Hi, I'm new here. I'm Shino (actual name Ada), I'm a game designer and an artist.
I grew up playing JJ2, and recently as an adult I got into retro games, and decided to give JJ1 a whirl. It's definitely a lot of fun, but I have to admit, I'm bothered by how close the camera is, especially compared to how fast Jazz moves, and compared to how camera is so much better in 2.

So I've been thinking - I've had an itch to make a fast-paced Sonic-style platformer for a while, and also to make some kind of a retro remake. The primary goal of such a thing (I'd make it in Godot) would be to allow player to choose any resolution or aspect ratio they want, and other minor improvements, like ability to add multiple playable characters (with Spaz and Lori having new sprites redrawn for JJ1 artstyle), and an easy-to-use graphical level editor so people would make more JJ1 levels (well, JJ1 style - I doubt the new levels would be compatible with the vanilla game).

Obviously to avoid bootlegging, this would work on a 'source port' like basis in that player would need to provide their own JJ1 data they bought on GOG, the game would be bundled with just the shareware data.

Obviously it wouldn't be a real source port or a decompiled reverse-engineer, since I have no idea how to do that - just a Godot game that would try to capture the feel and controls of the original as closely as possible.

Is this something anyone here would be interested in? Especially help from people with some understanding of JJ1 internals and hacking it would be cool, but optional.

Welcome! I'm not familiar with Godot, but you seem like someone who'd be interested in contributing to OpenJazz. It implements basically all elements of JJ1 and allows any resolution/aspect ratio at all, but the exact player physics and object behaviors are still unfinished, because they're based on observation of the real game instead of any knowledge of the source code. It supports many different devices and even has online multiplayer.

You can also find a couple of existing graphical level editors for JJ1 here and here. This page lets you quickly try out the various custom levels people have made with them.

If you're more interested in going it alone, though, just for fun, your best source for JJ1 internals is going to be Shikadi's Modding Wiki.

If someone drew full JJ1-style sprite sheets for Spaz and Lori, it'd be pretty trivial to implement them into real JJ1 (and therefore also OpenJazz). The problem is someone drawing full sprite sheets...

Originally Posted by Violet CLM

Welcome! I'm not familiar with Godot, but you seem like someone who'd be interested in contributing to OpenJazz. It implements basically all elements of JJ1 and allows any resolution/aspect ratio at all, but the exact player physics and object behaviors are still unfinished, because they're based on observation of the real game instead of any knowledge of the source code. It supports many different devices and even has online multiplayer.

You can also find a couple of existing graphical level editors for JJ1 here and here. This page lets you quickly try out the various custom levels people have made with them.

If you're more interested in going it alone, though, just for fun, your best source for JJ1 internals is going to be Shikadi's Modding Wiki.

If someone drew full JJ1-style sprite sheets for Spaz and Lori, it'd be pretty trivial to implement them into real JJ1 (and therefore also OpenJazz). The problem is someone drawing full sprite sheets...

I'm a pixel artist, I can totally do the drawing part. Especially since JJ1 artstyle has way less frames than JJ2.

However, after giving it a quick play, I'm not sure what can I contribute to OpenJazz. I'm primarily a game designer, not a programmer. I could perhaps improve some of the controls with careful analysis, but the best way to do that would be a decompilation and I'm not much of a programmer.

Also is OpenJazz still in active development? Last forum post in the thread is from 2017, so is the latest build.

It's been a long time since Toxic Bunny himself did any work on OpenJazz, for sure. Some other person seems to have taken over. But, like, the "Open" in the name means it's open source, so anyone can contribute.