Rayman 1

[Steo]

Yeah, the Saturn was good for these things, as we could even see with the loading transitions it had. Jaguar likely would have been really awkward to program for. I guess hearing how they handled level switching and the fact that it lacks sliding physics makes that clear though.

[PluMGMK]

So apparently we don't have a Rayman Junior topic (or at least I couldn't find it) so I'll just say what I have to say here.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds the punishment for wrong answers in plant-the-seed levels particularly disturbing. I mean, as a kid, I used to find the wrong answer punishments disturbing in general*, with all those big red enemies suddenly appearing on top of Rayman, but I still think they really went above and beyond with those plants. Like, did they really have to bloody anthropomorphize it, when the non-evil version is just a simple platform?
Here's something they could have done instead: just make a stalk grow up with six spiky fruits on it, and no nénuphar. That wouldn't have involved the invention of any new monsters, just the use of existing dangerous plants from the established universe. I say six, because then it's somewhat plausible that their combined action could insta-kill Rayman even at full health.

* Didn't help that much of the time, I actually knew the answers, but just sucked at the game so much that I ended up in the wrong place!
That excuse can't be applied to planting the seed though – I think what caught me there was being asked whether "O" or "K" came first in the alphabet, while under time pressure from rising water. It's a bit like "say the colour, not the word", given how common the expression "OK" is…

[The Jonster]

We can always make a topic for it later if need be.

Oh, those weird flowers with the scary face on them! Yeah those were pretty gnarly. And yeah the punishments are pretty brutal. Like anything bad could happen from random deadly red enemies appearing, falling into liquids or the abyss, etc.

[PluMGMK]

Yeah, using Ray1Map, you can see all the punishments in a level at once, and it feels like the devs really enjoyed coming up with creative ways of killing Rayman! I wonder if it helped them vent frustration with various things in life… Strongsad38001 once uploaded a really entertaining compilation of them to YouTube, but unfortunately that account ended up being deleted due to copyright violations.

[Steo]

That's a shame, seems Google has become notorious for such things. I kind of wish they didn't own YouTube.

[Fifo]

So apparently we don't have a Rayman Junior topic (or at least I couldn't find it) so I'll just say what I have to say here.

I feel like an Edutainment topic could be useful.

[dr_st]

Inspired by this recent discussion, I fired up my copy of the Hebrew Rayman Junior (that teaches math), and found that the translation broke some aspects of the game. There exist levels where you are supposed match numbers to their pronunciation. One such level has you find all the numbers that have "one" in their name.

For instance, you are supposed to select numbers like 102 ("one hundred and two"), or 1513 ("one thousand, five hundred and thirteen"). However, in Hebrew, these would be pronounced differently, without explicitly mentioning the word "one". It would be like "hundred and two" or "thousand five hundred and thirteen".

It seems that the localization teams simply did one-to-one translation in most places, and as a result, if you go by the proper Hebrew names of numbers, you cannot properly complete this level. You really have to know the English names. There may be more such levels, but this is the one I noticed. Pity that they didn't playtest it thoroughly.

[The Jonster]

So apparently we don't have a Rayman Junior topic (or at least I couldn't find it) so I'll just say what I have to say here.

I feel like an Edutainment topic could be useful.

Maybe, if there's enough talk about the games.

It's too bad they don't have running in Junior. It makes the level with the easel really long and boring for me. It's one of the first levels in the game too.

[PluMGMK]

Inspired by this recent discussion, I fired up my copy of the Hebrew Rayman Junior (that teaches math), and found that the translation broke some aspects of the game. There exist levels where you are supposed match numbers to their pronunciation. One such level has you find all the numbers that have "one" in their name.

For instance, you are supposed to select numbers like 102 ("one hundred and two"), or 1513 ("one thousand, five hundred and thirteen"). However, in Hebrew, these would be pronounced differently, without explicitly mentioning the word "one". It would be like "hundred and two" or "thousand five hundred and thirteen".

It seems that the localization teams simply did one-to-one translation in most places, and as a result, if you go by the proper Hebrew names of numbers, you cannot properly complete this level. You really have to know the English names. There may be more such levels, but this is the one I noticed. Pity that they didn't playtest it thoroughly.

That's just so full of fail, I can't even…

Hey guys, let's make an educational game for kids and make them think in a foreign language without ever explicitly stating that's part of the challenge! Yeah, great idea! Not like we have an English with Rayman game we could translate instead…

It's too bad they don't have running in Junior. It makes the level with the easel really long and boring for me. It's one of the first levels in the game too.

With the exception of the final level, where Mister Dark casts his forced-running spell. But yeah, I guess running would allow you to skip over a lot of the questions and maybe break the sequencing. It's the same reason that they spammed most of the maps with falling types – the amount of /!\s you can see in Ray1Map's types mode on those levels is quite something!

[rzil]

One such level has you find all the numbers that have "one" in their name.

I am pretty sure they ask for numbers with 1 as digit, not "one" as word contained in the number name. (and I think even the instructions say so explicitly)
kids should know that 612 have the digit 1 even though it is named "six hundred and twelve"

[dr_st]

One such level has you find all the numbers that have "one" in their name.

I am pretty sure they ask for numbers with 1 as digit, not "one" as word contained in the number name. (and I think even the instructions say so explicitly)
kids should know that 612 have the digit 1 even though it is named "six hundred and twelve"

Nope, definitely not in the level I was talking about (the last one of the Blue Mountains in my case). Try collecting a ting from a number that ends with "11" and you will die. I think there may be several similar levels with slightly different instructions.

That's just so full of fail, I can't even…

Hey guys, let's make an educational game for kids and make them think in a foreign language without ever explicitly stating that's part of the challenge! Yeah, great idea! Not like we have an English with Rayman game we could translate instead…

Well, as I said, this was clearly not the intent, merely the byproduct of lack of proper playtesting. But, hey, Rayman 1 itself was said to not have been playtested properly, and that's how it ended up so frustratingly hard according to the common opinion.

But yeah, I guess running would allow you to skip over a lot of the questions and maybe break the sequencing. It's the same reason that they spammed most of the maps with falling types – the amount of /!\s you can see in Ray1Map's types mode on those levels is quite something!

TBH, the challenge of Rayman Junior really does not come from the exercises, but from the game itself. It seems it was designed with the idea that kids of a certain way will have mastered Rayman 1 before they learn basic arithmetic / language skills. In the typical the case, the opposite is far more likely to be true!

[The Jonster]

It's too bad they don't have running in Junior. It makes the level with the easel really long and boring for me. It's one of the first levels in the game too.

With the exception of the final level, where Mister Dark casts his forced-running spell. But yeah, I guess running would allow you to skip over a lot of the questions and maybe break the sequencing. It's the same reason that they spammed most of the maps with falling types – the amount of /!\s you can see in Ray1Map's types mode on those levels is quite something!

That's also true, running over obstacles would have a chance of breaking something within the game!

Speaking of Rayman Junior wrong answers, I remember there was one level in particular I remember where if you got the wrong answer, Rayman would mysteriously have a drowning animation even though there's no liquid under him. I seem to recall this level to have something to do with counting and it was in Picture City. I wondered why it was necessary since red death-inducing obstacles would clearly have been better for that situation.

[PluMGMK]

I definitely agree that the challenge came from the gameplay and not the questions - as I said earlier, that's what led to most of my wrong answer punishments! The packaging acknowledges this, by saying "hand-eye coordination" is one of the main things it helps children to develop.

In the "Eraser Rebound" level, you drown instead of bouncing if you jump on the wrong eraser. You'll notice that they hardly used red pricklies at all in Picture City, except in the final segments. I suspect they didn't copy the prickly sprites over until fairly late in the development. Somehow the drowning didn't bother me at all - I was just glad not to see any red pricklies!

[The Jonster]

Yeah, that's the level I was thinking of! I found odd the first time I ever played through that level and made the slight mistake, since it technically shouldn't be possible for Rayman or really anybody in reality to drown in something solid like an eraser.

I was just glad not to see any red pricklies!

What if they were red antitoons?

[PluMGMK]

Yeah, for some reason I didn't mind red antitoons as much, despite their big teeth. I guess it's because they were smaller than Rayman, so at least they weren't engulfing him.

As for why the erasers drowned you instead of spawning antitoons, I think there's a philosophical reason there. In most of the puzzles you're told to "follow a path". If it's the wrong path, the devs are free to booby-trap it in any way they see fit. However, in that puzzle, you're told to "jump on an eraser". You can't really booby-trap an eraser itself except by changing its intrinsic collision properties. It's the same philosophical reason that they had to invent evil plants to punish planting the seed in the wrong place, though in that case I've outlined a less disturbing way they could have done it.

[Steo]

I think it was Glackum I seen playing Junior at one stage, then two words made sense, so he was just left scratching his head.

[PluMGMK]

Was that in the Mountain level where you have to choose words belonging to certain semantic categories?

[Steo]

I can't even remember now, it was a while back that I seen it. I never did play Junior myself, but I guess I should at some stage just for the sake of it.

[RayCarrot]

Over 1000 commits later and Ray1Map now finally supports the Jaguar prototypes, meaning it now supports every single game and version which uses the Rayman 1 multiplatform+Jaguar engines!

I'm going to go over some findings and such from the prototypes now:

Jaguar prototype:


This prototype actually has a reference table at the end of the rom which has a name for every piece of referenced data in the rom. This means we actually have function names, data names, certain variable names etc. which is absolutely amazing. Droolie even made a script so we can view it in Ghidra with this info, which is really cool.
Besides the aspect of being able to see function names we now also have event and animation names. Some interesting things from this:
- Event names matches the names in Designer, i.e. they all start with "MS_" and have names like "LIV", "CHA" etc.
- MS apparently stands for "Multi-Sprite", which makes sense since an event is a collection of multiple sprites.
- The name "event" was apparently used by Ubisoft after all. We assumed it was a name only used in Designer, since the PC source code always calls them "obj", but here they're called events.
- Animation names are also incredibly interesting. You can view them in the animation export.
- Collision types in this version don't match the other versions. It seems there are two types of collision for solid tiles, most likely one for tiles you can go down through (the proto and demo allow you to go through certain platforms by pressing jump+down).

Other interesting discoveries:
- Mr Stone is in the prototype and uses placeholder graphics for some parts. There are multiple animation names referenced in the rom, but they all point to the one and only animation actually available:

- The image data for the tentacle flower is in the rom, but it's missing the image descriptors (used to parse the image data) as well as animation data
- Gendoors in this version spawn events, rather than making them visible. For example at the beginning of the stage there's a gendoor which can spawn both small and big livingstones at random. Ray1Map doesn't display this as there are no graphics for it (there actually aren't gendoor graphics in the final Jaguar version either, but we hard-coded it to the user the Magician's sprite since other versions do that - we can't here though since it's not actually linked to anything, the events are spawned from code). This is only possible because the Jaguar version can modify the amount of events at runtime, unlike the multi-platform engine which has a set amount of events per level.

Some early graphics:









Jaguar demo:
I'm not really sure how many maps people are familiar with from this demo. The game becomes unplayable at a certain stage due to a non-functional Moskito boss, levels without exit signs etc. I know some people managed to access other levels by hacking, but not all. So for many this is probably the first time we actually see all maps. I'm only going to post the most interesting ones here (I'll post all of them on the wiki soon so you can see them there). Before that though, some interesting stuff:
- The level order is very different, but interestingly it matches the level order in the vol. 6 Japanese PlayStation demo!
- There is a leftover "DEMO?!" event from the vol. 3 Japanese PlayStation demo
- This is the only version we've found where this unused sign actually has an event definition (meaning it can actually be hacked into a level like it was intended, rather than just changing the graphic). Sadly it's completely non-functional (no collision or anything)

The music sign on the other hand seems to cause a level end animation to play, but then the game freezes:

- The Bzzit flight stage is there, but since the Rayman on Bzzit event isn't available the stage crashes when loaded in-game. Viewing it in Ray1Map shows it's mostly complete, but unlike the final game it doesn't have the tings spell out the cheat code to access Breakout. (the music signs in the screenshot below were added through Ray1Map - the game has no graphics for editor events on Jaguar, so we add them manually to make it look nicer when viewing - the music sign was in fact originally intended for something else).

- This build have functions to load levels in all worlds of the game, even though it only includes levels from Jungle and Music. Sadly the maps aren't in the rom. There is however leftover data for certain graphics, like the totem in the Mr Stone boss, the fish from Cave etc. These can be parsed using the descriptor data from the final version.
- The Music levels have a giant version of a cloud:


- They had a lot more fun with the eye placements here

- The stage where you fly up on a maracas has auto-scroll triggers which move faster than the maracas, so the level is nearly impossible to beat
- All the Betilla stages are completely different, and have water so you can die

- Only the Bzzit version of Moskito exists, so he is the one who chases you, unlike in the final Jaguar version where it's Moskito. It seems like originally there was only the Bzzit version, but then they split him into two bosses and made the second one red. Maybe the devs got confused as to who was chasing you and forgot to change his colors on PS1? It can't have been easy maintaining two completely different engines for the game (the Jaguar engine is completely different)...

Some of the interesting maps:

Hopefully I didn't forget anything, but this post is already long enough so I'll stop here lol Hopefully this interests some people I'm going to upload maps to the wiki soon (I need to finish adding the other ones to the level articles first) and then I'll probably make a video on YouTube to show all the discoveries we've made across all versions of R1!

[StelzenBomber]

Increadible


Youre doing amazing work!