UGGO! by Mark E. Whitehead VER A, OCT '91
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DISTRIBUTION NOTICE
This game may be freely distributed, publicized, or whatever.  Please retain
the Uggo ICON and this doc file if you pass it along.  I don't intend to
make a buck off this program - I would rather see it inspire more quality
PD games. (Hopefully I got all the bugs out of this one!)


WHAT IS THIS GAME CALLED 'UGGO!' 
Well, it's got a !-mark in the title so it must be fun.  It involves moving
a space ship back 'n forth across the bottom of the screen with the joystick
and shooting down waves and waves of ugly aliens.  A shield is activated when
the joystick is held down, but if you hold it down too long you will blow
up! (standard stuff).  The Uggos won't kill you if if they are in their 
'POD' form, but after awhile they will start to jiggle and eventually
become dangerous.  A new ship is automatically granted every 5000 points.

Bonus capsules will fall at various times:

	S - New Ship (nuff' said)
	B - Bomb (kills all onscreen aliens)
	F - Freeze (stops all onscreen aliens)
	L - Lateral (aliens will only move horizontally)

A word of warning about the last two, if you freeze or lateral an alien
when it is at your level, you may not be able to blast it any more and
you might as well end the game (this might be considered a bug but I prefer
to think of it as a royal screw-up).  If you get stuck remember that the 
Left Mouse Button will get you back to the main menu in flash.


TECH STUFF
This game was written on an Amiga 500 with 1 MEG of memory and two floppy
drives.  This is a really poor excuse for a development system!  I should 
buy a hard drive or upgrade or something.

The program was written with MANX 3.6 (R) with a small code, small data
model.  This was also pretty poor planning since I came within a hair
of exceeding the 64Kbyte data limit this model imposes (I had to sacrifice
one sound sample to make it fit!).

Almost 95% of the code was written in 'C', with the remainder being a pretty
cool graphics engine written in assembly.

An interrupt was attached to the vertical blanking interrupt to provide a
real-time counter which I used to keep from updating the graphics too soon.
This is a key piece of software lacking in many PD games.  The problem is
that everything speeds up or slows down depending on how much is drawn
to the screen (jerky movement).  With a screen synch you can keep it at a
steady pace.  In this game there are times when I am drawing too much and
there is a perceptible slow-down, but this is better than a speed-up.

The soundFX routine came from an issue of Amazing Computing (R) which I
had to convert into 'C'.  I really used to like this magazine.

The graphics are double-buffered, with a User CopperList supplied to change
the top 16 colors into another set of 16 colors below.  This is a very
easy trick to do (See Abacus's "Amiga Graphics Inside and Out").

The top part of the 'hidden' page is erased every frame before the aliens
are drawn in their new positions.  This way I don't have to restore 
background graphics or remember where, what page, or what order they were
last drawn.  Just re-placing the whole damn background is much quicker and
more practical than you might think!


GAME REVIEWS
Nobody ever asks me what my favourite games are so I thought I would slip
a few comments in:

TURRICAN (II)	Incredibly smooth, fast, busy graphics and great sound! How
		do they do it?  Why should I even try to write games?!

MAGIC POCKETS	I have only played the Demo disk, but I think it's great!
		This game is fun, with lots of surprises and laughs.

***MARIO***	Any game with the word 'Mario' in the title.  Okay, so I
		just lost some credibility, but I gotta tell it like it is.


END-O-DOCUMENT