Willy the Hacker ================ At last, here is the much-longed-for documentation for Willy the Hacker. The reason I didn't provide it in the first place was simply that I wanted to retain an air of mystery about the game, but evidently this resulted in *too much* mystery for some people! So, in response to requests, here are the secrets of the game laid bare. (Well, most of them; I may have left a few out by mistake...) Why "Willy the Hacker"? ----------------------- Why not? ;-) The game was originally conceived as a sort of "Willy does cyberspace", but the concept was lost over time; some remnants remain, though. Another design concept was to use at most three or four colours (not counting black) for many rooms, although this has little if anything to do with hacking. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Room explanations ================= Some of these may be less than exciting, since most of the titles are self-explanatory. The start of Willy's travels ---------------------------- The starting room, boringly enough! Up in the Sky ------------- Nothing to do with Oasis, just the uppermost room in the game. It's the Room with No Name! --------------------------- There has to be a room with no name somewhere... Willy plays Tarzan ------------------ It is possible to get all the objects without losing a life; I've done it myself, honest! The Yellow Room --------------- I wanted a room for each of the Speccy's 8 colours. Here's the first of them, and no, there isn't a yellow sprite. The Yellow Room's partner ------------------------- This room is to the preceding as "West of Kitchen" is to "The Kitchen" in the original JSW. Willy goes colour-coordinated ----------------------------- Should be obvious, don't you think? How long does it take before your eyes start to hurt?! I've just had a <> --------------------------- Inspired by the "It's The Mind" sketch from "Monty Python's Flying Circus". Better than having two rooms the same, at least. The Strange Plant of Mystery ---------------------------- OK, so I designed this nice sprite, and just had to use it somewhere! You Can't Get There From Here! ------------------------------ What Michael Stipe says when you ask him for directions, apparently. Not much seems to happen here ----------------------------- Indeed not. The Cyan Room ------------- No comment. The Mad Pig and the Worms ------------------------- Named after its sprites, of course. The Greek Room -------------- This actually originated as a typo for "Green". The Green Room -------------- Can't think what to say here! Not one of my best. Willy's inspiration sags a bit ------------------------------ A pretty room despite the title, which is probably more appropriate to the preceding room. Horticultural musings --------------------- The plant puts in another appearance here, along with a sprite for which there is no name. Despite the simplicity of the block designs, the room looks very like a greenhouse. Some differently-coloured bricks -------------------------------- Another descriptive title. It's The Pit ------------ My first "pit" room, named in the tradition of some certain Monty Python sketches ("It's the Mind", "It's the Arts", etc.). The Mating of the Wersh ----------------------- Another Python reference, this time to a bookshop sketch in which the customer asks for books with titles which are similar to but not the same as classics. Another example is "Knickerless Nickelby". Bubbles from the deep --------------------- Subconsciously derived from "Underwurlde", of course. The Triangular Thingees ----------------------- The sprites were originally all triangles, but that was felt to be making it a bit obvious. The Marching Globules --------------------- This shows what you can do with wraparound sprites (cf also "Terminus" from J4). The Waxdripper -------------- Inspired by a work of art called "The Honeydripper", via candles. Willy's latticework ------------------- A sort of block-design-in-search-of-a-room sort of room, this one. Willy's Bright Idea ------------------- Well, what else could you call a room with lightbulbs in it! A case of Geoff's inspiration starting to sag a bit. The Right-hand Edge of the Map ------------------------------ Geographically accurate, and a bit of a difficult room to do. Willy or won't he? ------------------ Another room in search of a decent title. Purple ------------ "If a buttercup is yellow, what colour is a hiccup?" So goes a very bad joke from my youth. The Passageway -------------- Err... pretty, isn't it? Hey kids, shake a leg --------------------- "Nobody tells you where to go" - "Drive" by R.E.M., more or less. So named because of the slow sprites. The Four-Way Crossing --------------------- Also the central room in the game. This used to be the bathroom ---------------------------- Indeed it did. Watch those sprites at the end of the game! Willy meets his strange friends ------------------------------- AKA an excuse to show off some of the stranger sprites. Willy's defence mechanism ------------------------- Maria still hasn't retired yet. a maze of twisty passages ------------------------- "You are in a maze of twisty little passges, all alike". - Room description from ADVENT, the original text-based adventure. Just Say No ----------- If I had my way, this is what would happen to all Micro$oft software. It sucks! It costs too much money!! It keeps crashing!!! It's produced by a company which is hell-bent on controlling every computer in the world!!!! Do yourself a favour - use Linux instead. It's much more fun. The Red Room ------------ Politically a bit out of date, but it allowed me to combine two different ideas. One of the more effective designs. Willy tries to avoid frostbite ------------------------------ Named for its colour-scheme, which actually looks quite snowy, I think, even if the snowflakes are pinched from the original JSW. The Room of Numbers ------------------- Reductionism taken to its extremes! Roslyn's lampshade ------------------ The artefact in question, which looks very like the sprites in this room, sits on top of the chest of drawers in our bedroom. The Foo Room ------------ A room of foo. It's room 42, which should explain things. Willy decides to have a rest ---------------------------- But not a very long one, thanks to all the sprites which keep killing him. The Brickie's Day Off --------------------- And just who laid all those bricks diagonally, then? Willy gets some 3D glasses -------------------------- Of course, the two halves of this room should be red and green - which they are for one-eighth of pause mode - but budgetary limitations prevented this. It's a game of 2 halves, Archie! -------------------------------- A stereotyped phrase from Scottish football broadcasting, in case you're wondering. "Archie" is Archie McPherson, a familiar name to many Scots of all ages. Alex Salmond's Room ------------------- The leader of the Scottish National Party, in case you're wondering - not that I'm giving away any political preferences in this game :-) The Blue Room ------------- Tasteful and unchallenging. An Fhaoileag Tuilichte ---------------------- Gaelic for "The Drowned Seagull", in case you're wondering. I wanted a room with a Gaelic title to confuse the Sassenachs among you. It's that damn CGA again ------------------------ CGA = Colour Graphics Adaptor, an early colour scheme for IBM PC-compatibles. Not a pleasant choice of colours! fairplay is turnabout --------------------- This is, of course, a room with 180-degree rotational symmetry. Has anyone else ever done anything like it? The Sprite Selection Box ------------------------ This room is to sprites as a certain type of Christmas present is to bars of chocolate. Not Alasdair's room, actually ----------------------------- Although it certainly looks like one... Willy's Recurring Fungal Dream ------------------------------ The apotheosis of Willy's mushroom fixation in this game. <-the place is too full to enter -------------------------------- In the adventure of "The Hobbit", when you tried to do something equivalent to "ENTER EMPTY PLACE", you got this message instead. I've never found out why. You tread the Quad of Iniquity ------------------------------ Yet another adventure-related room title. In an issue of "Computer and Video Games" from back in 1983-ish. there was a description of how to build adventures, complete with a sample. This was the description of a square of four rooms which it was impossible to get out of. Twice as much happens --------------------- A variant of "Nothing happens", a generic response to stupid commands in a certain popular type of text-based computer game. A More Appropriate Structure ---------------------------- "Dogmatic adherence to the supposed merits of a particular structure hinders the search for a more appropriate structure" - Robert Fripp. Throat-Wobbler Mangrove ----------------------- From a Monty Python sketch featuring a man called Raymond Luxury Yacht. This, of course, is the correct pronunciation of his name. The Room of Strange Growths --------------------------- More fungal fixations... The Room of Horizontal Fungi ---------------------------- Yet more fungal fixations! The Room with the Manic Pac-Man ------------------------------- A sort-of reference to "Manic Miner" and a popular video game from my youth, at which I was very good (top score 184360) The End of All that is Known.... -------------------------------- The very bottom of the game.. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------