In 1992, before I had access to the Internet, and not knowing that anyone else in the world was into MM/JSW editing, I wrote my own Jet Set Willy editor and, with it, a game called Jet Set Dizzy, inspired by Codemasters' fabulous Dizzy series of games (well, I liked them, anyway ;-)). The editor and hence the game were crap (in particular, I couldn't edit the item-table, the guardian-class table or the 16x16 graphics, the game was impossible to complete and it suffered from the infamous Attic-Bug), but now I've written a new, much better editor called Jet Set Willy Construction Kit, with which I'm now thinking of revamping Jet Set Dizzy to make it good enough to release on the Internet without shame! ;-)
You can download Jet Set Dizzy as it stands from the Files section of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group (you have to join the Group first). This is a beta version, so please do not pass it on.
However, the title Jet Set Dizzy is rather naff, and way too narrow as only a handful of rooms in the game are actually Dizzy-related! So I renamed it to JSW Iva, and later to Toy (after an album David Bowie was planning to release in 2001 but abandoned - it was going to feature revamped versions of some of his 1960s songs, and new songs written in a similar style).
The plot will be based on this dream I had in 1992, which I wrote up as a short story at the time. Willy goes on holiday with Maria and Esmerelda to a remote island off the UK, and stumbles across a terrifying secret...
Jet Set Dizzy had a room for each game in the Dizzy series that I knew of at the time: the original Dizzy, Treasure Island Dizzy, Fantasy World Dizzy, Into Magic Land, Magic Land Dizzy, Spellbound Dizzy, Prince Of The Yolkfolk, Fast Food, Kwik Snax, Down The Rapids, Panic and Bubble. I did not actually own a copy of all of these, but I had most of them either for my Spectrum or the Amstrad CPC 6128.
That only made 10 rooms, however, so I added a number of extra rooms, since a JSW game can have up to 64. The game was never finished, though - it only had 37 rooms when I left off in 1993. So I'm planning to vastly improve the original screens - several of which were based on good ideas but were poorly executed due to the limitations of my old editor - and add like 27 rooms to complete the game, including new Dizzy games I've heard of since, such as Crystal Kingdom Dizzy and the Russian Dizzy games.
The new rooms that I write for Toy are probably going to be mainly tributes to my favourite Spectrum games, and perhaps some tributes of a more personal nature.
Toy will not be so mind-bogglingly difficult as most of my games, although it will be harder once I've added some proper guardians! The atmosphere is probably more akin to the original Jet Set Willy rather than the surreal atmosphere of We Pretty and Goodnite Luddite. It's going to be one for the fans rather than a high-brow masterpiece!
8th April 2007: I am considering the possibility of making Toy my next JSW game - ahead of Afrikaan. I'm also considering making Toy a JSW64 game, and maybe even renaming it to Jet Set Toy.
I'm planning to release Toy as a box-set containing Toy itself, Jet Set Dizzy, and the various parts of the Jet Set Willy II conversion-project.
