Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

While this level looks aesthetically modern and contains many scripted elements, this is still the most vanillish JJ2 level by Violet in a while due to the obvious theme of the contest it was made for. While having enough original quirks, the main course here is a pretty straightforward mostly linear level with a mild focus on exploration. Secrets are traditionally placed in walls and most of them are accesed a bit more intuitively than just by hugging every wall around them. There are also more open secret areas that can often be found by following the path not guided by arrow signs.

Gameplay mostly follows JJ2 standards, although there are a few platforming sections that take more precision by means such as chains of platforms appearing and disappearing one after another quickly. Hence why Violet decided to make these skippable by giving good old Coin Bunny a mere 10 coins. The carrot rockets are also a surprising addition, as well as the water slides. And while not by far among the hardest of JJ2 levels, this one is definitely more difficult than standard JJ2 and a slow & steady traverse is recommended above running & gunning around.

Enemies are mostly slight alterations of original JJ2 enemies, such as faster throwing Monkeys and Fencers standing on airboards so that they can cover more vertical space. There are also Devan and Devil Devan clones that behave like their regular boss variant but take only a few shots to kill. The most original enemies are the swarms of pesky pumpkins that can poison you, forcing you to look around for antidotes if you were unfortunate enough to touch one. Ammo is very balanced, with the more useful types such as Seekers and Toasters being relatively scarce. Most of the powerups and shields are placed within secret areas to make them feel rewarding. Bird cages are less secret yet placed very out of the way.

The only problem I encountered on my first run (on Hard) was that I somehow missed the airboard and jumped straight through the vine area assuming the large carrot platforms were meant to be long-jumped. That all went well until I got stuck below, got confused and died to get back up to the checkpoint. Maybe there is a way to clear it without the airboard but I don’t think it was meant to be.

And finally, the bossfight didn’t feel so special and recycled a bit of the Angelscript example level. It’s still better than ending such a beatifully crafted level without a bossfight. The typical J2C-style credits text near the end of the level got me by surprise though. I also liked how the player grading feature from Bunnylover was ported over, it encourages replayability a lot.

Download highly recommended as long as you enjoy SP levels!

This will be Carrotus graphics in 2014!

I’m in awe, I’m amazed by the charm of this level. It’s full of things I’ve never seen in jazz 2 before, devan clones, rocket carrot, tube carrots, etc…
I really like the water in this level, it’s just too white and I can’t see well. However I find this level a masterpiece,
You really amazed me Violet!

[Changed to quick review]

I like the atmosphere and the color scheme. I feel like the bricks are a bit mismatched with the tileset though. I also think the weapon balance is slightly off, with Fireball PU outclassing Blaster PU. The layout is decent, although the pit is probably unnecessary, and the hanging wooden beams were a bit obstructive. Overall, cool level though!

I’m amazed at your level, it’s a small map but well filled, I really like the fact of the mushrooms that act as springs. I think there aren’t so many ammo in the level, the layout is simple but with this background it makes complicated.
Good job PurpleJazz

This level looks gorgeous.
It’s a bit claustrophobic and there are too many pick-ups but, overall, it plays nicely.

I decided to review this because I think it deserves a review. Since Jgke is an experienced levelmaker, I’m going more into detail.

Visuals
The visuals in this level are overall solid. When starting the level, you directly notice how Jgke has seperated the background layers by using a blue tint. Although tinting the background has been a fairly common trick by now, this is still a clever design choice. Jgke is aware that by using the tint, it creates a lot of visual depth. It not only puts the background further away, but also makes the playable area pop out to the front more. Although players are not always aware, it does a lot to feel connected towards a level. Seperating layers professionally is one of those checkboxes. Mitosis does this through colour, but there are a lot of ways to do this, for example: through scale, brightness, saturation or just overall level of detail. So for any levelmakers reading this, always ask yourself: “How does this look from a player perspective?”.

To go more into depth, this question can be expanded to “What can players see in the 800×600 canvas at any position in the map?”. This is crucial to jj2, because the maximum resolution is 800×600. Considering this, I still see a lot of room for improvement for Mitosis and i’ll try to explain what exactly. Behind the blue tint is a bunch of scenery placed into two seperate layers. Something that is noticeable right away is that the placement of this scenery looks a bit chaotic and uncohesive. As a levelmaker, I instantly notice that this takes away from the overall feel of this level for multiple reasons: 1.For some reason the bricks don’t have the usual shadows on them anymore like in the sprite layer. 2.It feels like both layers were made seperately, without actively keeping the parallax view or the viewability in the 800×600 resolution in mind. This results in background eyecandy that feels a bit off. While moving around you’ll notice that the layers fall into each other, float in the air, obscure each other, or fall off the 800×600 resolution. Since it’s also a bit oversized, it’s hard to imagine the continuation of the scenery patterns. The difference in layer speeds makes it extra confusing. Between the first and second scenery layer is no difference in scaling/colouring/brightness/saturation that I’ve talked about earlier, yet they have different speeds from the player perspective. The combination of these factors make this background not as visually convincing as it could have been. I think there are several levels with backgrounds that do this a little bit better, closest reference being the level “verdoemenis”. So on the background overall: tint is nice but I hope these tips help a bit on how to implement it even better in the future.

The visuals of the sprite layer + background walls look good enough, but it feels like there is just too much blending of tiles from the tileset in each part of the level. I feel like it could have been easier if you showed a bit more restraint in the eyecandy usage. I’m missing some visually memorable landmarks in Mitosis as a side-effect, but this is not a huge issue in a level this small. Choosing distinct visuals goes hand-in-hand with gameplay, because it’s part the same thought process. Therefore I decided to describe this further under gameplay.

Gameplay
The gameplay here is decent, it’s noticeable how Jgke put effort in optimizing the flow in this level. Eventhough this level has a lot of slopes, It’s unlikely you will ever bump unintentionally into diagonal ceilings. I couldn’t find any flow issues in events like springs/tubes, they are all adjusted nicely. The main pickups like powerups and carrots are also well visible.

However, I can’t help but feel that the gameplay in Mitosis feels uninspired. This is because the layout is very limited to a single style throughout the entire level. I’ve talked earlier that visually the parts of the level are also not distinct. As a result, it doesn’t fill different locations with their own distinct gameplay assets (and can’t due to the singular layout and visual blend). When you look through the layout in the editor, it’s very noticeable how every area kind of masks the same and every area tries to blend in a lot of tiles from the tileset at the same time. My tip is to have be more restraintful about the tileset use or make choices in it, it will make a level look more convincing and understandable. For example: A tileset like diamondus forces you to use thin masks if you want trees, tree areas and ground areas play very different in diamondus and that’s very interesting for gameplay. In a tileset like windstorm fortress it’s not so easy to see, because the tileset does not force you to use it’s tiles in a certain way or for certain masks. This is why it’s important to think about how and where you use these tiles for, both visually and layout-wise. For example, you can decide with windstorm fortress that you use the red tiles and the grey tiles in very different ways and parts in the level. Mitosis doesn’t really do this and thus it’s also less tempting to think about the step after on how to connect gameplay to masks. For example after that it’s where you can start thinking about the masks, the scale, maybe the red area having vines but other areas don’t, grey area with loads of springs.etc. There are a lot of ways to expand on the theme once it’s convincing.

Overall
Mitosis doesn’t really stand out because it seems to be missing some of it’s design processes.that seperate the good from the great. However, there is not really much to hate about Mitosis either. Everything is decent and there aren’t any bad design choices.Mitosis is a fairly standard CTF level that plays like your above average CTF level and it is certainly enjoyable enough to play in sometimes.

Almost all of these are terrible for instagib.

I decided to review this level, I like to do that by seperating the review into two parts. First I want to talk about what went right and secondly what I think could be better. That said, let’s start the review.

What did it get right?

Inside the freezer has a theme that builds upon. Using the multiple tilesets, it mixes the cold blue tint frozen feel of the level together with the steel/industrial feel of a freezer. The music works for this level and everything together makes this levelname quite believable.The colouring in this level is pretty, because it blends well together (although a small nitpick would be that the dark blue platforms are a bit too dark and the fans in the background are too bright). For the most part it has a nice offset between a brightness in sprite layer and a dark background. This creates depth in the level. Always try to think of what you want to place together and what you want to seperate, make distinct choices so the player can more easily understand the level. This makes the level look more clean and professional. I hope to see more of that in the future. So far from all Dragusela’s levels on J2O, this is his best implementation of theme and it really shows he grows as a levelmaker to make distinct areas and adds tiles within that theme.

The gameplay, for a some parts definitely looks better than your previous levels. This level feels easier to move around in, it is more open, it is more practical. It flows better than other levels. This doesn’t have uncounterable camping like before. I can remember in your first levels it used to have powerups in extremely safe spots, luckily this level doesn’t have that.

Where is room for improvement?

Although this level does some things right, it also shows a lot of room for improvement. There’s a certain randomness to a lot of the level aspects, which makes it feel chaotic and unprofessional. It’s a bit much to name, so I’m just going to start a list of things you can expect to find in Inside the freezer: Secret warps that have no visual indication (I had to look in MLLE to find it), ground tiles that also unexpectedly become foreground tiles, inconsistency with one-way floors, confusing layer speeds that move slower than the layer behind it, ceilings that randomly stop existing and turn into foreground, floors that could be just floors but instead has bridges behind foreground scenery (also had to look in MLLE to find this), the unconvincing perspective that a huge background is seperated from the sky by a mere 1 tile waterfall, inconsistency on whether steel support beams are masked or unmasked, missing masks to prevent players running in the edges of the map, missing mask edits for inferno to stop players from standing near ceilings, dead ends without any pickups, springs that don’t reach high enough or are too high or are missing completely, the copter respawning too slow, pulse lights that don’t do anything because the ambient lighting = 100, ricochets causing bullet desyncs in multiplayer. Wew, this is quite a lot… I think it can be helpful to look into these again and imagine how this is from the player perspective and what you can do differently. I think most and foremost: Try to stop combining your layer 3 with layer 4 this much. They are not interchangeable and shouldn’t be. Layer 3 should only really be mixed into the playable area to hide small areas or for small scenery, not hide entire masked layouts.

Anyway, I hope to see more levels and I hope to see you continiuing levels, because I can definitely see some improvement.

I really like design of this level, i like how you combinated mez with inferno, also that Fanolint parts in backroud.But the problem is that you didnt put Jazz 1 Fanolint.j2t (not JJ1 Fanolint) in your file (that made many tilebugs and mask bugs) so please try to reupload it with that tileset (btw you can in mlle package in zip your map). I found few tilebugs even after i added that missing tileset.
Map looks playable.I like how you added fire ball pu.
Nice map, good job

The tileset Carrot1 (2).j2t is missing from the zip (although I assume it’s very likely just a duplicate of Carrot1.j2t).

J2o rating system is boogus anyway. I’ll try it out once I’m on a computer.

amazing

dragusela768943 ..I edited and paletted that tileset in mlle.

Cmon guys who removed rating xD

Wow! Good job, I like this particular tileset. How do you make one?

[Rating removed: this is a battle level, not a tileset.]

Funny, but not useful in any way. I don’t want the rating system to undermine great uploads, that’s why I’m giving this a 7. I think these type of uploads work better with N/A only.

Does exactly what the description says. It’s great if you want a good chuckle.

Fairly lengthy, nice level design, nice eyecandy. I can’t complain, it’s a good vanilla level pack. Give it a try.

amazing

That you wanted make easy test is alright but you should at least use some more original tileset.