Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

I was excited to see the author trying a battle level instead of a CTF one this time, because battle levels are theoretically more forgiving in their layout demands. There’s no symmetry requirement, and it’s also more acceptable for there to be areas that it’s hard to hit players in, because unlike in CTF there’s no flagholder for you to hunt down. If a player wants to hide away in a weird corner, they’re only hurting their own score, not yours. (Except in LRS.) And yet the design here seems less purposeful than in the author’s CTF maps. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of not having to worry about finding ways to connect one base to the other, but somehow this level ended up with a lot of awkward spots.

The most obvious are the dead ends. There are at least six spots at the end of the level where you end up in a dead end for no more reason than maybe an ammo pickup or two. These are the opposite of what I described above… the player who ends up in a dead end is supremely vulnerable to people chasing after them firing high-speed bullets, and has no way to get out or fight back. Dead ends can sometimes be good layout decisions if accompanied by some reward other than movement, such as a powerup, but the dead ends here are mostly just holes in the layout with no clear purpose.

The author’s good quality that does continue to manifest here is that there are a lot of details. The tileset is given a good workout, with lots of different kinds of walls interacting with each other to provide landmarks and generally make the level interesting to look at as you move around. The main issue with the tileset use, however, is that there are very few slopes, so once again it can be a bit hard to move around, though not to the same extent as in Greenflower Jungle. You can frequently be running along a platform and then crash into a wall that looked like it should have been a slope, all momentum lost. If the author was unwilling to compromise on graphical variety by using the tileset’s main slope option, the diagonal dark brown branch things, they should have either hidden slope-masked tiles behind layer 3 or else used MLLE to edit the masks of some regular tiles to make them slopes.

I think the closest comparison that comes to mind for this level’s layout is Blade’s Battle Pack, with its complicated layouts and sort of random ammo placement, though Blade always made sure to put lots of ammo in and this is still a little too focused on ice for some reason. (This time there’s an ice powerup inside a secret warp.) I’ll always have a big sweet spot for battle levels that have interesting features and are more than a series of wide passages connecting at various strategic points, and this does push some of my buttons in this regard, but inventive design isn’t itself an excuse to neglect flow. The author’s immediate challenge for future level design is to make it easier for the player to get around, so they can easily experience all the fun little details without getting stuck running into walls or not being able to jump high enough to make it onto platforms. The next step after that is figuring out how the level should flow as a whole, with all the individual areas working together in service to that larger flow, but the ability to move is a more pressing matter than the reason to move.

(This review is based only on the Day version, under the assumption the Night version is identical but with a different palette. If this is wrong, I apologize.)

The impression I got here is of the author trying to lay out a coherent and logical jungle world, populating it with several distinct areas—a cave, a treehouse village…—that each have a layout appropriate to that kind of geographical feature. This is an admirable idea, and the complete opposite of the creating a layout first and then applying a theme to it afterwards… it is, unfortunately, much harder to get right than that other option, especially in a heavily layout-focused gamemode like CTF.

The consequence of the way the level is designed is that it’s surprisingly hard to get around. Over and over, I’d expect to be able to go somewhere, only to discover the mask didn’t actually let me. Either I’d guess wrong what was masked and what wasn’t, or I’d be unable to jump up through a platform, or the jump would be just a little too high to pull off. I’m accustomed to multiplayer levels being more or less on my side: if I see what appears to be a path nearby, and it’s in the direction I want to go for some larger purpose (e.g. getting to a base or powerup), I expect to be able to take that path without much thought. Here navigating the level is actively difficult. This is especially dangerous if you’re being pursued by another player and you don’t have the time to stop and figure out how to move around because that will lead to your death.

One such area is the bottom right corner. Its proximity to the red base suggests it’s a either a way of getting to the red base or a way to escape from the red base when you’re being pursued. It’s not. Rather, it’s the only(?) source of electroblaster ammo, which is needed to get the powerups scattered around the level. All well and good, but the actual electroblaster pickups are hidden behind a wall of leaves, so the player doesn’t even know they’re there, and also it’s almost impossible to get out of the bottom right corner in anything approaching a timely manner unless you’re Spaz. Though at least it is possible.. by comparison, in the area surrounding the ice powerup, you can only move from the right side of the level to the left side if you’re Spaz. Likewise, the blue base is flanked by two cliffs which only Spaz can jump to the tops of. Any other player needs to climb a series of nearby platforms and hover over, which takes more work and only affords access to the base from the right, while Spaz can access it from either the right or the left.

There’s not a lot to say about this point, but there’s not a lot of ammo. Probably the most plentiful kind of ammo is ice, which is also the least useful. Arguably the most useful powerup, the seeker powerup, is hidden inside a secret warp, which gives a significant advantage to people already familiar with the map.

I can see what the author was trying to do here, and again there’s clearly a lot of work put into it, especially the luxuriously detailed graphics. It’s just unfortunate that it’s so hard to move around the level, which, again, is fatal when you’re being pursued by a rabbit from the other team.

There’s a lot of interesting experimental design work in this level, but I don’t think CTF is the best gamemode for it. The fundamental rule of any team-based gamemode is that neither team should be given an advantage by the level design, because it’s random who will be on which team. There are occasional exceptions to this rule, like in Assault levels, where one team attacks and the other team defends, but the expectation there is that at some point every player will swap sides. There’s no such expectation in CTF, so you want a very balanced layout. Most levels achieve this by being fully symmetrical across the vertical axis, so the left side of the map is the same as the right side but mirrored, maybe with some slightly different ammo placement but no other significant changes. Levels like this, where one base is on top and the other is on the bottom, are very rare because it’s very hard to do properly. The existence of gravity means that up vs. down is a fundamentally different question than left vs. right.

In this level in particular, the layout is extra unbalanced. The top area has not only the blue base but almost every useful thing in the level: carrots, powerups, even a shield. The bottom area has the red base, spikes, and a (broken) bottomless death pit. Worse, while the blue base area gives you a lot of freedom for where to move around, there is only a single path to the red base, and it’s very long in addition to being very linear. This means it’s much, much easier to hang around the area of the blue base, waiting for your chance to capture the blue flag or deliver the red flag, than it is to hang around the red base. That’s the kind of gameplay CTF levels should try not to deliver without a very good reason.

Anyway. Just moving around in the level is actually pretty cool, even if I don’t think it coalesces into a balanced whole. In other words, I enjoy exploring this map more than I would probably enjoy playing it, and I’d suggest trying to find a more appropriate way to express this same style. The level has a lot of things to do in it, and I’m always a fan of that, provided they’re there in service to a broader gameplay. Secret areas aren’t really in vogue for multiplayer levels anymore, because they they give too much of an advantage to people who’ve played the level before, so I’d suggest dropping the RF powerup/lightning shield area, but in general I do like the willingness to experiment. As for graphics, while this isn’t my favorite Tubelectric palette, everything comes together pretty well and looks good and intricate. Different areas look somewhat different from each other, which is another important thing to be able to do in multiplayer levels, to help players keep track at a glance of where they are in the map.

Basically, on a micro level, this is really good and I’m happy I downloaded it. There are lots of fine details, both visually and technically. What you need to work on is the macro level: how the different areas in the map relate to each other, how players move from one area to another, and why.

When you’re new to the multiplayer level-making scene, figuring out what to design can be a challenge. I feel like this is their best level out of the three (as of this review). So, without ado let’s go;

Minimum standards it does reach;

• Has an understanding of how layers work
• The CTF bases work
• It has ammo, some powerups and carrots
• Most of it looks functional
• A little sense of risk/reward and control (for example, the gun9 placement)

And what could be improved is..a lot.

The first impression I got was..very confusing eyecandy. It uses a lot of layer 3 and traditionally layer 4 tiles as visuals. I think it’s trying to look pretty, though it either comes off as intrusive or misleading. It also covers one of the important pieces of key ammo, gun 9. Covering key areas with layer 3 is something to be very careful with, generally left only to secrets or adding a small touch of atmosphere. Some levelmakers will tint the colour of non-functioning sprite layer scenery to show it’s not interact-able (with either scripting, or the classic translucent tile trick), or other, intended tiles filling the space. Or they at least add parallax to those kind of tiles, which gives a sense of depth (can still be kind of confusing, but much-less so).

The second impression I got is the levelmaker struggles to find where the one-way event is, which explains how they are often lacking where they should be – for example the branch above the left of the red base, or the edges of the hut platforms. You can copy and paste events, and adding one ways is more appreciated than not having them at all.

My third impression is that it’s practically unplayable without Spaz. Yes I get it, most players use him, though a lot of it can be so easily fixed in a way that would improve flow for everyone. For example, the branches area near red base can be climbed to the top with him, without having to go all the way around, you can doublejump to the blue-base from below with the green spring and jump to there from the right conveniently. It’s considered good courtesy to keep levels functional for all characters.

And then…the base balance. From what I’ve checked the creator has also made, they seem to really dislike red team. Blue base is given a lot more defense and a strong powerup nearby. Even if they are less close to the full carrot, they could way more easily fend it off. Red also more closely gets the ice powerup – one of the weakest, if not the weakest powerup in the entire game. Remember that by default, players do not get hurt, can break out manually and the powerup does no extra damage.

There’s more flaws I could point out, though I believe I’ve written enough for a beginner.

If I have to be super honest though, I actually don’t recommend newbies make multiplayer levels until they have played online for a reasonable amount of time. This gives a baseline understanding of what makes a multiplayer level fun, and is extremely hard to understand by explanation alone. I see a world of difference in improvement when levelmakers make multiplayer levels where they haven’t played online at all, vs when they have – especially for several months.

Don’t let this review put you off from levelmaking though, new blood is always welcome when you’re willing to learn and put in some effort! With some more experience, I think you have potential.

I’d recommend using Multi layer level editor, which allows you to find events easily now by sticking in key letters/words – very handy for JCS newbies and saving time on placing new events. You can also set smart tiling with it, saving much long-term time constructing base layouts.

You can add a bottomless pit by placing a MCE event in the complete bottom right corner of any level.