Jungle Journey

[Dave_E]

In short...

...I LOVE IT!

In long...

http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/eug/revs ... -jung.html

[PitfallJones]

Hi Dave,

I notice that review is for EUG #74.

Are you releasing a EUG issue this year?

There's been one every year you know (apart from 2005)

You've still got a couple of days left

- PJ

[Dave_E]

Each EUG gets bigger and better than the last. Gotta keep it up. Hence will it get finished in time? That's the question.

[davidb]

Thanks for your kind words. I can assure you that the game wasn't inspired by a John Saul novel. Although I read some of James Herbert's offerings in the distant past, the "story" was a conscious imitation of those from the Ultimate games.

After some fiddling with uef2wave and some old cassette recorders, I managed to load the game on my old Electron yesterday and try it out on some unsuspecting relatives, with positive results; though one of my nephews spotted a bug with the high score table, so I'll have something to fix early on in the new year.

With all the encouragement I've received recently, I'm now even more inclined to do something with the sideways scrolling platformer I mentioned in the Retro Software forums. I'm pretty certain that it won't be a Super Mario Bros style game - recent experience has made that pretty clear. Ideas for this are welcome in the forum thread over at Retro Software.

[PitfallJones]

Is Jungle Journey going to get a 'real' release like the other retro software games?

[Dave_E]

I have reviewed JUNGLE JOURNEY as part of FIVE GAMES FIVE MINUTES #58:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmSSC7Wb_0M

It's the first one that comes on, in case you don't want to plough through the remainder of the vid. ;-p

[davidb]

Thanks again for a nice review.

The character movement really is a bit too responsive on the high score screen, isn't it? It's something I can fix in the repository and leave for a speculative later version. In the meantime, watch out for those letters!

I always thought that Gauntlet was a pretty good game. I think the Electron was spoiled with at least three decent versions of Defender.

[The Kraken]

Fifty-eight? Damn, the last one I watched was #50. I have some catching up to do

As for Jungle Journey, I'll edit this post to leave my impressions after I've watched the eight videos.

[GroovyBee]

As a big fan of the Ultimate games I'd love to do a port of this to the Atari 7800 when I get a chance (thanks for GPLing the source code ). In Mode 5 the Electron has the same horizontal resolution as the 7800 (at 160 pixels) but the vertical resolutions are very different (256 vs 192) so the graphics would need a bit of a rework to scale them down a bit.

[davidb]

As a big fan of the Ultimate games I'd love to do a port of this to the Atari 7800 when I get a chance (thanks for GPLing the source code ).

You're welcome! I'd love to see ports of it to other systems and would be happy to help.

In Mode 5 the Electron has the same horizontal resolution as the 7800 (at 160 pixels) but the vertical resolutions are very different (256 vs 192) so the graphics would need a bit of a rework to scale them down a bit.

Yes, I can't think of an easy way to keep the original graphics. You could remove the top two lines with the score and strength (16 lines) and as much of the top and bottom rows of tiles as possible (up to 48 lines). So, you can get close to 192 lines, but not quite.

Feel free to link from the main Wiki page to your own development diary when you get started.

[GroovyBee]

Due to the fact that most 7800 players are in the USA I tend to limit the display to 192 video scan lines so that games are centred on an NTSC TV. The 7800 is quite flexible when it comes to generating its display because it doesn't have a video frame buffer. Having said that, it can be made to have one.

Initially I'd propose to get it going on the 7800 at the 256 pixel height (as a PAL version with a frame buffer) and then replace the sprite tiles with 16 pixel high versions so that everything can fit onto a 192 pixel high screen.

It makes more sense to redo the graphics for the 7800 version because it can display up to 25 colours per video scan line. Do you have a *.bmp or *.png with all the graphics in the game in a single place? Maybe I should move this discussion over to Retro Software?

[davidb]

You could probably do some kind of anti-aliasing with those extra colours to retain some of the detail of the larger tiles if you decide to shrink them. Otherwise, redoing them to give them a new style might also be an option. The images are all in the repository, but they're all in XPM format because it seemed to be easier to manipulate a textual format. I can convert them all to another format if that would help.

We can continue with the discussion in the Jungle Journey forum if you want.

[davidb]

A nice side effect of the recent Flash ROM cartridge testing was that it gave me the opportunity to record a playthrough of this game. The first part can be found here. I'll compile a playlist when I've uploaded the rest of it.

The quality of the recording isn't great. I encourage others to record their own playthroughs with superior recording equipment.

Edit: All four parts have been uploaded and put in a playlist for your viewing pleasure.

[davidb]

I've made a "permanent" version of the Jungle Journey site. It's pretty much the same as on the Retro Software Wiki but there may be a few broken links at the moment.

Enjoy!