EDIT: Never mind, then. If screenshots, a webpage, and an open request for assistance don't persuade people to download JJ1 levels, I guess I'll try again when it's all finished and not just a demo.

Okay, one more shot. SAGE (the Sonic Amateur Games Expo) is an annual online fangame convention, and this year I decided to submit the demo for the Jazz 1 episode I'm working on and you may have seen screenshots of. If you want to join in the fun and give some feedback, my "booth" is here (or linked to from the full list of booths). All editing work done in J1E and the Jazz Graphics Pack, plus a little bit of initial layout work in J1CS before switching over to the more powerful program. J1LES not employed because this stuff was finished some time ago and I'm working on later levels right now.

Awesome!

Where's this "appropriate Sonic Fan Games HQ forum topic"? I'm curious about how the Sonic community reacts to this. Nevermind.

That was pretty impressive. I liked all the custom enemies. Loved the part before the boss too!

Looks Great. Dling as we speak.

I had no idea you were entering it into that contest. That's a really cool idea, hopefully you'll win something. When I look at most of them they seem to be quite simple ROM edits. It seems like you put in a lot of work.

Oh yes, maybe this is really obvious but why aren't there any ring pickups in the game?

I doubt I'll win anything, since it's not really a contest, but rather an exposition... you may be thinking of the Hacking Contest? In any case, there are definitely a number of games, be they originally programmed or actual hacks, that have quite a lot of work put into them.

As for rings... I am forever on the fence about how much I want to edit the more constant graphics and how much I want to leave things as Jazz visiting planets that happen to resemble greatly zones from another game. I do worry about rings in particular, however, lest people assume that they would act as rings do in Sonic and then be disappointed when they were either items or health but not health that all went away at once when you got hurt.

ETA: I've been noticed! I have as yet no evidence that anyone from the Sonic side of things has actually played it, but I've certainly seen people mentioning that it looks interesting.

Sadly I can't think of any way to make rings do anything related to Jazz's health. But I personally don't think people would think it would be confusing if they were there as regular pickups. There still is the health bar on the bottom of the screen which clearly shows what is going on. Maybe you could somehow connect the rings to the item score that shows when you finish the level.

I'll probably at the very least change the red bonus gem sprite into a giant ring. And changing the items to rings is feeling more tempting because I can think of a way or two to expand that... hmm... what do other people think? Rings or standard items (floppies, stars, gamepads, etc.)?

If it were possible to make rings like a low-powered carrot, then maybe. Otherwise a pickup would be all right. I haven't had a look at what J1E can do yet, so I don't really know how much it's capable of changing.

Briefly, JJ1 events have a Modifier/Type setting which essentially determines what happens when they're destroyed or passed over. Item is one option (counted on the item tally at the end of the level), health is another. The closest you could come to having a single event do both would be to put two events on different tiles and shift one's sprite over into the next tile, but the animations wouldn't sync up perfectly. And there are no smaller health intervals than carrots.

This has very little to do with the mod itself, but do think you might, in the future, release that Hillgrius tileset for use in JJ2/other JJ1 levels? It looks great.

Thanks! For JJ1 levels, I view it as analogous to .j2t files: it's capable of being used, so people should be allowed to use it. I'd feel a little odd if someone else released something first, but I wouldn't say no, and I don't anticipate the tiles changing unless I hear some complaint. As a JJ2 set, I have no plans to convert it myself (it's too much just a skin for Diamondus in my eyes), but I'd be fine with someone else doing it so long as they added a background of some sort. It's all edits or copypasta of original JJ1 graphics, after all.

Question: finally someone from SAGE commented on the demo, and he felt that the difficulty level was too high. Did other people have troubles staying alive? Were there particular points that should be toned down?

There were one or two bits for me, but quite frankly it was only as hard as JJ1 itself. I think it's fine as it is, though I don't know about other people.

They are pretty hard. Most of the difficulty probably comes from some quite awkwardly placed spikes - I had trouble with most of the spikes in Act 1. The green newtrons are annoying too, sometimes they're hardly possible to evade (the one in Act 1 by the pendulums). The motobugs could be less numerous, or slower, because they're pretty difficult in packs (read: more than one at once).

I never really noticed this while playing, but the ammo is pretty scarce indeed. JJ1 stuffed +15 orbs at every occassion possible.

Also,

Originally Posted by BlazeHedgehog

made by somebody who clearly loves the source game so much and are so good at it that they make levels for their own skill level – while forgetting that the rest of the world hasn’t played Jazz Jackrabbit 1 in over ten years.

He makes a very good point there.

I'm probably going to rebalance my own level(s), in turn...

I looked at that review too and I would argue that most of the points he makes are also true for the Sonic games. He loses track of that, I find it a lot easier to die in any sonic game than in SWAG. It depends on what you're used too. I'm not saying his criticism isn't correct, I'm just saying it's a bit unfair.

Building Jazz1 levels is a lost skill. It's difficult to get right.

Originally Posted by cooba

Most of the difficulty probably comes from some quite awkwardly placed spikes - I had trouble with most of the spikes in Act 1.

All the spikes in rough chronological order. The first row shouldn't be a problem since the red spring takes you directly over them, and they're against a platform anyway. The third row is really hard to land on at all. The fourth row is only a tile wide. The fifth row, again, you are automatically taken over by a spring(flower). I will concede the last row, and do plan to fix up the ending to be less ridiculous... the ones I'm most concerned with are the second row, amidst the waterfalls, but I do feel that they're somewhat justified since the player, in jumping over them, is actively not choosing to take the downward route which doesn't necessitate that jump. Or is it not obvious enough? Please let me know where my assessments are off.

"The green newtrons are annoying too, sometimes they're hardly possible to evade (the one in Act 1 by the pendulums)."
If you mean the one you think I mean, I don't see that as a problem, since its firing interval is completely regular and it's totally possible to predict when it will fire, land on the platform, and kill it before it has a chance to act.

I'll consider ammo (although raising it to JJ1 levels is ridiculous -- you'd never run out of anything), and see if there are particularly inappropriate enemy clumps.

Well, I get hurt on rows 1 and 2 more often than not. I never played Sonic so I don't view the level as a series of "routes", so jumping over row 2 doesn't mean "you deserve to get hurt because this is an easy way out".

Originally Posted by Unknown Rabbit

If you mean the one you think I mean, I don't see that as a problem, since its firing interval is completely regular and it's totally possible to predict when it will fire, land on the platform, and kill it before it has a chance to act.

Not if you approach it from the right, where it will fire at you from offscreen.

Re: rings: I suppose you could make them One Hit Shields? The health bar remains an issue though.

Finally got some time to play this, and here are my thoughts:

- The level layouts are Sonic-like, the placement of obstacles is not. Much like in the rest of Jazz, just running through a level quickly is an absolutely terrible strategy, whereas in Sonic games it generally only kills you about half the time. I can only assume this was intentional.
- The whole thing feels heavily constrained by Jazz's small view, though this is more in the first level than the second.
- The difficulty level, to me, seems similar to the rest of Jazz.
- The modified Armor-Doofi look more like Lovecraftian eldritch abominations than Sonic enemies.
- The platforms in the boss have a tendency to fall down while you're standing underneath them, which is annoying.

As a whole, it's pretty enjoyable, but honestly, nothing exceptional; I was kind of expecting more. Oh, and I didn't have any problems with the spikes at all.

Add cheat codes.

Is there any chance you could/will edit the standard diamondus trees to look like palm trees from Sonic 1?

It seems like people are showing some interest. A whole bunch of replies to that youtube video, most of them enthousiastic.

He did better on Medium than I tend to do on Easy...

Good find, NS.

Last night I had a dream that Violet finished this. It was pretty good.

Well, y'know, still plugging away. Star Light takes less time to design than most because it's so fast and open, but I still need to do ~three level layouts, a full blockset and corresponding events, and three or four bosses, plus a whole lot of eyecandy upgrades and difficulty balancing edits to the stuff that's already done. But it will happen.

Oh, I certainly expect you will finish it. I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought otherwise. (But I really did have a dream about it!)

I did not see this thread when it was first posted.