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Who set up Monkey Shines HQ?
He was one of the first people to release an add-on world for "Monkey Shines" (Phil's Mac World..which won the first Fantasoft Level Design Contest!!) and decided to created the site to encourage others to do the start making worlds. Philip is also the author of "A Very Bonzo Christmas", a world he produced in conjunction with Alan Lau, the "Monkey Shines" Graphic Artist. The development of this site has also resulted in the production of a DocMaker version of his tutorial, which is now distributed with the Macintosh Level Editor as the official Level Editor guide. He's also involved in the development of "Monkey Shines 2 - Gorilla Warfare"...his semi-offical job being world design...deciding just how to lay out all the cool graphics into the worlds. If you really want to find out more about Philip, then visit his Home Page here at this site. And please...make the counter tick over...it's looking pretty dismal!!
 Monkey Shines is a shareware game for the Macintosh and PC, released by Fantasoft Software. They produce numerous games for the Mac platform (such as the very popular and award winning "Realmz" role-playing game) and the PC. Monkey Shines is an arcade-type platform game. It features a monkey (Bonzo) that must run around a number of screens collecting fruit, blue keys (if he wants to get to the bonus levels) and red keys, in order to activate the Exit and complete the level (or world). If you would like to see some actual images of the game Fantasoft have a screen-shots page. In its' unregistered state you can play one world..."Spooked", but there are four other worlds that come with the game..."Spaced Out", "About The House", "In The Drink" and "In The Swing". In order to be able to access these worlds you need to register the game. That's well over 120 screens to work through for the registration fee and before you play any add-on worlds!!! Registration not only allows access to these four other worlds, but it also allows access to the "Other" button. This button (which is very important for this site) allows you to load worlds that anyone has created.
As mentioned above, you simply need to register the game to play add-on worlds. You'll find it pretty tough going not registering but continuing creating levels. You do need to test your levels out!! Currently the Level Editor is only available for the Mac, so PC users are only able to play converted Mac files. To create your own world see my pages elsewhere on this site on design, or visit the Fantasoft pages on design.
Which is it...Levels or Worlds ? You'll notice that I use the terms World and Level fairly inter-changeably, as they are more or less the same thing. These are the files that either come with "Monkey Shines", or that you or others create. I prefer the term World, as it tends to imply that each world is quite different from another. Try and give your world themes...my first world for instance "Phil's Mac World", has an obvious Macintosh theme to it. I think the term level tends to imply either an increase in difficulty ("Hey...I've just finished a level of Monkey Shines") or implies a location ("Hey...I went up two levels and found the exit door")..so I'll try and be consistent and use World. One other term you should start to become familiar with is Screens ...and this is a fairly straight-forward one. My first World (yes, I do go on about it...hey, I'm proud of it) has 20 screens plus 3 bonus screens. These are the different screens in the world that Bonzo faces his challenges on. Later on you'll see that it is recommended that each world have a minimum of 20 screens. |
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On
July 28th 1997 "Bonzo Hits CyberSpace" went on-line!!
This site is the evolution of that site, which was run from
that time until February 2000 by Philip Roy. With Philip at
the helm we witnessed the moving of the site to the
Fantasoft domain, the launching of the new name of "Monkey
Shines HQ" and having it presented as the offical Monkey
Shines site. This a very old picture of Philip, but
unfortunately he's just a big kid who enjoys playing
computer games and "Monkey Shines" is just one of those
games.
