Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Over the years JJ2 has seen an explosion of multiplayer gamemodes. Sch wizards as BlurredD and EvilMike wove together arcane contraptions of sucker tubes and trigger scenery to create levels that, even when played in vanilla JJ2, still followed the scoring rules of Team Battle or Last Rabbit Standing or the like. JJ2+ canonized these, and others with more complicated rulesets, from Pestilence to Headhunters. Mutators expanded the playing field still further. But somewhat lost in all this was the idea of single player gamemodes.

In general there have only ever been two goals in single player levels: either get to the exit (which may involve a boss battle), or collect all items (usually coins). Within collecting levels there are two subtypes, one where collecting everything makes you win immediately and one where you have to go to a specific place afterwards, but they’re largely the same thing.

But there’s a third mode that’s lurked around the edges, only making an appearance every once in a while: horde mode. The level design stays constant, but enemies keep appearing, and either they die or you do. A major example is TDI_07.j2l from Moonblaze’s “The Demon Invasion,” where a regenerating coin and an invisible coin warp serve as a countdown timer. hgfDiamondusColosseum.j2l from happygreenfrog’s “Operation Cleanup: Turtle Terror Revisited” uses scripting to implement an enemy quota, so the level will not end until you’ve killed enough (regenerating) enemies. Both make the assumption there must be some sort of measurable goal that the game itself keeps track of for you, or else why would you bother?

The Lapidarian Chaparral says screw that noise.

The Lapidarian Chaparral decides that you, the player, are in charge of keeping track of how well you’ve done and whether you’ve accomplished whatever goal you might choose to set for yourself. It demands you make up your own emergent gameplay. It puts itself in your hands as clay to be molded into whatever experience you prefer. It is single player by way of sandbox. It is, in a way, a metaphor for JJ2 and JCS as a whole.

Sure, with some work Lark could probably piece together a complicated system of a generating coin, an electro-blaster SCE, and various belts, animated tiles, bridges, and so on, that periodically dropped a coin into a pseudo-random spot in the level, so that you have to keep moving around to find the next coin. It would be pretty cool. But there’s a boldness to giving up on that altogether as irrelevant.

Sure, the concept still has some limitations as implemented. In the current version of JJ2+, regenerating enemies and pickups don’t give points, but pickups spawned from regenerating barrels do, so if score is your goal, you should focus there. Sure, certain areas are purely safe, so if your goal is actually to set a stopwatch and see how long you can last, you’re just gonna hang out next to a carrot and walk away from your computer. But does Lark really want you to do that? More importantly, do you really want to do that? Or do you want to blast turtles?

Anyway. Cool to see Jungrock. Level looks nice. Didn’t notice any bugs.

Gosh. Lark. Long time, kid. Thanks for dropping by. Happy new year.

I didn’t think Jazz 2 levels would make me cry. I didn’t think Jazz 2 levels would make me cry three times.

Literally perfection

Well, other than the fact that the approach of this level is not my cup of tea, I think it’s overall a good level. I think the layout and the eyecandy is really cool. The open ended nature of the level actually appeals to me (though this most likely came due to the fact that it was designed as a battle level originally). Music is pretty good, though I don’t know why there’s that noise at the beginning of it that sounds like background chatter in a bar.

Things I didn’t enjoy are basically the fact that the level can’t be ended in a traditional way, since there’s no level end trigger, basically you just run around the map until you find everything. Which brings my second issue, everything respawns. Obviously it’s not a flaw, since it’s an endless loop level anyway, but still, navigating through the level gets a bit frustrating when enemies you’ve already dealt with spawn back on top of you. Also, it’s supposed to be a single player level, but pickups all still have the “battle level” mindset, so you only pick up ammo and health (and a secret water shield).

Rather than making it an endless loop, I think it would have been more fun if there was a coin warp that teleported you to the end, once you collected all the coins after exploring the map.

Still, the level itself is really good, just the overall fundamental design to it isn’t really for me.

Ah, I missed this one when I was doing my Psych3-edits tour the other day! This has some good moments with warps but doesn’t always do a great job of trying to impose layout edits. I miss the fly carrot but reluctantly accept the float sucker stomp sequence is also neat. Definitely on the more interesting side of the genre, though imperfect.

A decently lengthy pack with highs and lows. The highs show up more toward the end, so you leave with a good memory, but it takes some work to get there. I like the original, memorable sequences like the airboard level, the frog level, the fun and colorful rainforest level—I’m less into the trigger crate chasing, and there’s a lot of it.

Gorgeous looking level. You somehow made a Diamondus/Inferno wall mashup look so natural that I didn’t even consciously think about it when I first played it. The large crystals from Ceramicus in the foreground do look a touch out of place with their lack of detail. But that’s more than made up for by screen-filling parallax background layers that give the sense of an expansive landscape behind the sprite layer – moreso than any other JJ2 background I’ve seen.

In gameplay, it’s a traditional CTF level and wears that on its sleeve, no wacky gimmicks. But I always like when levels are asymmetrical and I always like when carrots are placed in out-of-the-way areas, and this level has both of those things so I like that.
Besides, there’s next to nothing to actually complain about here: balance seems good, the level flows pretty well thanks to extensive usage of One Way events, and both flag bases are interesting to approach and defend.

Definitely looking forward to seeing more, and being doubly impressed if you do pull out another great level within 23 days!

Its not bad for third lvl !

I like that you are trying to use background layers and adding some eyecandy into the map. As abdgrenv said, ammo and enemies placement feels kinda random, and unbalanced, also i dont see the point of putting free powerups and carrots right in your way, it feels like you got it for free and its not really challenging.
It kinda looks like you are just testing on this map what you can do in jcs and thats totaly alright, but i would reccomend you to upload those maps into discord jcs chat than here. We can tell you there advices and opinions there so you can improve. In my opinion on j2o you should upload single player pack with more than one map. I think ppl would enjoy it more that downloading sp map one by one. But as I said, for 3nd maps its very good visualy and i think you can make big things in the future! (sorry for the low rating but 6,5 is too high imo, i just want to average it)

Pretty decent level overall. Has some platforming challanges added in, which was a nice addition. There’s 1 secret, and a detour to break a crate to be able to progress.

Issues are mostly the same, a bit too much ammo packed right at the start of the level, while the level isn’t really difficult enough to warrant that much ammo, and especially that many health carrots.

All things considered, I had a decent time.

Second map by this user, and I have to say it’s an improvement compared to the first one.

Let’s start with the positives:
The level layout is pretty good. While the first map was pretty straightforward, being a straight line with some platforming for extra goodies in some rooms, this one feels more like a complete level. No branching paths that loop into each other, but there are some areas where you can go out of your way to get some extra goodies.

Luckily the pickups have been spread out much more sensibly this time, so there aren’t just a bunch of areas with a ton of goodies as if you entered a coin warp.

Same can be said for the enemy placement, while nothing challenging, they are competently placed.

Also, a coin warp and boss fight is present as well.

Now for some negatives:
The biggest one I can bring up is the difficulty, the lack of it to be more specific. While the enemies are much better placed than in your first level, there are a still a bit too few of them. There were multiple pretty long streches where I was just walking in a straight line because there were neither pickups nor enemies. If you are afraid the levels would become too difficult if you put many enemies in them, you still have the option to make some of the enemies be “hard difficulty exclusive” in the level editor.

While I don’t think the level itself looks ugly or empty, I did instantly notice that you only used layer 8 and didn’t do anything with layer 5, 6, 7. Diamondus is one of the best tilesets for beginners because the it has a lot of potential to be made interesting looking. The boss area for example stands out in a good way, since you had a bit of fun with how you made it look.

Here are 2 examples of what can be done with this tileset:
https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/5775/mines-of-diamondus/
https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/6921/cold-flash/ (this is an altered tileset, but most of it are still the original Diamondus tiles)

Some extra advice: Adding some secret areas make levels a bit more interesting. Use layer 3 to hide secret rooms, or just place warps in certain particular places for warp secrets. Don’t make them obvious, but give small hints through tileset patters.

As for the coinwarp, that isn’t part of the tileset (even though there is a partial tileset for it). All you have to do is place the warp, set the amount of coins and change the “ShowAnim” part from 0 to 1 to make the coinwarp rabbit appear, though this only works for 10, 20, 50 and 100 coins in the vanilla version of the game. If the coin warp requires any other amount of coins, then yeah what you did is a viable alternative.

Summary:
A rather significant improvement over your first level. Improved level layout, improved item and enemy placement, improved the general use of events. It’s a competent decent level.

What a nuanced colour palette and sweet atmosphere. All the incredible details and animations. Is it a bee or a mosquito? A Beescito? True to your distinctive style. Amazing set Blade! I don’t dare to rate that magic.

First upload by this user.

Let’s start with the positives:
For how linear and straightforward the level is, it actually looks pretty decent. The different layers are used pretty well, so even though you’re mostly going in a straight line, at least it doesn’t look boring or lazy.

Though it’s short, some areas have potential, as far as the layout is considered. Sure it still needs to be filled with some enemies and the variation of pickups need to differ, but it’s apparently a test level, so there’s that.

Now for the negatives:
Most importantly. Variety in pickups and item placement. Don’t just make a room with 8 large gems, and 4 weapon powerups. It’s like placing all the gems at the beginning of a Spyro level, so then you don’t bother to explore the level itself. The level is basically a continuation of rooms with a bunch of pickups, which don’t complement the decent layouts of the rooms.

Enemy placement needs to be improved. You only used normal turtles, but there are about 8 in the whole level, and half of them are in a straight line grouped up in each other (use the Stop Enemy function to keep them apart from each other).

The buttstomp and destructible blocks don’t work as intended, you shoot 1 and the whole row disappears (you also need to shoot the buttstomp block, though it’s irrelevant since you can jump over it).

All in all, there might be some potential here. Some of the issues are easily fixable (item & enemy placement), while others may need some practice in the level creator to learn (what functions each event has)

10/10 HYPE

It’s the perfect tileset for making, for example, sky levels! Good job Blade!

Well, it contains a vivid, animation heavy tileset with a beautiul 3 examples for know-how. Even though it’s overly-vivid in my taste, I see there are endless possibilities for levels filled with colorful eyecandy. Good job!

thanks Violet for the generous review!

I think Turtemple sounds good with these instruments, very ominous. The others fall into the standard remix trap: a bunch of random noises but every once in a while you get to hear the melody of the original song and think “oh yeah I like that original song!”

A bunch of duel-sized, high-concept CTF levels of varying quality. The pack starts off strong with krcage, which has some interesting gameplay around the carrots, with vines and electroblasters. The bottom area is a bit too simple, though, and the double vine rows could probably be reduced to single vines to make the level play a little faster. krdeep also has a focus on two +1 carrots instead of one full energy, this time paired with copters, but the rest of the level is too difficult to parse visually, and Spaz can get up the central castle much faster than the other characters. krlz I’m not a fan of, only Spaz can get up the central column in any reasonable timeframe and the rest of the level is blocky and hard to see in. There are other CTF maps that do this diamond layout more gracefully. krnj is a bold attempt to make a vertical CTF level, but I’m not convinced it’s any more successful than most others, since there’s nothing to keep you from falling down from one base to the other. Also I asked my brother, who lives in New Jersey, about its accuracy, and he says “Seems a little desolate for the most densely populated state!” krsand seems fine to me, I could imagine giving it a little more polish in certain spots but the basic layout is totally functional and enjoyable. krvolc is a letdown though, the bases are so incredibly close together I don’t see how this ends up playing well.

In conclusion, some of these levels are better than others, but it’s not a bad effort, and I like getting more bite-sized maps out there for quicker games.

I don’t really have anything to add. Just download it and see for yourself

Ah, 2015! A heady time full of promise. Let’s look at the angelscript API and see what it can do for a single player level. Different palettes at different stages of the level? Absolutely! Enemies with more health, other sprites used as enemies, other sprites used as (unremarkable) weapons. Sure! Totally sick fire-breathing platforms moving in all directions! Anything seemed possible. People were building on JJ2 gameplay to add exciting new elements to dazzle and amaze and entertain.

Good times.

Tweedle Wheedle is not without bugs, I suppose, and the eponymous boss battle is frustrating as all Tweedle fights seem to be, and the layout occasionally gets confusing, but it’s unrelentingly cool. And even without all the scripting stuff the layout is still really good, doing interesting things with the psych3 base, then adding lots of really distinctive design elements to the rest of the level. Just a fun time throughout.

This is a good glow-up! It’s striking how much of a difference the fade color and the foreground layers make, and the intro area from psych3 has a lot of cool edits with pickups off to the side and stuff. Using a Cheshire2 is very smart—surprisingly few psych3 edits seem to do this—though I don’t understand why the fly carrot was removed here, as it was the original’s most distinctive feature. The spring section that replaces it is pretty cool, though. The rest of the layout is also generally good and fun with some fun takes on Psych wall shapes, albeit with the occasional dud moment (everything relating to TNT, some alcoves it’s easy to get stuck in). This isn’t a transformational take on JJ2 gameplay but there’s a lot of aww yeah neat. A great take on psych3.