***************************** * * * Team Mango's SKIMMERS AGA * * Pre-release demo V0.7 * * * ***************************** System requirements. -------------------- A1200 or A4000 1.8 megs of free CHIP ram. >If your title bar says you've got less, don't >run it. Approximately 2 megs of HD space. Setpatch should be running. Not tested on standard A1200 - recommend accelerator card! About the demo. --------------- As this is a game in progress, you shouldn't be expecting a fully playable game. As it stands, the gameplay is only half finished, we have been concentrating mainly on getting decent movement of the skimmers. The graphics are being worked upon by our newly-recruited artists, and the purpose of this demo is to give them an idea of what the game will be like. The idea of the game. --------------------- In the finished game, the idea will be to become the ruler of Kinesus IV, by 'skimming' (ie. capturing enemy territory and wiping the enemies out) through a series of races in the technologically-advanced boy racer skimmer carts. The races will be played in arenas which have a track layout, but the idea will be to get the most Blood Points in a certain amount of time, rather than to complete a certain amount of laps. Points will be awarded for completing laps, and this will be the highest scoring task next to total destruction of an enemy skimmer, which is why the CPU skimmers will aim to complete laps, rather than to wipe each other out. Other than this, points can be scored by ramming other skimmers, hitting other skimmers, and also by picking up bonuses on the arenas. The game map is where all the tactical parts of the game go on, here you can plan out where your next move will be, and you can see an overall view of the whole of Kinesus IV, which is laid out in four distinct areas with boundaries: * The Desert Zones * The Future City Zones * The Ocean Zones * The Lava Zones * The River and Sand Boundary Zones So what is in the demo? ----------------------- In this demo, you will be able to play on the battle map and you will also be able to play the game on a single arena with three other skimmers. There's nothing fancy like energy bars, time or lap counters or shooting as yet, but this is only about 3 months on/off work. Hopefully it'll just get some people interested in the game. At the moment it looks like being a PD release, but if we get any publishers interested then it'll be a commercial for sure. Sorry if it crashes all the time, but it is a VERY early demo which shouldn't even have been released, but how else are we going to get recognised? The game will crash a lot less if it is ran from no-startup, but make sure that you run setpatch, else it'll be really jerky. The main crashing point is when the map sector attempts to load the game sector. If you want to muck about on the map for a while, click 'no' when asked if you want to try to stop an enemy from taking a new piece of territory. Why the massive overheads? -------------------------- Why all the memory? Why all the space? I know it may seem a lot for just a demo, but I hope that in the end, the game will take up less than 6 megs of space. It'll be HD only, but a future patch may be released to allow the game to run from floppy. The game at the moment needs lots of chip mem due to the size of the 256 colour GFX. In game, the graphics are not stunning, but they are 256 colours, and when our artists get cracking, it'll all be fully 3D rendered crafts and movies and bars and god knows what else. It all takes up so much room because we have to use straight up IFFs and anim formats, what we really need is someone that knows how we can compress data to a very small size and still be able to load them into Blitz after decompression into !FAST! ram. If you think you can do it, then contact us at the address below. Team WHATo? ----------- Don't ask. But here are the following mad people behind the scenes at TM: * ME - Gareth Williams (Aged 15) Main Coding, some GFX, some SFX, scheptic and all-round sad git. * Adam Bartlett (Aged 16) Co-Programming (at last), Music, some SFX and file/image processing. * Alvaro Thompson (Aged 15) Does all the Docs, languages, installers and workbenchy-things that no-one else can be bothered with. He also has the home address and keeps our mail and contacts going. Manic depressive. Got the Net, too :-( * Peter Hardy (Aged 16) Used to do our GFX, but wasn't very good so we decided that he should just do some game and level designing for us. He's there for a laugh and stops our meetings from becoming so boring. Makes decent criticisms. Our new artists that can become full-time members if they want to (hint!!) * Andy Kinsella Does some REALLY nice 3D stuff, and he's doing our intro sequences. Now this is a guy who >KNOWS< what he's talking about. He's doing some skimmers as well. * Mark Sheeky This guy must be superhuman. He does his own REALLY nice GFX, music and assembler coding. He gets punished (Burnout-AF-40%) and then comes back for more. As long as he doesn't want to do coding (I don't want to lose my job) then he can join us NOW :-) He's doing all the title screens and a few Skimmers. ANY OTHER NAMES THAT YOU SEE IN THE CREDITS ARE PEOPLE WHO HAVE HELPED US OR CONTRIBUTED TOWARDS SKIMMERS AND WE ARE IMMENSELY GRATEFUL TO THEM. SKIMMERS IS COPYRIGHT ©1997 TEAM MANGO ***************************************************** * * * For all feedback: * * * * Alvaro Thompson * * 17 Bank Gardens * * Ryde, Isle of Wight, * * England. * * PO33 2SY * * * * * * E-Mail: alvaro@enterprise.net * * * * Web: http://homepages.enterprise.net/alvaro/tm/ * * * ***************************************************** Greetings to: ------------- Everyone that we know, but especially: * Unlimited Design * Coloured Pixels * Steve Moore * Bodhi Politic And all Amiga users worldwide. Keep the dream alive!