Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

One thing the official JJ2 releases did that didn’t catch on too much in fanmade levels is creating multiplayer levels to accompany single player levels. All the different commercial JJ2 releases included multiplayer levels, some of them better remembered than others, but only a handful of fanmade single player packs—e.g. Rabbit Honor Guard, Lost World—have done the same.

So, it’s nice to see a CTF version of Snowball Valley.

CandionV, which this is ostensibly based on, has always been an incredibly garish tileset, but Frosted Peaks plunges deep into the soft blues and grays area of the color spectrum and never leaves, with just enough contrast between ground and background to make clear what is solid. A lovely static aurora in the background adds a little bit of green but is rarely very visible, as layers upon layers of trees and mountains fill the distance lower down. This should serve to make it easy for the player to know where they are (at least vertically), though the different layers all look similar enough in their color distribution that this effect is somewhat muted.

What’s especially interesting about the gameplay is the focus on weapons that shoot downwards, with both bouncer (powerup)s and rollers included. The layout also goes out of its way to support them: not only are there lots of platforms hanging above the main structures of the level, the CTF base areas also invite downward weapons through the bridges that otherwise serve as ways for flagholders to escape. But these guns, which have perhaps the most utility when fired from the top of the level, are found mostly at the bottom. So a player who takes the time to explore and gather resources from multiple areas in the level should have the advantage over a player who spawns and immediately runs back into battle around the bases or carrots.

In general there are a lot of clever details here, both visual and mechanical. Waterfalls are frozen in place and don’t use animated tiles. The thin Stonar platforms are everywhere and make navigation more interesting, and the constant poles surrounding them make them feel that much more integral to the level as a whole. The slide events will probably have minimal effects on competitive gameplay but they’re nice to have anyway. It’s good.

The overwhelming impression I get from this level is huge. It’s rare to be in a spot where ceilings are a concern: instead, the planes of the outside areas are separated by a significant vertical space, and the inside area has a lot of tall, open halls. Even some of the horizontals feel a bit stretched out, suggesting a level that’s trying to accommodate a larger number of players without significantly modifying the layout principles of a smaller map. The outsides are especially empty in this regard: all that height, and yet only two floors, each made up of one-tile-thin wooden platforms. There’s a lot more substance in the center, though, to be fair.

What I do quite like is the commitment to being a Pit Level and not just a level that happens to have a pit somewhere. The use of orange leaves around the edges to indicate “this is where it’s unsafe to fall” is quite welcome, and also there’s a bunch of ice ammo (even a powerup!) near the bottom, to make it easier to get your opponents to fall in. I’m not sure without playtesting how likely people are to be in the bottom corners, though the presence of copters and carrots should help… on the other hand, there are other carrots elsewhere… dunno. But it’s a solid design decision.

The graphics are generally pretty solid and it’s mostly easy to tell walls from background, though the thin branches do have some trouble standing out. I’m unsure about the rampant bright orange and green, however. It’s distinctive but maybe not actually pleasant to look at?

There’s something cynical about these maps, with their flat, linear, open spaces and single weapons only. They seem to leave combat up to chance without giving players opportunities to hide behind walls or otherwise position themselves strategically. The graphics (besides the pink sky) are generally detailed and lovely, but the maps are so flat…

One of the more interesting multiplayer level design patterns that’s emerged in JJ2 is the commitment to making it easy for the player to get around without bumping into things. You wouldn’t necessarily expect this from the sometimes downright nonsensical layouts of the official levels that served as our earliest examples, and yet here we are. Arguably this pattern has two main components: if you see somewhere nearby, you should be able to get there easily, and if you’re moving around at high speeds, you shouldn’t get unexpectedly overly impeded. In general, movement through the map should be intuitive, leaving you to focus on where you want to go more than how to persuade the level to let you get there.

And as you might imagine, this pattern really shines through in Crayon Valley. With only a few exceptions—high jumps in the bottom corners, occasional moments of losing speed by bumping into ceilings—it’s very easy and pleasant to get around here. Edges of platforms are perfectly positioned to let you transition to other nearby platforms, which is made the more impressive by how how many tiny platforms there are, all of them more or less working with each other. And yet, miraculously, the layout doesn’t feel clinical at all.

In fact, the level even finds time to divide its layout into two halves, top and bottom, distinguished both by different eyecandy (outdoor trees and hills vs. indoor sand and blocks) and by the thick walls between them, with only a few carefully defined points for the player to switch sides. This should make it easier for the flagholders to escape capture in the lower half, as it can take more work to reach them there—reminiscent of such stalwarts as Happy Castle CTF—but also defines a lot of clear structure. You can get a general sense of where you are at a glance by looking at the graphics around you.

Better yet, the two graphical halves of the level don’t clash at all, thanks to careful use of the same general color palette (rainbows, pastels, and pink walls) and a few common elements like lampposts. With eyecandy doing so much informative work in this level, you might worry that it would be overdone and get in the way of the gameplay, but it manages to accomplish its goals without those pitfalls, succeeding through color palettes and broad strokes at what other levels might need entire arboretums to accomplish. The distant parallax background of the top half uses the same general palette as the rest of the level, but sufficiently faded and low-contrast as to not look confusing solid.

Ammo choice is mostly standard stuff for a CTF level, with the normal set of powerups (bouncers/toasters/RFs). Seekers and fireballs (forced by the level to exclude pepper spray) are also present but can’t be powered up. Electroblaster is the more interesting inclusion and tracks well with the level’s layout, which does have a lot of key spots (in the top half) with thin enough walls to attack other players through. The handful of TNT pickups I’m less sure about, but maybe that weapon is enjoying a renaissance, I don’t know.

All in all, a delightful showing with an uncommon yet vivid color palette. The layout is strictly symmetrical on the edges but not in the center, an interesting choice that gets around an awkward center area where players can clearly see the exact spot the mirroring happens. The CTF bases are in clear visual fortresses but are still quite open, approachable from three different sides. The music is cheery without becoming inane.

I really like how this looks—the colors work well together, the leaves are charming and make the screen look alive without obstructing visibility/gameplay—but not how it plays. There’s definitely room to explore how to use Hurt events (and other things that hurt you) in multiplayer levels more, but I don’t think this is the answer. Right now if you want to get the carrot, you have to take a sucker tube out of the carrot room and into a bunch of Hurt events. I’m really not sure what the reasoning here is but it’s not enjoyable.

I wonder if this level was only tested in local splitscreen multiplayer, not internet/LAN multiplayer? When played in local splitscreen, the various destruct blocks respawn after a while, and even a bunch of enemies(!) appear, but neither of those things happen otherwise.

The layout is odd for a battle level. There’s only one start position, and from it you follow one of two linear paths (one of which loops back around to near the start) in search of powerups. There’s not a lot of stuff to pick up between powerups—and most of what there is to pick up is gems, which are useless in battle—so battles may end up clustering around those powerups as players who already have them defend their positions against their recently respawned opponents. The flow isn’t the smoothest around: you can bump into walls and stuff trying to progress along the linear paths, and again there are Hurt events to contend with.

I dunno. I’m reluctant to opinionate too much about the non-technical aspects of this level, as it’s clearly aiming for a very different style of gameplay than most battle levels (especially when the enemies work), so how reasonable is it to judge this by the standards of a more traditional style that it’s uninterested in emulating? Maybe if I got some more people together to play this with, we’d have a good time advancing along the level’s main linear path, kind of like an assault level. Maybe not. But the graphical experiments going on here are certainly pleasant to look at in the meantime.

There are two things about the designs of these levels that really stick out to me, so let’s start there.

The first is the trigger crates. There are a lot of them here, and I think some are handled better than others. The ones in the first level are both pretty bad… you have to take a long path to find each one, then take the same path again in reverse after hitting the crate, only all the enemies are gone and you’re just running around to fill time. To get to the first crate, you got bounced by some horizontal springs, but on the way back you have to avoid them… I’m not sure whether this is an intentional challenge or confusing, but I couldn’t find any other path to take.

By contrast, there’s a trigger crate in the second level that is handled much better: hitting it takes you into a new area of the level, with new enemies and other challenges, and you have to navigate all those things before you get back to the main flow. That’s actually interesting, rather than filler.

This may be my personal preference talking, but I think it’s probably better to ensure the player sees the trigger scenery blocks first, before they go hunting for the trigger crate, so they know where they have to go back to. Otherwise you get moments like the second trigger crate in the first level, where the path branches in two directions, one with the crate at the end and one with the blocks at the end, and which direction you choose at random dictates how much time you’ll waste on backtracking.

The other main thing here is that there are points that seem to expect the player already knows how to beat the level. This is a common/easy level design mistake: the person making the level obviously knows where everything is, so why doesn’t everyone else? The less problematic cases of this include unlabeled warp events, or mandatory coins (in the secret level) hidden inside walls; the more egregious case is in the third level, where you twice need to shoot some normal-looking walls (using bouncer bullets!) or else you’ll fall into a bottomless pit. (The pit doesn’t even hurt or kill you, so you have to cheat or else quit the game.) I’m comfortable saying that this is just objectively bad design. (Some of the trigger crate hunting also feels to me like a bit of mind-reading, but I recognize that some players may be more into hunting than I am, so that’s just opinion.)

Those are the main offenses of this pack. There are a few things that are just buggy—bad masking on the ends of vines or poles, springs that don’t keep your x/y speed properly—but whatever, those are easy fixes. Giving the player a whole bunch of powered-up seekers right before facing Bilsy renders the fight meaningless, but it’s never been easy to design a compelling boss battle/arena.

Apart from those focal points, though, I think these levels are decent. There’s a good mix of enemies and pickups, with various nice features like stomp/destruct blocks, springs, vines, and poles to mark that these are distinctly JJ2 levels. Trees and lakes both make appearances in places to make different parts of the levels feel distinct from each other. Sometimes there are little platforms and sometimes there are larger walls… the walls look a bit flat at times but that may be a consequence of the tileset choice. I think in general the moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty solid here, but some more thought needs to be put into determining what moments the player encounters in what order, and how the player is supposed to figure that out.

Do you want to play some Jazz 2? Yes? Great, here you go. These levels feel like Jazz 2.

These are fine levels. They are short, but that is probably why there are three levels with each tileset and not two levels with each tileset. There are enemies and ammo and food and even some springs and blocks. All JJ2’s main things are here in these levels. You mostly go right but sometimes you go up and down, and that’s good.

I think pickups could be placed better. There are many pickups, but often all pickups are in the same place. There are parts of the level with no pickups and then suddenly a part with many pickups. They could be spread more evenly.

The snow levels are especially good because they are not single paths. Sometimes you can run around in other directions for a while. That lets you have fun and make choices. That is a good thing. The Diamondus levels do this less… maybe they are older. Coins are always a fun thing for running around but these levels do not have coins.

The graphics are not very different from normal. They are well made but I will forget about them because I have seen other levels that look the same. Trying out more different things might be interesting.

These levels are fine. I enjoyed playing them. The author is doing a good job of making levels that feel like Jazz 2 levels. They are shorter and maybe easier but still similar. They are much better than Medivo 3, and Medivo 3 is only one year old. I am impressed. I hope the author will soon make levels that are unique.

Treasure Hunt is a multiplayer gamemode, but this level seems to be designed to be played by only one person.

The big problem is the giant pit… if someone falls in it, there’s no way to get them out. if they have any gems, those gems are lost for the rest of the game. If they have a lot of gems, that means it’ll be impossible for anyone else to get those gems from them, and nobody will be able to win.

The other problem is there’s no ammo at all. It’s certainly possible to steal gems from other people using blaster alone, but it’s not very fun. A big part of the draw of multiplayer JJ2 is using different guns for different situations, and that’s not available here.

Other than that, the level looks nice enough, if a bit cramped in places. The walls don’t always tile properly but that’s a common thing with Carrotus/Easter. The background idea is neat but doesn’t quite work right when played in 800×600. Treasure hunt levels and Easter’99 levels are both rare. It’s just a pity the pit makes the level functionally unplayable.

Thanks for the screenshots!

It’s a nice little tileset, I like it

Golden Diamondus!

We forget, sometimes, how abnormally complicated level design for Jazz 2 has to be. Both the visible resolution and the characters’ mobility so far outstrip most other platformer games’ that there are few available analogs. What suffices as a perfectly functional, even engaging, layout or visual in another game is skipped over here in a matter of moments. Worse, even the official maps shipped with the game fail to perfectly illustrate the way forwards, having themselves been designed for a smaller resolution and more limited moveset.

All of which is to say: yes, these levels can be skipped through quickly, but it’s not really their fault.

Focusing on the moment to moment level design, there’s a lot of good work here. The ground goes up and down a lot as you progress through the maps, both using slopes and using tiny cliffs, and even some springs make their appearance. A few areas place pickups just off the main path, encouraging the player to explore. Vines and trees give the levels even more variety, including a memorable section in level 2 crossing a pit of spikes using multiple vines. Everything you see here is much more complicated and interesting than you could find in many other 2D platformer video games.

But it continues to run into this problem sometimes.

Now, to be clear, this pack is much, much less easily skippable than the author’s previous works. The author is clearly improving, which is great. Even that video is a bit unfair… levels 1 and 2 are much more interesting than level 3, and also put more work into avoiding that problem, even using the presence of flying enemies to prevent the player from easily sticking to the skies. But it’s still a problem. For all that the levels are getting more interesting to look at, the enemies more carefully placed, the floors less flat… there are still a lot of places where the player has the option of speeding through between enemies and ignoring all of that.

• Make it harder for the player to skip things. Level 1 does this the most; level 3 does this the least. Ceilings are a valid approach, but the main thing that Jazz 2 does that many other games do not is have the player change direction over the course of each level. The overall progression is still always from the left side of the map to the right side, but in the meantime, there are lots of times when the player has to go up, or down, or even left. Level gimmicks, such as springs and blocks, are also simple ways to force the player to pay attention to the level however briefly.
• Make the player want to take their time. The most obvious way to do this is putting a lot of rewards in the level—food, gems, ammo, birds, shields…—in places that require just a little bit more work to access. How much extra work should be proportional to the reward… a few red gems could require no more than jumping instead of walking, but a powerup can require some actual work to find. Having lots of goodies around helps to keep the player engaged. It’s still possible for the player to ignore those goodies and run for the exit at top speeds, but then it becomes the player’s choice to be speedy—their choice not to pursue the rewards—rather than something the level simply fails to make impossible.

The other, more elusive option is to find a way to focus on speed above all else as the thing the level design should encourage. I don’t think that’s what the author is doing here, because there are a lot of enemies I had to sometimes purposefully avoid, but I don’t want to leave it out as a possibility and suggest the only good way to design levels (or video games) is to slow the player down as much as possible. Perhaps if anything you want a mixture of the two: challenges, then speed, then challenges, then speed. The official levels have a number of automated sections using springs and poles that seem to support this idea, which simultaneously give the player a chance to rest their fingers.

I don’t have much to say about the visuals in these levels. They’re functional and mostly nothing else, with the occasional cute moment like using a tree branch as a bridge instead of using normal floor tiles. This doesn’t look amazing at JJ2’s high resolutions but I think focusing on level design is more important, so I wouldn’t worry about this too much for now.

Overall the first level here is the best and the third is the worst, but none of them are terrible. Clearly a lot of thought was put into keeping each individual area interesting and distinct from the rest. But some more thought still needs to be put toward the bigger picture, focusing on more than putting down one set of tiles after another until the right side of the layer has been reached.

A very professional level. This level is thematically at the top of levelmaking. The tileset could have used a little more visual variation, especially for making the middle more organic where the level struggles a little bit showing it’s symmetry. Besides that this a near perfect level. It plays really well too and includes surprising elements.

Another solid CTF level from Faw. The various JJ1 sets have been amalgamated together in a nifty way to create a visually interesting level. The pastel colors in the background complement the sprite layer nicely without being distracting. The gameplay and the layout are pretty excellent for the most part, with a few handy tricks here and there.

u programed that!?

Good Test! 10/10

- I think that background color is too aggressive,orange trees looks like you can stand on it and that’s kinda confusing.Map feels kinda empty, i think it needs more ammo.Iam wonder why is there spring on 95,37 I didn’t find it useful(mby it is but i just don’t see it).
+I like middle part layout and map idea (mby just change a bit palette?)

Beautiful level with with great gameplay and many hidden secrets!

The first time I played this was in hard mode, it was challenging and the enemies are no joke (God those monkeys). One of the best levels I played for sure. The platforms’ creative effects and the waterfalls add up to the fun. Despite the level being kinda big, it never got repetitive and it kept getting better! It is also well balanced in difficulty: easy is truly easy and hard is truly hard, allowing players with different levels of skill to enjoy it.

Though there were some parts that I have complains about in hard mode:

The last part with the pumpkins: your screen is filled with enemies everywhere, the pumpkins are following you around and your adrenaline is high, you wanna get out of there ASAP, so it was easy to overlook that one special platform at the end that gets you out of there, instead i wasted my time to search for the exit in the water so the water in that part felt useless/misleading. I only noticed that platform when i replayed the level in easy mode (just to realize that i was at the very end when i lost in hard mode).

Some poles flew me straight to collide with enemies with no way to react.

I also agree with slaz about the airboard, I went there the first time without knowing that I needed an airboard to continue and got stuck. (Getting in, grabbing the airboard and getting out was also one of the most challenging parts)

All in all it remains a great level, download recommended!!!!

nyt on kuumaa kamaa

One of my favourite hotels. A lot of memories came back to me after seeing it on main page ;d.