What is a good size for a first game?
One thing I've noticed is it's not so much how many *rooms* you do, as how *much* you cram into the rooms. this of course depends on your style so I’d say whatever feels reasonable.
I've noticed that when some of my sprites move, they move jerkily. This became particularly apparent when I changed Willy’s sprite in a room? Any Ideas?
take a look at the original JSW sprites, in particular, the horizontals. you'll see that they move 2 pixels per frame. you should emulate this when you design your own sprites. it doesn't have to be exact, but the more exact it is, the more pleasing the end results. of course, jerky sprites have their places...
What is considered acceptable and what is not? An example is that I used the colour trick to put more than one conveyor in some rooms. In one room (I won't say yet :) ) I have a Hidden conveyor (looks like other blocks) one block long and if you fall you die. Is that considered a good addition to a room or just plain mean?
it's okay if you have enough time to react to the situation and save yourself, in my books. if the trap leads to the loss of one life, then it's not that bad, but if it leads to an infinite death, then that kind of thing would peeve me off. especially if it's gratuitous. (it's a lazy way for the author to bump the player off :). basically traps are good if they allow a millisecond or so for the player to react, and do not lead to infinite death.
oh and the old 'going down an innocent-looking hole and falling to your death' scenario is completely unacceptable in my books :). there is something like that in WBA but it's very near to the beginning, the hole *looks* dangerous (because you fall quite a way before the screen flicks), and you fall 20 screens down to your death, collecting several objects and getting some great 'promised-land' views of the different areas as you go :).
Infinite death scenarios ? I have not set any, " Traps ", but there are occasions where it is possible to fall from a ledge and get an infinite death scenario. I have tried to limit them without ruining the rooms but some times leaving the floor out of a room is necessary. So do they creep in a lot in your games ?
you have several options here:
1) put some invisible fire blocks in the places where you may fall out of the screen to
your (infinite) death.
2) put fire blocks along the *top row* of the screen over the parts where you can fall
through. this has the same effect as 1.
3) make it fairly easy not to fall through. quite an obvious solution but sometimes the
only one :)
I was thinking about doing a game where you control Maria trying to get back into the house because Willy fired her for kicking him out all of the time :)
Maria might be hard to animate as she's so fat and might not have room to move in the frame. I believe erix1 is making a game starring Maria, but I’m not entirely sure if Maria will be the 'heroine' of the game. presumably so.
Sendy
Has anyone done anything like that yet ?
Yes. See Maria vs. Some Bastards, by Erix1
Gawp!