Basic Game Design:
Bushfire was setup from the very begining to be a very simple hex-based strategy game. The basic theme is that you must guide fire-fighters to fight fires that have sprung up around your urban areas. There are two distinct turn phases: the first is where the fire-fighter gets to move his tiles, and the second is where the fire gets a chance to grow. The game progresses by alternating between these two phase types. During a fire-fighting phase, the player can only move one tile at a time and then only while that tile has enough movement points for it to move. There are two possible endings to the game: the first is where you lose all of your fire-fighter tiles, while the second is where the fires either completely burn out or have been put out by your fire-fighters.
Working With The File Menu:
The File menu is all very familar, and there are only a few things to note.
The menu items Open, Close, Save and Quit work as you would normally expect.
The menu item New brings up the following dialog, which is used for setting up the random map generator:
There are a variety of options. The first is the difficulty level of the game - basically, the variation is that the harder the game the less fire-fighters you start off with and the more fires start on the map. I've scaled the Even difficulty level to that which I can win within a reasonable amount of effort, but other people might be more comfortable with other difficulty settings. The second choice is that of the map dimension. All maps are square and the dimension is the number of hexes that lie along each side of the map. The larger the map, the more that you have to deal with, and the harder the game becomes.
The Open Edited Map... menu item is a little difference. This is a means where you can open maps that have been made by other people. That I've given it a separate menu location to the standard Open is so that the user might keep in mind that opening an edited map is a little different from opening a saved game. The main thing that a user should keep in mind is that maps that have been edited need to be compiled by Bushfire Editor before Bushfire can read them. If the map isn't pre-compiled, Bushfire will complain appropriately.
Even the Preferences menu item is a familar sight in other applications.
With the Preferences, there are a variety of choices that you can make:
Working With The Map Windows Menu:
When Bushfire opens up a new window in which it displays a map, it will try to make the window as big as possible and still fit in the main display area. If the monitor you are using is larger than the map, then the window is sized to fit. You cannot, at any time, resize the window for yourself - this arose out of consideration about how to keep with the Mac GUI guidelines and still locate the movement arrowpad in the lower right corner, with the Mac GUI losing out (the lower right hand corner is where the Mac resize square is meant to be located).
Like other familar Mac applications, the windows work just like any other windows that you are familar with. Clicking in the titlebar of a window and dragging will move the window about the screen. Clicking in a window's close box will cause the window to close (after doing the familar checking to see if the file needs saving). If a window is in the background, clicking on it will bring it to the foreground and cause it to be updated. Note that clicking on a background window won't result in any actions happening within that window - for example, clicking on a background window where the close box is located won't close the window, it will only bring the window to the foreground.
To help work with windows that might be hidden behind other windows, Bushfire has a Window menu which can help you chose which window you want in the foreground. If you have only one window open, then it will be dimmed and you can't select anything from it. But once you do have 2 or more windows open, then you can select items from the Window menu. Basically, you have a list of open windows and you can either page through them one at a time by using the Next Map menu item, Or you can work your way backwards through the list by chosing the Previous Map menu item. If you have a lot of maps open, you can go directly to the map that you want by selecting the menu item from the list attached to the bottom of the Window menu. The tick tells you which window is currently in the foreground.
Navigating About The Map:
Navigation around the map is very simple, and is based completely on the movement arrowpad located in the lower right hand corner of the map window. There are two things that you can do with the arrowpads - you can either click quickly on one if the arrowpads which will cause the map (if it can move at all) to move one hex in the chosen direction, or you can hold down the mouse on a particular arrowpad and after a slight delay the map will move an entire screen size in the chosen direction.
In Bushfire there is something called the "active unit". The active unit is the single tile that is presently able to recieve commands. Sometimes, it happens, that you have scrolled the map such that you can no longer see your active unit, and clicking the center pad on the arrow pad will call the map to center as best it can on the active unit.
What The Map Is Made Of:
Those who have played V4Victory or World At War will be familar with the look and feel of the graphics used for the maps. The first component of the map graphic are the terrain hexes:
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Lakes - no unit can enter this hex. This hex is meant to represent an unpassable body of water. |
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Clear Field - this is what a flat field of grass looks like. Putting out fires on this kind of terrain is very easy. Grass also doesn't have much flamable material and burns out quickly. Grass fires can never be more than moderately sized. |
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Light Forest - this is what a field of grass with a light sprinkle of trees and bushes looks like. |
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Forest - this is what a fully grown forest looks like. Trying to put out a fire in this can be nearly impossible. Once alight, heavy forests have so much burnable material that they can burn for a long time. Fires in this hexes can grow to enormous sizes. |
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Village - this is basically a grassy field with a scattering of buildings. |
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City - this is a heavily built up area. |
On top of the terrain, we add some details to the map.
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Roads - this is meant to make moving the fire-fighter tiles easier. |
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Hillsides - in this image, we are going uphill as we move from the left hex into the right hex. Fighting fires uphill is harder than downhill. Fires also travel faster up a hill than down. |
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River - this is difficult for all tiles to cross. |
After the terrain, there are the units that get to move about the map.
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This is the tile that the player moves about the hex map. The most number of fire-fighters that can appear in a single hex is always 4. |
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This is the tile that represents fire. The more fire tiles there are, the bigger the fire that is meant to be represented. The maximum number of fire tiles that can appear in a hex varies with the hex type. |
Working With The Fire-Fighter Tiles:
If a fire-fighter tile is able to move (that is that it still has some movement points left and is not asleep) then a green highlight will appear around the hex edge in which the tile in question is located. This is called the active unit, and it is always the topmost tile if the highlight ever appears in a hex where there is a stack of fire-fighter tiles. You can move the mouse near the active tile and if it can move into a neighbouring hex, then the cursor will change into a narrow arrow shape pointing the direction of possible movement. If you then click the mouse the unit will move. If there is not enough movement points available for a fire-fighter tile to move into a hex, then the cursor will remain the familar default cursor.
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A fire-fighter who is able to move into an adjacent hex. |
Having a fire-fighter try to put out a fire is very much the same as in moving the fire-fighter tile. If your fire-fighter is adjacent to the hex with the fire tile, then you can move your mouse over the hex and if you have enough movement points to enter that hex then you will be allowed to fight the fire, which you can see by whether the narrow arrow cursor replaces the default cursor.
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A fire-fighter who is able to attempt to put out a fire. |
When you then click on the hex that you want to fight fires in, you will be shown which fire-fighters contribute to putting a fire out. This is conveyed by the cursor being hidden for a moment, during which little arrows are drawn on the map corresponding to those fire-fighters that are making a contribution. From this is becomes obvious just how important it is that your fire-fighters give each other support in the face of fire. It is important to note that when several fire-fighters are used at once, only that tile that you are moving will experiance any changes to its state, that is the active unit will expend its movement points on putting out the fire, but those fire-fighters that are playing a supporting role will experiance no changes. This is a useful trick, for even a tile that has expended all of its movement points for that turn phase will, for a moment, act as if it is fully mobile if it is supporting some other tile that is trying to put out a fire.
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What you see during an attempt to put out a fire. Notice how there are little arrows showing which fire-fighters took part in the attempt. |
There are three outcomes to an attempt to put out a fire:
Sometimes, you don't want to use the present active fire-fighter tile, so you can page through the list of fire-fighters by chosing the Next button from the display at the bottom of the map window. This means that latter on in the present turn phase, you will have to return to that tile and decide what to do with it. Those tiles that have used up their movement points or are asleep are not returned by clicking on this button. (A note on the button graphic: I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, so what you see on the button is a graphic that I used while trying to figure out how to work the linked lists that contain the tile infomation. It's a graphic that came out of the design stage of programming and was the best that I could come up with that represented what I wanted it to represent - so tell me if you have problems with the graphic being confusing or such.)
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The Next button - this pages through the list of fire-fighter tiles that are free to move. |
Sometimes, you don't want to use a fire-fighter tile at all for the rest of the present turn phase. To prevent the present active unit from becoming active again during the present turn phase, you can select the Defer button from the display at the bottom of the map window. When the next turn phase comes around, the unit will be a one of those units that can become active.
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The Defer button - this defers a tile's possible actions until the next turn phase. |
Sometimes, like towards the end of a game when you might have surplus tiles, you might want a more permanent solution then being able to defer the tile's actions until the next turn phase. You can select the Sleep button from the display at the bottom of the map window and this will mean that that unit will not become active again during latter turn phases, although it will still have a presence on the map (affecting other units that might want to move into the hex that it is in, for example).
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The Sleep button - this puts a tile to sleep. |
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The Wake button - this can be used to wake all the tiles in a hex. |
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What you see when you are about to wake a fire-fighter. |
Comments About The Game-Play:
Life's not easy for fire-fighters. There are two types of problems (other than fighting fires) that a fire-fighter has to contend with. The first is that in the face of out of control fire one must retreat from it. In Bushfire, like in real life, you have no real control over where fire will push your fire-fighters:
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If retreating in the face of uncontrollable fire isn't bad enough then there is worse. If a fire-fighter can't retreat then the fire overruns him and he gets killed. Once you lose a fire-fighter tile this way you can never get him back - so in other words treat your fire-fighters like a great treasure.
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There are a few things to keep in mind, and which should help you to fight fires: