GYVES v1.1 (formerly SNAP) By Abe Pralle Using AMOS Professional A SPARTAN DESIGN Production Documentation (Updated 7/14/93) ***** Deep in the heart of an alien jungle, a warrior is chained to the Prisoners' Rock. The sun beats down upon him, sapping his vitality unceasingly. He knows he must soon muster the strength and force of will to break his bonds, the gyves that chain him to the rock, or die a slow death of dehydration and fevered dreams. You play the part of this stolid, otherworldly captive as he desperately tries to focus his mental and physical energies enough to give him the strength to escape. You are faced with many aberrant fragments of yourself; organize them, stack them, and connect them to make yourself stronger. Because you alone have the perseverance and skill to set yourself free. ***** GYVES is a falling block game. We've all seen those before. But THIS game is no mere clone. It features: * Selectable pit dimensions. * User definable pieces (up to 14 in play at once). * Ten distinctly different levels, each with its own original background art and a visually unique block set. * Sound and music (music for 1 meg+ only). * A good-sized ending animation if you succeed under certain conditions. GYVES is freely distributable. Give it to whomever you wish. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS---------------------------------------------- Any Amiga, 512k. 1+ Meg is preferable. To install on hard drive or another boot disk: copy the GYVES directory to its desired location. Ensure that you have the library AMOS.LIBRARY in your boot disk's LIBS: directory. QUICK START (for those who know what they're doing)-------------- S toggles sound. M toggles music. Use a joystick or the numeric keypad. To see the ending animation, start each time from level one and make it all the way past level 10. Also, don't modify or edit the pieces. SHIFT+ ends a current game. LOADING THE GAME------------------------------------------------- You can click on the icon or set the CLI directory to the GYVES drawer and type GYVES. Memory is a bit tight on 512k, so don't have anything else loaded if you don't have more memory than that. HOW TO PLAY------------------------------------------------------ Maneuver the falling blocks to form solid horizontal rows. When you fill a row it disappears. Don't let the pit be filled to the top. The next piece to fall will be previewed in a small square to the right of the playing pit. CONTROLS--------------------------------------------------------- p Pause - any other key to resume. s Toggles sound on and off. m Toggles music on and off (1 meg). SHIFT+ Ends the game and brings up the setup/preferences screen. In the preferences screen pressing this will end the game. For the actual game play you may use either the numeric keypad or a joystick in port 2. If you don't have a numeric keypad on your machine, don't despair. There is an alternate key set which relates to the keyboard controls given below, and it is defined thus: 456 = l;' (the "L" and the two keys to its right), 0 = SPACEBAR, ENTER = RETURN. KEYBOARD JOYSTICK FUNCTION 4 and 6 left and right Moves falling piece left or right. 5 up Rotates piece counter-clockwise. 0 down Piece moves down without delay. ENTER button Piece moves down as far as it can go in one step. HELP -- Active only on the setup screen. This restores the shapes of all the pieces to their default mode (in case you messed up badly editing them and want to start over). +a Switch Workbench to the front or back. SETUP/PREFERENCES------------------------------------------------ You will be in the setup screen when you first start the game. You don't HAVE to do anything except click with the left mouse button on "START" or just press RETURN. If you want to fine-tune the game to your liking, read on. From top to bottom, the first two options are START and QUIT. Their functions should be fairly obvious. Next is WIDTH. There are twelve little rectangles to the right of the word. The one that is bright red represents the width of the pit that the blocks fall into. You may choose, by clicking on the appropriate rectangle, to set the width of the pit anywhere from four to twelve squares. DEPTH works vertically the same way width does horizontally. Note: a wide and deep pit is easier to complete than a narrow and shallow one. LEVEL indicates which level you will start on. At the beginning of the game, you can only start on level 1. As you reach higher levels, you will be able to start on them. But it only works this way up to level 9. Even if you make it to level 10, you have to start succeeding games on level 9 or lower. WARNING: You must start on level 1 and make it straight through to the end of level 10 if you wish to see the ending animation. If the game is over before you finish level 10, move the LEVEL light back down to the first position. To the right of the LEVEL selector is a toggle button that is marked CLEAR AT END. If it is lit (default) then you will start each level with an empty pit. If you turn it off then whatever clutter is in the pit at the end of one level will be transferred to the succeeding level. There is one big advantage to have it on the latter setting (off): you will receive 1,000 points for every horizontal line that is totally unoccupied at the end of each level. FILL is how many lines will be filled with squares in random locations at the start of each level. At the bottom center of the screen are two switches: BASIC and EXTENDED. There are fourteen possible shapes. If the BASIC switch is lit you can play the game with the first seven. If the EXTENDED switch is lit you can play with the last seven. At the bottom left of the screen is the shape editor. Cycle through the available pieces by clicking on the corresponding arrow button. Edit the piece by clicking on the 4 x 4 grid. You can only view and edit the shape sets (BASIC and EXTENDED) that you have selected. Again, pressing the HELP key restores all pieces to their default shape. WARNING: Do NOT edit the pieces if you want to see the ending animation. It will not be shown if the pieces are different from their default shapes. Lastly, clicking in the lower right hand corner displays a blurb for another game by the same author. SCORE------------------------------------------------------------ Every piece you set earns you 20 points. For the first line completed you get 200 points. For each succeeding line completed (at the same time) you get double the previous score +200 points. LINES COMPLETED INCREASE AT ONCE IN SCORE 1 200 2 600 3 1,400 4 3,000 If CLEAR AT END is off, then at the end of each level you get 1,000 points for each horizontal line that has no pieces anywhere across it. If the pit fills all the way to the top, the game ends and your score is reset to 0. PARTING WORDS---------------------------------------------------- If you enjoy this game, you may be interested in another game of mine called The PuzzlePits 2. As described in the info box in GYVES, it is a brain game with a full featured level editor. The full version is not freely distributable, but you might be able to find the playable demo. You can order the demo from me for $3, or you can buy the full version by sending a mere $10 to: Abe Pralle PO Box 2059 Chinle, AZ 86503 USA AUTHOR'S NOTE (Contains some rambling)--------------------------- GYVES is the first game of mine to come out under the SPARTAN DESIGN label (previous games are SWITCH and JEWELS, published by AMIGAWORLD magazine on their tool chest). SPARTAN DESIGN is a programming force of one, namely myself. I used to consider it a bit pretentious to have a design label without a design team, but that was before I got a hard disk. When I got a hard disk, I immediately wanted to transfer all of my games that I've made into one directory. The problem was naming the directory. Should it be ABE'S GAMES? No, that's stupid. I considered that if I had this problem, so, hopefully, would other people. Human beings like to organize things, especially on hard drives, so I decided I had better create a means to organize my games with. Thus, SPARTAN DESIGN was created. It is a name intended to reflect the quality of my games: good stuff, but lacking the bells and whistles of commercial games due to the necessarily small amount of money and manpower invested. And by "bells and whistles" I mean things like rotoscoped and raytraced animation, digitized speech, manuals, and even decent disk labels. To make up for this, I attempt to make my games as fun as possible, as well as inexpensive. When I'm creating a game, I fully intend to make it the best, most playable, most fun game of its class. I won't always succeed, of course, but it's fun to try. Enjoy GYVES, and Happy Gaming! Abe Pralle July 14, 1993 END OF TEXT