Church

[ryos]

@aquaMat: If you jump from the top of the short vine right as the moving platform is closest to you, then you will hit it every time. (And yes, I died a lot before I figured that out. :o)

I think that all the platforms two rooms up are harder! There's a trick to those too, but it's still hard to pull off (at least for me; I suck at moving platforms).

[samskelton]

I diddn't know my mansions were so hard!

[Wingy]

You mean....... you NEVER BEAT THE MANSION FROM START TO UNDERWORLD???? :o :o :o BTW: Where's the winning spot in the Underworld? Can't find it! (Make hint in yellow) It's good if you play from start to finish with your mansion. I stongly recommend that you test each room and make sure they're beatable. Hey, I didn't do it for Volcanis until I did that movie that was 45 mins!

[samskelton]

I think It's through the yellow door. I thought It was all beta tested. I went through the mansion twice myself. I also sent It to a few beta- testers

[aquaMat]

Ahem..... excuse me.... now that shocks me quite a bit, Sam. You only went through your own mansion TWICE from start to finish ?!?  :o

I can't believe it..... (and that explains a few of the design mistakes)....  I went through the Palaces and Discotheque about 50 times each before release (and they were still not perfect) !!

Now I understand why -although filled with wonderful ideas and wild room design- all your mansions seem to share one feature:
the relation between difficulty and saving posts, and/or money being given out, is not perfect. Especially the first save usually comes way too late.

Apart from that I found a few of the following

oddities

in Church:

- several doors can be

jumped upon

(meaning: Jack can jump ON the closed door and thus is able to simply jump behind it without having a key), sometimes this happens in conjunction with other things: e.g. in room 15705 Jack can jump on the top of the red door in the upper left coner (near the belt), and from then on further up, into some hidden caveat.... I thought it might be a hidden area, but I walked on and died of a sudden fall to the ground !!

- occasionally some of those wonderful

elevator machines

you created are mulfunctioning (the same button suddenly triggers the platform ABOVE the one it has triggered before...and you have to leave the room before getting it to work again!

But especially the last point is far outweighed by the wonderfulness of most of these platform-related automatic-transporter-machines (I don't know what else to call them)...they are fantastic !!  As you might know I have experimented with moving sidewalks and elevators etc. quite a bit myself, and you have certainly taken the concept a step futher!!  I especially like the one room, where Jack is moved through at a very high speed and immediatly behind him a block platforms shuts his way back like a door.... great stuff.

(Sorry for this rather long post...)

[brell]

aquaMat, if you read Sam's post carefully, you see that he had his mansion beta tested by other players. That is how beta testing works. Not by you replaying your own mansion x times because you are not the best beta tester for you own mansion, which you know so well that it is easy for you to miss the spots that might bug other players. Of course the builder has to test every single room and whether Jack can go between rooms without any flaws. After that the mansion is in the hands of the testers, which are, IMO, much more likely to find the weaknesses of the mansion than the builder. Whether the builder accepts all of the testers' comments and whether the testers do an excellent job is quite another story.

[aquaMat]

brell.... while what you say is of course true...(and I know that obviously) I still find important that a designer is playing his own mansion from start to finish as often as possible.
'Cause he designed it, he also knows it best....and even if he doesn't have the distance to find certain things a beta-tester can find, it is alo often the case that a designer -simply because he knows his mansion so well- will find other problems, issues or faults which a beta-tester will not spot immediately.

IMHO it's the combination that works best.

(BTW, I don't want to come across narrow-minded or something.... but if - like in The Church's case - something as obvious as the missing music error-message hasn't been spotted during beta-testing, I'm not too sure about the depth of testing that went on....).

[Freddy]

aquaMat wrote: I still find important that a designer is playing his own mansion from start to finish as often as possible.

That sounds logically, but depends from the mansion. MMaM could be released without a single play through the whole mansion. But that had to do with its rather exceptional construction. MMaM is one of the rare mansion that really can be cut in pieces without any harm or problem ...

[Spiak]

Psychotronic wrote: Okay, so I sort of finished the mansion. It's obviously the last room, but I can't figure out how to go actually exit. I'm pressing UP in what should be the right place (and everywhere else nearby) but the level doesn't end. That's bug number one.

I with you there Psycho. I tried everything I could to find an exit in that room, and nothing. I can't play any more MM until I get my suspended game of Church finished!!!


!!! Help !!!

[ryos]

You could always back up the suspended game file.