Tuesday 16. February 1993 ------Joona Palaste------ M A Z E M A N I A ------------------- Playing instructions - 1: The Idea - Maze Mania is, by a simple means, an arcade game. More like a puzzle game than a platform game, though. The idea of the game is to guide your little character around 16 screens collecting diamonds and reaching the exit. There are other features too, the main one of which is a construction kit. - 2: The Front End - After loading Maze Mania and getting rid of the blue loading "picture", it's onto the front end. This cycles between the game logo and the options on offer. Simply press the correct function key (the gray keys at the top of your Amiga) to access the features. Now, before you try anything else, a little note about alerts. They are the little gray-and-black text messages you seem to be getting all the time. To get rid of them, press either mouse button or "y"/"n". The button you press does matter, because some of the alerts are in fact requesters. The press of the left mouse button or "y" is thought of as YES, while the right mouse button or "n" means NO. - 3: Playing the Game - After a press of either F1, the left mouse button or the firebutton you will gain access to the game proper. You're supposed to be the little flesh pink dot (a "face"), which you steer either with the joystick or the numeric keypad. There are six different kinds of terrain. The two most basic of them are empty space, which is completely unaccessible, and "road" which is just about your basic terrain. Dangers/fires are the orange dots, and they are lethal to touch. One press too far equals buying the farm. Crumbly areas (shown in shaded) are just that; leave them and you can't come back. Diamonds are shown as cyan dots, and you can collect them by touching them. Then, all that is left, are the generators. To see what these look like, access the game and look at the "GADGet" picture. Touching these will result in a diamond appearing somewhere on the map. After collecting a set number of diamonds, you can reach the exit, which will take you to a new level. I will now show you a scoring table: Diamonds...........25 points each Crumbly areas......3 points each Generators.........10 points each Completing levels..200 points. To pause the game, press either "p" or the spacebar. To exit, press ESCape. - 4: Level Codes and Custom Levels - There are 16 codes (work for yourself how many per level), which consist of four letters of normal English. Just press F2 and type one. If it's invalid, you will be abandoned to level A. You will be shown a code for the next level every time you complete a level, regardless of how well you fared. You can play on two different kinds of levels: the default levels, and custom ones. You will only see the end sequence if you play the default levels. To access a custom set of levels, either load them from the game, or perform "clear all!" from the construction kit. To select default levels, just press the right function key, and after a confirmation, they will be yours to play. Selecting "delete levels" will display a requester of level files to delete. Click on one and confirm to delete the set from disk. - 5: The Construction Kit - Pressing F4 or the right mouse button at the front end takes you to the construction kit. Obviously, there are lots of features here. Firstly, let's explain the instruments. There are three drawing instruments: dot, line and filled box. Select one by clicking on it. Any type of terrain can also be selected from the blue set of boxes. To draw on the level, click the mouse on the level area. For lines and boxes, you will need to hold the mouse button down. Clicking on the level name or the code will - providing you have custom levels to edit - allow you to type a new name or code for that level. Then, a more important feature will be discussed: the action buttons. The most basic of them are "you?" and "ext?" which will inform you of your/the exit's position in the current level. The two other most basic buttons are "l+" and "l-" which will allow you to edit different levels from the set. Then there are the "clear!" and the "clear all!" buttons. A click on the first one will clear the selected level, while the second one will clear all levels. To begin creating your own levels, click on "clear all!". Otherwise, all drawing will be disabled. Now only the ">you"/">ext" and the file operation buttons remain. The ">you/ext" buttons are used to set your/the exit's position on the level. Just click on them and then on the level area. The file operation buttons are "save" (save the levels to disk), "load" (load levels from disk) and "quit" (well... quit, actually). My apologies for the slightly crude interface in the load/saving operations. - 6: The High Scores - Pressing F3 will show you the high scores table. There are 10 positions for you to appear in, and a built-in ranking system, which will show the previous game score's rank from "MegaDrive owner" to "Miracle"... To exit the table, press any key. Mouse buttons are inoperable. - 7: Other Information - The game includes speech. To toggle it on/off, press ctrl-s. The end sequence is worth watching. It includes pretty (8-colour) pictures, sound (beeps), and a message. When typing a code, you can use either UPPER CASE or lower case. If you cannot get past some messages, click the mouse or press any key (preferably "n"). That usually helps. Anybody with AMOS knowledge, would you please tell me why the spacebar pauses the game much more frequently than the "p" key? They are both tested in exactly the same way. ENJOY THIS GAME!! If you like it, carry out the money-sending instructions on the Readme_First! file. See you...