Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Note for those who, like me, don’t have a numpad: Do a find and replace in the script file and change “0×6” to “0×3”.

Administrative notes: I don’t know why this level is listed as TSF+; I played it in 1.23+ just fine. Also you need to include the tileset (Desolation7th.j2t) or a lot of people won’t be able to play it.

That aside, this is pretty cool. With all the power that JJ2+‘s angelscript implementation offers, Survival Mission 1 is a good reminder that you don’t need to use every single function and rewrite every last bit of JJ2 and pretend you’re writing an entirely new game just to make a playable level. SM1 uses angelscript to take certain actions just a little farther than they could be done in JCS alone—cutscene-like dialogues, flashing lights, announcements—without creating the impression it’s anything other than a JJ2 single player level. It’s very subtle, and we could definitely use more levels like it in that respect.

(Also there’s mouse aiming and several of the enemies have higher hit counts, but besides that it would be very easy not to realize the level is scripted at all, if you’re a casual player who isn’t incredibly familiar with every single thing JCS can or cannot accomplish.)

Of course, once scripting is involved at all it’s easy to think of places that could have been a bit more elaborate. At least one point in the level would feel more complete with an accompanying music change. And I found myself getting lost a whole lot while playing; text alerts would announce that some door had been opened but woudn’t tell me where that door was, and those would have been excellent use cases for moving the player’s camera to focus on the newly opened door for a few seconds. And some more lighting effects would have been nice.

Anyway, how’s the level? It’s all right. It’s a classic sort of level where there are various places with labels like “generator” or “engine room”, and you have to find various trigger crates/zones to progress. Some enemies are supposed to be guarding various rooms, as indicated by their sitting in giant chairs or stuff like that. You shut down a “core” and then find your way out again. We’ve seen this exact theme in Another Story, and maybe other levels even older than that, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I have to say, though, the layout was too cramped for my tastes. It definitely made the mouse aiming feel incredibly useful at times, particularly when I was climbing up a tower and shooting the enemies walking around on the ledges above me, but it also meant that the seekers and RFs didn’t have very much to do. (And there wasn’t a lot of ammo at all, especially in a level where half the enemies had higher-than-usual hit counts.) And the level was also quite compact, forcing a lot of paths to be right above or below one another even if they weren’t necessarily close to each other in terms of semi-linear layout. This made things more confusing than they needed to be, and also reduced the possibility of making different areas of the map visually distinct from one another.

So there are definitely various improvements that the author can make here, but it’s a pretty playable experience provided you don’t get too lost. I think the level of scripting is just fine, and the visuals are plain but serviceable, so I’d suggest concentrating primarily on design in the immediate future. Don’t be afraid to make things bigger. Work on getting the layout to match the theme. Find ways of indicating what path needs to be followed. Compare the ammo you offer to the places they can be used.

Download recommended? Sure. It’s not spectacular, but it’s a solid foundation. For players, there are some decently attractive areas and reasonable challenges—float suckers put in several appearances in their classic role as buttstomp targets—and you’ll get a chance to kill some enemies and stomp some crates, so long as you don’t get too confused about where to go next. For level makers, it’s a reminder that the barrier of entry to angelscript is only as high as you want it to be, and you can make a level that only needs it for one specific purpose instead of worrying about the whole level being a backseat to showing off your scripting skills. It’s a traditional JJ2 SP experience with some mouse aim thrown into the mix, so if you’re into that sort of thing—and, well, you are on J2O—have at it?

This is exactly what Overlord’s j2ff does, except j2ff can also recompile them for you. (Granted, the recompilation messes up on TSF-only levels, but otherwise it’s all good.)

Novel as the fact this is a .lev is, there is really no other reason to download this. The tileset uses about four distinct colors, and the level about six distinct tiles in a 20×15 space. The only challenge is jumping over a tuf turtle. Marinata_1997, please spend more time on your levels, and/or read www.jazz2online.com/tilesets

I think you want the Articles section?

Either I don’t understand why a jcs.ini is included in this upload, or you don’t. A jcs.ini file affects only JCS: which events you can place, what they’re called, what you think their parameters are. It has no effect on JJ2, and you do not need any specific jcs.ini — in fact, you do not need a jcs.ini at all — in order to be able to see blue ghost enemies in TSF.

Way too full of very simplistic errors. Animation speeds are wrong (esp. the boss), animations are wrong, blaster uses the RF sprite for no clear reason, and there’s really no level design to speak of. At the least, glance at the tiles and make sure they look like they tile right before uploading. The bonus level has boundary issues.

I see a lot of good design principles that are let down by poor execution. You definitely have a sense of what kind of challenges are germane to single player — respectable enemy placement, some precision platforming, triggers, collapse scenery, and other such things — but it’s all done way too quickly. The running section (you should know, btw, that fast feet events don’t actually do anything in JJ2) is ended by a wall which signals that it’s dangerous once again and there’s an enemy coming; that’s a great touch. I see tiles being used for specialized purposes, and definite hints of JJ1 design philosophy (e.g. the secret level hidden behind the end of level sign). As PJ said, you just need to spend a lot more time polishing your levels and making the good ideas that you have more appealing to look at and play. Choosing different tilesets will also benefit you tremendously. Inferno is difficult to use even for experienced level designers, and the other sets you used aren’t really very high quality. Find a nice good-looking, easy to use set and see if you can’t find some inventive graphical tricks to complement your level design intuitions. Keep it up.

Nice as it is to see a custom Battery Check level (this is possibly the first???), this really has no other redeeming qualities. It’s tiny, tiles don’t match up too well, and there’s little challenge and absolutely no use for the batteries. But please keep practicing: we need more Battery Check levels!

The atmosphere’s not bad, although you owe the tileset a large debt there. Eyecandy does get repetitive. Occasional tile bugs but fewer than usual for Carrotus. Not nearly enough ammo (pretty much just powerups), and too many walls, especially that carrot portion. No incentive to hang around the dangerous pit area. Good ideas, but too cramped.

A small level that takes no real risks and could use a bit more polish. The ammo placement is bizarre — somewhat sparse, but with lots of pepper spray and even some TNT — and the path to the blaster powerup is way too long and slow and unbranching. Not fond of the upper right. Eyecandy is serviceable, if unadventurous, and there are good areas.

The authorship looks a bit too much like a he-said-she-said situation for me to try to resolve, and there’s not much to say about the gameplay here, but I do like the eyecandy. :) You(?) make Top Secret look pretty.

The issue with alternate palettes is that the tileset is 100 rows and I already had to truncate its background somewhat to fit in that space. Creating a more straight up Carrotus expansion with regular palette and background but all the expanded walls/bridges/vines/thorns/etc. — CarrotusV, obviously — would definitely result in TSF-only territory. If there’s demand I guess I could do that, but it wasn’t my top priority.

Alien Temple ][? Hell yeah.

The tileset and the music? Really?

It’s an okay list for what it does, but the fact that a better list came out two days before it rather limits the incentive to use it. At the very least you should have combined it with Pyromanus’ long-existing list so that it would describe which sprites each sound activated. Finally, I’m not sure how much this really belongs in the downloads section as opposed to an article or ERE page.

EDIT: “Neobeo’s post doesn’t even list HALF of all the Ambient sounds, so I’m not sure why it was even mentioned in this discussion. His list serves a completely different purpose from mine.” <- This is totally false. I think you may be looking at blur’s list instead of Neobeo’s, which is later down the thread? Neobeo’s goes straight from 0 to 255 without gaps. Compare his 42-62 to yours, for instance.

Also, I didn’t say this should be an MCE list. However, as noted by Pyromanus, ambient sounds are linked to MCEs in that different ambient sounds will load sprites into memory. They don’t place events in the level; rather, they affect what will happen if one does place such an MCE somewhere. These sprites are directly tied to specific ambient sounds, and it doesn’t really make sense in 2011 to have an ambient sound list that only specifies one dimension of the ambient sound event.

Also, if this had been an ERE page, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because other people could simply make the requisite edits to bring yours up to date with Neobeo and Pyro’s findings.

And yet there have been nine downloads that were neither the uploader nor Grytolle, so there must be at least some demand. :-?

Compare n00b’s Colonial Building Remake.

And so the discussion comes to an end.

BollyWorld is a rare example of both the aerial boss battle and the level where choice of character truly matters. The basic premise is that you are fighting Bolly, but instead of a solid ground from which to attack him, you are given a series of sucker tubes that continually shoot you up into the (horizontal and vertical) center of the arena. To aid you in reaching him, two float lizards respawn from beneath the arena, and if you can successfully shoot them, you can potentially use their copters to take you up above Bolly where you may stomp him repeatedly until eventually he gets hidden inside a wall and you fall down to begin the whole process again. There are also a couple of carrots respawning at the top to make the fight more endurable.

To complicate all of this, the level is filled with belt events, alternating in direction by row, so Bolly’s missiles wobble a little and whenever he or the float lizards stop moving (to fire at you) they are carried inexorably off towards one or another of the walls. This makes stomping Bolly much harder, naturally, and even when you do succeed in shooting down a float lizard, their copters will suddenly go zooming off to the left or right where you will have to work hard to catch them. It’s a clever addition, one which you begin to come to terms with after the first few deaths.

You should definitely expect to see the Continue? screen a lot, because the carrots don’t respawn very quickly and it’s non-trivial to reach them anyway, and Bolly will only get in a good position for stomping every so often. Many of my deaths came about by running into shot-down lizards while zooming through the sucker tubes at the bottom — remember to stomp those as well, or shoot them from the corners in hopes of carrots. The bottom corners can be good ways of shooting down lizards, since you’re not in the air at the time, but they’re especially nasty places to be swarmed by Bolly and his long chain of spike balls, which is much harder to deal with when you can neither uppercut nor sidekick them all away in a heartbeat.

To add to all of this, there is a secondary, hidden strategy that you will probably have to use JCS to discover. There’s a lot of bouncer ammo at the top, and some trigger crates and a powerup are below the arena, as what appear to be random eyecandy to give the impression of lights or something. However, and the level gives no indication of this, the blocks underneath the bottom corners of the arena are secretly destruct scenery, which you can use the bouncer ammo to destroy after making a trip up to the top of the level to collect some. From there you have to destroy all the trigger crates, though the small height of the area means that this secondary strategy should be attempted only by Spaz. If successful, the area with the carrots post-crate-kicking also allows access to an airboard, which renders the rest of the boss fight if not trivial, at the very least much simplified. As a tradeoff for this reduced challenge at the end, it’s much harder to navigate the arena with a double jump than copter ears. The Jazz option of simply fighting the boss feels a lot better put together.

Graphically, the level is… well, functional. Again, there is no real way of knowing how to reach the trigger crates short of JCS, but moreover, there’s just not much in the way of eyecandy. The background is a series of starfields, invoking the “city of lights” aspect of the title, and the sky seems to have some sort of strange window effect going on that I don’t really understand. Either the tileset is holding the level back or the author is holding the tileset back. Perhaps both. I understand that too much eyecandy would serve to obscure gameplay, but something closer to a middle ground would definitely have been possible.

Bollyworld is a very clever idea, coming even with events specific to different difficulty modes (which I confess to not having dried), although the complexity of the arena makes it difficult to know when one is exploiting a bug vs. when one is playing the level as it is intended to be played. If I stomp Bolly while he is almost completely hidden behind a wall while waiting for him to finish firing, am I supposed to be able to do that? It’s hard to tell. With some better graphics, this level would serve as a great example of an Idea that was translated to level form with apparently minimal sacrifice.