2.GOODNITE LUDDITE (C) 2002 BROADSOFT ================== For the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Written by Andrew Broad http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/ The Plot (in a nutshell) -------- Just when you thought it was safe, Kari Krisníková comes back up the S-bend for a sequel to We Pretty! Goodnite Luddite is set in the distant future, when Selesianity (the worship of Monica Seles) is an established religion. It is set in the Holy Land Monastery of Selesia. The spirit of Kari Krisníková has been summoned up and has entered the monastery, so she has the power to haunt the brethren in their dreams. Whatever she does to them in their dreams KARIes 'OVÁ to reality! To exorcise the spirit of Kari Krisníková, you must collect all 256 of the colour-cycling items from around the monastery before the end of the world - at midnight. Then, only then, will you be able to sleep safely - or else meet your date with the garderobe! ;-) Background Information ---------------------- See the file DIARY.TXT if you're interested in the storyline that underlies this game. It's not really essential that you understand it completely, as you can always play the rooms autonomously, just as Jet Set Willy rooms! My inspiration for Goodnite Luddite comes from many diverse sources, ranging from personal experiences, dreams, television, computers, tennis (particularly that of Monica Seles), religion (Selesianity is strongly influenced by Christianity, and also by the Jedi religion from Star Wars), and music - particularly the works of David Bowie. It was his album 1.OUTSIDE that gave me the idea of writing Goodnite Luddite as a concept game, based on an underlying plot (documented in a diary) and characters. The plot was partly influenced by the movie A Nightmare On Elm Street. The prequel, We Pretty, provides a foundation on which to build Goodnite Luddite, which has a more coherent plot on top of the We Pretty concepts. I have taken my life's experiences and refracted them into surreality! ;-) The Game -------- Goodnite Luddite is basically a redefinition of the rooms, items, guardians and graphics in Matthew Smith's classic Jet Set Willy, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Software Projects (1984) - owned by Jester Interactive since 2001. Unlike most previous games based on the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game-engines, however, Goodnite Luddite is not based on the world of Willy, but has its own plot and characters (it extends the concepts of We Pretty). I developed the game on a Spectrum +2, using my own Jet Set Willy Construction Kit (at the time of writing, JSW CK 1.0 has yet to be released). Goodnite Luddite has been in the pipeline since 1998, but the bulk of the work was KARIed out in 2002. Goodnite Luddite is written for advanced JSW players, and the rooms are intended to be outstandingly difficult, as a challenge to the experts. It presupposes that you can play Jet Set Willy - the controls are exactly the same, but the gameplay is much tougher, requiring both manual dexterity (a need for pixel- perfect and time-frame-perfect accuracy of movement) and lateral thinking. Goodnite Luddite liberally exploits all the quirky features in the game-engine - you need to know all the tricks if you want to get at all far! I have tried to be fair, though, by keeping multiple-death scenarios to a minimum. You shouldn't encounter infinite death unless you do something really stupid, such as jumping into an unfamiliar room when you should be walking into it. Whereas many players couldn't get past the first room in We Pretty, I have tried to make Goodnite Luddite relatively easy to explore, but very difficult to collect the items! I have thoroughly play-tested the final version, and I certify that it /is/ possible to complete (i.e. to run into the toilet "REREDORTER (WITH GARDEROBE)"). However, you do have to sacrifice a life to collect one of the items in "SELEBBATH WORSHIP", as I didn't want to spoil the aesthetics of the screen by providing an escape-route. Several other items throughout the game are amenable to a kamikaze approach, but they are all possible to collect without losing a life. You can consider yourself to have passed Goodnite Luddite if you finish the game using infinite lives (POKE 35899,0) on a real Spectrum, or saving and loading snapshots on an emulator. If you cheat by using any other POKEs, or by using WRITETYPER, you should consider yourself disqualified. ;-) A blow-by-blow description of each room is not included here - some of the meanings can be inferred from the diary, the rest of it is open to personal interpretation! Members of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/] can view exclusive screenshots and playing-tips in the Photos section. Acknowledgements ---------------- * Matthew Smith, for writing the original Jet Set Willy, and in particular for deciding on an unencrypted, perspicuous room-format! ;-) Goodnite Luddite reuses some 8x8 graphics and room-fragments from the original Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, most notably in "MUTANT ECLECTICISM". * Monica Seles and David Bowie, for being the single biggest sources of inspiration for We Pretty and Goodnite Luddite. There are many others, but they are too many to enumerate here, and I also feel that to do so would detract from the audience's personal interpretations. * My fellow MM/JSW authors, for general inspiration, and some specific tricks (sometimes unintended on their part, but deliberately exploited by me! ;-) ). * Philip Bee, for sharing his experiences of monastic life (albeit not Selesian ;-) ), for the intriguing discussions about Selesianity and Goodnite Luddite, and for introducing me to The Rainbow Children (a spiritual concept-album by Prince Rogers Nelson, which has had its influence on the Goodnite Luddite diary). * John Elliott, for his disassembly of JSW [http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Jsw/jsw.mac], which was an invaluable aid to me in hacking the game-engine (see TECHNICA.TXT). * Richard Hallas's document "A Miner Triad" was an invaluable aid to redefining the music. However, I deviate from his advice by /not/ having 255 as the last note in the in-game tune (in order to terminate the super-long combined melody), because (a) bottom C is the wrong note to have at that point in the in-game tune, and (b) I actually like the way it plays the data following the tune until it hits a 255, because of my interest in random sound. ;-) * The in-game tune comes from Doctor Spin's "Tetris", a single from 1993. It was composed by Steve McCutcheon, Robin Sellars and Nigel Wright, based on a Russian piece called Korobushka. * The title-screen tune is a super-long combined melody of "Frosti" by Björk Guđmundsdóttir (from her 2001 album Vespertine) and "Tetris". * The font is from Part 1 of the Spectrum game Journey's End (Mastertronic, 1985) - which I recommend as it is atmospheric, fun to play, and has good sound- effects. :-) * The sprite for the horizontal guardians in "THE LAND OF SWEET DEMISE" that look like fire-breathing trolls was `discovered' in John Elliott's JSW128: "ROOMS.JS2": Sprite-Page 196: Sprite 5. It's amazing what you can find by looking at non-graphics data in a graphics editor (namely the one in my Jet Set Willy Construction Kit), and I expect I shall use much more of this technique in the future! :-) * I used Leonardo (Thorn EMI Computer Software, 1984), a Spectrum program written by Mark Stoll, Clive Thomas and Peter Chandler, to draw the loading- screen. Loading Instructions -------------------- To play Goodnite Luddite, you need a Spectrum emulator that is capable of loading TAP files (I hope I'm right in thinking that the emulators you all use are capable of loading TAP files, as I don't want to complicate matters by also releasing snapshot files). To find an emulator for your particular computer, see the Emulators section of the comp.sys.sinclair FAQ [http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~pak21/cssfaq/emulator.html]. A TAP file is an encoding of the files on a Spectrum tape (as opposed to a snapshot file, which is an encoding of the complete state of a Spectrum at the moment it was created). To load from a TAP file, you have to issue a load- command to the emulated Spectrum (i.e. select Tape Loader or type LOAD "" (in 48K mode, press J for LOAD and SYMBOL-SHIFT+P for ")). You also have to open the TAP file in the emulator (either before or after issuing the loading instruction). I speak only from experience with MacSpectacle, but I expect the procedure is similar for other emulators. New Quirky Features! -------------------- The game has a few quirky features which have not, to my knowledge, been seen in any previous Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy game before: * Items which appear only when you enter a room from /some/ directions. For example, the items in Room 5 ("CYGNET COMMITTEE") only appear when you enter the room from the right, because the down-exit of Room 4 is 133 (5+128). I discovered this feature when playing some JSW128 rooms using the 48K JSW engine. * Some but not all of the wall-blocks in Room 40 ("OBLATE OBLUTION OBLIGATION") behave as conveyors because of the rope - an unintended but interesting effect! ;-) * The guardians in Room 63 ("PICTURE PRODUCERS") take their sprites from video RAM (16384-23295), so that they change their appearance as other things move around the screen! * Goodnite Luddite is the first game to deliberately exploit /distributed/ ILBs (innocent-looking blocks). These are like the regular ILBs that dump you under the platform when you jump through them, but when you jump through them precisely on a left/right screen-boundary, they work even if they are `blocked'. I stumbled across this feature when playing Nick Aldridge's JSW Stupid. * There's a new type of ILB in Rooms 16 ("THE UPSTACK POINTER") and 44 ("THE CELLS (AKA BEDROOMS!)") which allows access to the bottom-left of those screens. The game also features a wide range of quirky features originating from We Pretty, and from sendy's game strangel (Goodnite Luddite is the first Broadsoft game to feature an invalid ramp, and more intelligent use of invalid arrows). Internet -------- I currently have a website at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/ (though it will disappear in the future when I leave university). Some relevant pages within this website are: * http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/ Top-level index of my Spectrum pages. * http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/ My Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy pages, including a list of Spectrum MM/JSW games (which I try to maintain as complete and up-to-date as possible - please inform me of any I have missed), various other MM/JSW documents, and links to other MM/JSW websites. * http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/download/ My download page. Currently contains my other games, my Manic Miner Screen Editor, and my Java toolkit SPECSAISIE. Also has previews of forthcoming software (mostly MM/JSW games). * http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/tennis/seles/ My Monica Seles pages, including information about Selesianity. * http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/download/goodnite_luddite.zip The original source of Goodnite Luddite! I founded a Yahoo! Group for Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. Its URL is:- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manicminerandjetsetwilly/ It includes a message-board for discussing MM/JSW, picture galleries which members can upload to, a bookmarks page and a calendar. Anyone can visit the Group and look around its public areas, but for full privileges you have to join the Group as a member. This prerequires signing up for a Yahoo! account, which you can do, free of charge, over the Web. I encourage all members of the MM/JSW community to join the Group. I recommend the comp.sys.sinclair USENET newsgroup as a place for discussing MM/JSW and other Spectrum-related topics. It's worth at least browsing through the headers each day (says he who has long since lost touch with USENET :-o ). The newsgroup is archived at http://groups.google.com/ for those who don't have access to a news-server - in fact, it's worth surfing there even if you do, as not all news-servers receive all newsgroup postings! http://www.mailandnews.com/ (a free Web-based email service) also provides access to newsgroups over the Web. Disclaimer ---------- I cannot accept responsibility for any mental damage caused either by playing the game or by reading the diary. I cannot accept responsibility for any real- world murders KARIed out by other people inspired by the fictitious murders described in the diary. I cannot accept responsibility for the actions of any religious cults inspired by Goodnite Luddite. ;-) This game was not written under the influence of drugs, nor was its prequel We Pretty (as some people accused). It is merely the product of my bizarre imagination! :-) The views expressed in this work are my own, and should not be construed as representing the views of, or being endorsed by, my Internet service-providers at the University of Manchester. Copyright Notice ---------------- Goodnite Luddite is, of course, my copyright, but I don't mind you putting it on your own website or redistributing it otherwise, provided that no money is charged, and that you acknowledge that it is the copyright of Broadsoft (2002). This document must be included with all copies of the game. Modifications are discouraged but not forbidden, and you should state specifically what you have modified. I don't mind you reusing some of the rooms, graphics, &c. in your own games, or converting the game to another computer (e.g. for JSW-PC). However, the accompanying documentation must state that the reused material is the copyright of Broadsoft - failure to do so may be construed as plagiarism. I would like the documentation to be quite specific about this, e.g. "Graphic X in Room Y was taken from Goodnite Luddite", or whatever. Please let me know if you do rerelease Goodnite Luddite or reuse bits of it - it's not that I'd be likely to object, I'd just be very interested to know what follows from my releasing it! If by any chance you're thinking of writing a book, movie (David Lynch, perhaps?), TV series, music album or other adaptation of Goodnite Luddite, please email me to discuss it, as I am the only one to judge whether your ideas are faithful to the plot! Version History --------------- 2nd December 2002: Initial release of Goodnite Luddite on the Internet, to celebrate Selesmas Day (Monica Seles's birthday).