No Fragments Archive 10: Diskmags

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ No Fragments Archive 10: Diskmags / nf_archive_10.iso / MAGS / NARSIL / UNREGGED / N43.MSA / DATA43.ZIP / SKAMPY / READ.ME next >

Wrap

Text File | 1990-01-01 | 15.2 KB | 370 lines

******************* ** S K A M P Y ** ******************* ************************** *** RELEASE DEMO 0.9 *** ************************** SKAMPY BY JASON DAMISCH AND THE FORTH GAMES WORKSHOP 2000 CONTENTS 0. Shareware Notice 1. Story 2. Play Instructions 3. Installation Instructions 4. My Story 5. Ending Comments ***************************** ** 00. Shareware Notice ** ***************************** Hi guys! I hope you liked the demo. This is being released as shareware. a. Send us a postcard or a letter with an address on it where you can get mail. b. When the game is complete, we will send out mailings. c. You can use the inclosed coupon to get your game for $7 instead of the regular $10. This would be in United States currency if possiable. Send your postcards and letters to Skampy c/o Tonya Damisch 1063 Saginaw Salem, Oregon 97302 Permision is given to spread this demo around as much as you like, provided that the files are not changed or altered in some way. Permision will not be given to distribute the final version freely, it will be $10, $7 with coupon. ******************* ** 1. Story ** ******************* It was a very long time ago that Mimi the good witch created the magical domain of Zowgo. In this underground realm did she study arcane magic and cast many amazing spells. At times studying magic can be a very lonesome affair. In her lonelyness she eventually created a magical creature to keep her company. This creature was named SKAMPY. This green smiley face with legs was a good companion. Even after she passed away from the world he was faithful to her memory. He inherited the magical domain of Zowgo for himself, and all of the fruit for himself, for munching. Unfortunately, several years latter, monsters invaded Zowgo looking for something to much on themselves, and it wasn't fruit. Skampy must eat, but this makes his life that much more difficult. ********************************* ** 2. PLAY INSTRUCTIONS *** ********************************* In the game of SKAMPY, you must wander many underground mazes in search of food while avoiding monsters. A. The game is joystick controled, use the port other than the mouse port B. Eat all of the fruit to advance to the next level. C. In order for SKAMPY to defend himself, there are two methods 1. Stepping on a green tile stuns monsters for a period of time. 2. Rocks can be thrown at skull and eyeball monsters to stun them for a period of time. A. First grab a rock by walking over it. They appear as small round stones lying about in the maze. B. Release the fire button. Point the joystick in the direction of a monster. Press the fire button while pointing at monster. C. The rock bounces off of the monster stunning it. It may be picked up for reuse. D. Most mazes have alteast one rock. There is often more than one rock lying around in a maze, Skampy can hold more than one rock at at time for throwing. E. The eyeballs and skulls can be restuned before they move again. D. SKAMPY can gain a free life by steping on a tile that looks like himself. E. Warning, steping on a red tile will stun SKAMPY for a period of time. F. There are doors that open automatically by picking up a key of the corresponding color. G. The Skull Monsters wander in a predetermined pattern H. The Ghost Monsters also wander in a pattern. They are gaseous, so they are immune to rocks, and can move through walls. I. The Eyeball Monsters chase SKAMPY relentlessly. J. There is a timer. If the timer goes to zero, the ghosts will break out of their confines and chase SKAMPY. K. Touching a clock tile will give SKAMPY more time. L. Pressing Spacebar will pause the game. M. Pressing 'E' will exit the current game and return to the attract mode. N. Pressing 'Q' will exit the current game and return to the desktop O. See if you can get through all of the levels to reach the end game sequence. Good Luck! Monster Nickname ------- -------- Skull Monster Skinny Ghost Monster Creepy Eyeball Monster Tuna Lips *************************************** ** 3. INSTALATION INSTRUCTIONS ** *************************************** When the game is decompressed, it should pretty much be ready to run, with the files in their proper places. Here are the files Folder SKAMPY containing Folder LEVELS File READ.ME File SKAMPY.TOS Folder LEVELS containing File HISCORES File LEVEL.000 File LEVEL.001 . . . . File LEVEL.050 File TOPPER You may need to run this from a minimaly configured system. That is to say, run it from TOS. If you have half a meg, run it from floppy with no hard drive active and no desk accessorys either. If you have more than half a meg, you can run it from a hard drive, but it probably won't run from any desktop or operating system other than TOS. If it does I'd like to know about it. Note that I've tried SKAMPY from the PC emulator WinSTon and it seems to work fine there. Bug: SKAMPY will run if booted up from low res, but when exiting, the screen will look funny, sorry, this is a glitch that I could not correct. Fault of the Forthmacs compiler. Boot up from medium res! ************************ ** 4. MY STORY ** ************************ WARNING: This is somewhat technical, you can skip it if you like. I always had this dream of creating an Atari game, even when I was a little kid. It was something that stuck with me from the time that I first played Air Sea Battle, Combat, and others on the venerable old 2600. My first computer was an Timex Sinclare 1000, yech! I may have been barely into my teens when I bought it with very hard earned money that I aquired by picking strawberrys during the Summer. I remember the sales lady telling me that I should not buy it because it was not much of a computer. Probably should have listened. By using this computer I first learned what a programming loop was. I tried to learn about that on the TRS 80 at school, but the idea would not sink in. Then at home I tried to get a pixel/block to move from one side of the screen to the other. My BASIC program consisted of line after line of statements, all alike, which drew the block in a location, erased that block, and redrew the block in the new location ajacent to the preceeding one and so on. I ended up filling up the pathetic 1K RAM space before I was able to get the dot to move all of the way across the screen. Pretty frustrating for a little kid. 'So thats what a looping statment is for?!' Perhaps only the next year after that, my poor mom scraped up enough money to buy me an Atari 800XL computer, which was on sale at K-Mart, for $100, plus a cassette tape drive. Finally a real machine! I'd still say the nicest 8bit computer ever built. On this machine I learned Atari BASIC, which seemed nicer that the TRS 80 or the Timex BASIC. At the public library I found a very special book Dr. C. Wackos Miracle Guild To Creating Your Own Videogame ( or something like that ) a true classic in my mind, which I still wish I could have in my collection. Very entertaining while being able to lay down the fundamentals of operating the Atari hardware, sound, graphics, joystick, all in the context of writing a game. Wonderfull. So, in order to test out my new knowledge, I tried to create something simple, which would not be too hard to build, for my first game. It was FRACK MAN, a PAC-MAN clone. This striped down version had no power pellets and only two ghosts. Well, much to my dismay, the game was so slow you could basically move your player in one direction, let up on the joystick, walk away to make some breakfast, and come back after you had eaten breakfast and still wait for the player to move a single pixel across the screen. Well, it wasn't that slow but it was most unplayable. And, I worked so hard on it. I didn't know it at the time, but interpretive BASIC is dog slow, and unless you have a really tight efficient program which can only be created through experience, a game in interpreted BASIC will be too slow to be playable. Maybe a year after that or two, I was talking to my friend at school, which happened to be the smartest kid in class. He had tried to write some games for another 6502 baised machine. He had this peice of line rule paper which had all of the machine language commands written on it with their hexadecimal and decimal values along with their nuemonics. This was the key!!! Machine language is the fastest language. But, too bad, our family was poor. So, I could not afford to buy an assembler cartridge, or a hard disk drive. Actually, I didn't even know what an assembler was. We were lucky to be able to buy two new 2600 carts a year though, so a Hard Drive was out of the question. It never really occured to me to get some real development tools. So, I proceeded to hack out a graphics exceleration subroutine by coping commands from the peice of paper my pal gave me, onto another peice of paper and then POKEing it into the memory of my 800XL from BASIC. There was a special command in Atari BASIC to call a machine language subroutine that way. I learned about page addressing, and registers X, Y, and the Accumulator. For this, I decided to create a new game, called RECOVERY. Here is the premise of it. You drive around a little armored vehicle. You are supposed to pick up canisters of radioactive material laying around the screen, one at a time and drive them back to a central disposal bin. While this is happening, there are three space ships trying to chase you down. You can shoot the space ships. There are mountains around the screen which you have to drive around while doing this, but the space ships can fly over them. There are three levels each with a different screen layout. Well, this game, while being much faster than FRACK-MAN, was also far too slow to be playable. It was neater, but still too slow to be playable. What was happening was that although the graphics routines were in assembler, the rest of the game was still in BASIC, and was being slowed down by such. And both of these games were littered with bugs and glitches. Threw in the towel for a few years. I got old enough to have a job and earn some money after school. So, I worked hard, 4 hours every night, and saved up some money. Then low and behold, the Atari ST came out. A decision had to be made, get a disk drive for the 800XL, or get the ST. I guess it was a toss up, but I decided to go for the ST. On this machine I knew that I was going to be able to create videogames for sure this time. So, I went to Toys R Us to get the ST. WRONG The included BASIC was worse than the 800XL one, and the LOGO was even worse than that, atleast from the perspective of writing games. What the heck is an operating system? Where are the player missle graphics? As I latter found out, this machine is mondo mondo harder to program than the 800XL I so foolishly left behind. You have to deal with things such as bit planes. And, you have to write and install a data package handling routine to access the joystick on an ST. On the good old 800XL, the sticks were just a PEEK away. I was flabbergasted. Even the sound chip is harder to use. You need to first tell the chip which register on it you want to use, and then tell it what you want in that register. Somewhere along the way, I heard about a language called FORTH, which seemed interesting. I went to the library and read up on it. It seemed like a really great idea. Here is a language that you can add any command to that you wanted. I could create a command called BANG, which when typed in, would make an explosion sound. I could create a command called DIE, which when I typed it in, would destroy a spaceship. Wonderful. And on top of all of this it was supposed to be fast ! So, I tried a few commercial FORTH implimentations. The first was a FORTH put out by the Fly by Night Group. I was suprised at the total lack of documentation. How was anybody supposed to learn how to use this? Well, I tried hacking with it, and that is how I really found out about how much more difficult it would be to write an ST game than an 8bit game. But, it wasn't a very usable product anyway. One glaring fault was a total lack of a 68000 assembler for writing assembly language routines. I wanted to create a wiz bang fast arcade game, and I knew I needed an assembler to do the graphics subroutines. The rest of the game could be in FORTH. Then I latter tried 4x4 by the Dragon Group. Ok, here is the key! Or so I thought. But, as it turned out, the assember package in this FORTH was buggy. I can't remember all of what was wrong with this system, but it was not good enough for my purposes. And I heard good things about 4x4 too. A few years latter on I decided to try Mitch Bradleys ForthMacs for the ST. Difference of night and day. It worked. The documentation was good. And it was shareware, only $50. By that time I was in college and used it to create a disk sector recovery utility, and another utility to flip a bitmap image for creating T-shirt iron ons with. But I didn't have time to write a game. I tried a little on and off, but I didn't really have all of the knowledge of the hardware to really do it right anyway. Ended up dropping out of school and joining the work force but thats another story. Until a few years ago, this dream of mine was lying dormant, but still viable. The dream to create a real videogame. So, I started to try again. Got online to get the rest of the information about the hardware I needed. Learned how to crank out decient assembly routines for the graphics. Learned how to create code that was elegant enough to not be bug strewn, and which was somewhat maintainable and developable. Followed the FORTH phylosophy of writing and then immediately testing one subroutine at a time, always. It started to come together at last. And here you have it! Game: Skampy Genre: Gobble Game Language: ForthMacs Graphics: OCP Artstudio ***************************** ** 5. FINAL COMMENTS *** ***************************** I hope you like the game. I think that it is a decient amature effort, not as good as Yak, maybe somewhat behind Munsies stuff, but better than a poke in the eye! Hey, it looks, feels, and sounds like a real videogame. And, yes, its fast enough to be playable! FORTH is fast enough to write arcade games in, I always knew that. And I guess I was always too headstrong to try STOS although I've seen stuff in STOS which was in the PD library which was still not as good as my game. Dream: Write an outstanding good RPG for Dreamcast or Nuon Take Care. Jason Damisch Forth Games Workshop "Games In The Future"