided a memory for you :) I don't have Jason 2 here (have you kept copies of your old games?) but I know it must be somewhere on the Amstrad still under my desk at my parents' house...
Re: Jason Jupiter 2 next?
Date: 2009-12-03 02:09 pm (UTC)I can send you Jason 2 if you want. For that one I wanted to do something using graphics rather than text, but I didn't want the hassle of doing collision detection and masks so I did a Boulderdash type game which had the graphics in squares like a chess board. It appeared in a later issue of PC Plus, but I don't think it was as popular as the first version...
Neil
Re: Jason Jupiter 2 next?
Date: 2009-12-03 02:13 pm (UTC)My email address is davidknewton on gmail.com.
Re: Jason Jupiter 2 next?
Date: 2011-01-12 04:53 pm (UTC)Re: Jason Jupiter 2 next?
Date: 2011-01-12 04:55 pm (UTC)