                      Dragon's Mandate
                      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      [The few, the proud, the soon to be annihilated]

_____________________________
What's up with this TXT file?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've decided to do this whole document in a FAQ or Q&A
style... Hopefully you'll find it both interesting and
useful at the same time.

__________________________
Why the silly game, Bones?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, you see, I was reading some reviews for some recent
game releases, and saw how they mentioned a few details
about this game or that game staying true to the previous
classic CRPG styles while still being modern in graphics.
Around the same time, I also started looking at various
emulators for some of the old Atari, Nintendo, and Coleco
game consoles. Personally I sometimes feel that in game
design over the years something has been lost. Certainly
a lot of the current games are fantastic, and there are
many older games you wouldn't see me considering playing,
but sometimes a simple game with simple graphics is a
lot of fun.

So what it comes down to is this- Nostalgia. I wanted to
try to recapture some of the old "feel" that was present
in some of the older games, but with slightly better
graphics. Originally, this game was going to be completely
retro, with 16 colors, blocky pixelated images, etc. But as
I worked on it, I kept scaling up the graphics. In the end,
this game turned out to still be similar in gameplay to an
old console game or an early PC game, but with graphics
similar to what you would expect back in the days of 386's,
but you still need a pentium to make it run correctly. :-)

Much of the inspiration comes from "Adventure" on ye olde
Atari 2600. I've done a Adventure-like games before, in the
form of my "Dragon's Domain" tetralogy. Back then my
programming skills weren't quite as nice yet, nor did I
have as much pre-written code to fall back on (why rewrite
what you can steal from your previous programs?). While
one or two of them may have actually been fun to play, this
one is the technically superior package, and arguably more
fun as well.

__________________________________
OK, enough of that, how do I play?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So you actually want to play, eh? I wasn't expecting such
brutal masochism. :-) Alrighty.. Gameplay is very simple.
You must navigate your way through the various mazes, and
eventually recover the chalice (the blue/green cup) and put
it where it belongs (the room with the *large* circle of
stones that has obelisks and requires the brown key to get
to). Along the way, you will find several foes and will
need to use the keys to unlock the doors.

You can only carry one item at a time, with a few
exceptions. You can carry all the keys, and one basic light
source (the candle or torch) forever. Everything else forces
trade-offs, including the sword, lantern, chalice, etc.

Your primary foes are the dragons. You'll find that all of
the monsters are instantly deadly to you by touch, except
the dragons who have to fry you from a certain distance.
If you see the dragon start to inhale, you had best move
since they only do that when they're properly lined up to
blast you. If the dragon is standing on a wall, he may not
actually look lined up, but as I said you should move if
he begins to inhale. In general, as long as you don't stop
moving, the dragons will have a hard time hitting you.
Of course, while getting killed by a beam of fire may be
great for getting rid of all that unwanted facial hair, it
can also ruin your day, so be careful.

However, the monsters can be defeated if you have the right
tools. But keep in mind that you are never invincible, and
you are never safe. Just because you have the sword doesn't
mean that the dragons can't hurt you. If you don't move, you
will still fry. To use the sword on them, you have to move
in close, much closer than the distance they torch you from.
This is quite risky, but you'll find that if you're too
close they won't be able to hit you. It will often take many
sword swings to take down a dragon (though I've seen them
fall in one swing before).

With the smaller creatures, having the appropriate means to
kill it often will make you immune to that creature. For
instance, having the sword makes you immune to death by
skeleton, but fire elementals will still take you down.

Killing off the dragons will do a lot to make the whole
world safer for you, but not permanently. One dragon is a
phoenix, meaning it will rise again. You will know this
has happened because its color will change to a firey
yellow and orange. The rest of the dragons will stay dead
once killed.

The smaller minor creatures will reset everytime you move
from one room to another. As to whether they can reset
after having been killed is an individual issue though.
Some creatures stay dead forever, others reappear every
time you enter the room. You'll just have to experiment
to see which are which.

Something that sets these monsters apart from similar static
background games of yore is that they can actually leave
their starting positions and travel around the map, not
popping back until you move from one room to another. So
just because you don't see a skeleton doesn't mean there
won't be one. The one in the next room may find his way over
to you if you stay put.

One other exception to the general class of monsters is the
bat, who actually starts in the same room as you do. He is
not dangerous, but is more of a nuisance since he can pick
up objects and carry them around, and end up leaving them
in inconvenient places. There are a few locations on the
map in which he can drop them and you can't get them back,
but such places are few and far between, and all are at
least visible. Don't worry about him "ruining" the game,
since he can't pick up keys, and everything else of any real
importance can't be touched by him until you've found them
yourself.

Not every object has a purpose, and not all are immediately
obvious in use. Again, you'll just have to see what happens.
For instance, don't bother trying to get to the boats, since
the boats, trees, standing stones, bookshelves, etc are just
decoration. There are also many blank rooms that just take
up space (but of course, the bat may drop things in them). A
good example of a useless item is the sapling you start with.
I just thought it a cute idea to make you start the game by
planting a tree. :-)

___________________________________________
Great, can you tell me about the interface?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It's actually quite simple. The cursor keys make you move,
spacebar draps what you are carrying, and that's all you
need to know to be able to play.

However, here are some more useful keys:

F1       - The "about" message
F2       - Turn sound on/off
F3 or C  - Change your surcoat color
F4       - View this text file
F5       - Toggle speed control
F6 or P  - Pause
S        - Save your game (only one slot)
L        - Load the saved game
SPACE    - Drop object
ESC or Q - Quit

You'll notice the lack of a "fire button". This is because
combat is somewhat automatic. I say "somewhat" because you
still have to navigate yourself, but the sword swings
automatically if it is in range to hit something that it
is capable of killing. In the case of skeletons, they drop
dead instantly. However, the chance of any single hit
slaying a dragon is quite low, so you may have to dance with
them a bit before they taste soil. Of course, you have to
actually get the sword before you can use it. You start with
abosulutely nothing of use.

You can ignore the small two-digit hexidecimal display in
the lower-right corner. I added it for debuggin purposes,
but saw no need to remove it. It simply shows the scancodes
received by the keyboard handler.

________________________________
Any suggestions for how to play?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yup. Don't get killed. :-) Seriously though, I would
recommend going everywhere you can without any keys before
using the first one on any door. You should familiarize
youself with the central areas of the map, and you may find
a few useful things along the way.

As for dealing with the dragons, the edges of the screen are
very useful when trying to lose them. Also, they have a hard
time catching you if you keep moving. Be careful at the top
edge of the screen though, since a dragon may be standing on
a wall next to you, putting him high enough that you can't
see him. For this reason, if you're at the top, step
downward slightly to avoid this problem.

I would also suggest that you leave objects in places where
you can find them easily later. You never know when that
sword or that lantern might come in useful.

Also, you should save your game frequently so that death
doesn't force you to start over from scratch (unless
starting over is one of the things you really liked about
all those old Atari games).

__________________________________________________
Should I feel guilty for not paying for this game?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, although there are probably very few of you asking
this question, I will answer anyway. Nope! It is provided
completely free of charge. Feel free to give copies to your
friends, to post it on BBS's, or put it on your websites.
Just remember not to modify it in any way, and not to charge
money for it. And if you're going to have it on your
website, please have a link back to mine as well (available
in the NBONES.DOC file).

While no payment to me is required, if you feel a burning
need to send a donation, then feel free to check out the
contact information in NBONES.DOC. You can fax or e-mail
me a donation, or if you're feeling generous you can
snail-mail it to me. :-)

______________________________________________
How long did it take to make? And was it hard?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hard? Nahh... most of it was rather easy. A lot of it was
tedious though, especially when my image editor started
rearranging the color palette on me.

Overall the project represents between 30 and 40 hours of
work, spread out over about a week and a half to two weeks.
This of course does not include time spent doing the major
playtesting. The game should be pretty bullet-proof (in the
sense that it shouldn't attempt to shoot itself in the
foot), but problems are always bound to leak through on any
project. As they say, there is no such thing as a bug-free
program, except arguably a simple "hello world" program,
but even those are susceptible to bugs in the compiler.

As I was explaining above, the game was intended to be a
"retro" game. It is supposed to be a tribute to the days
when games were simple to play. While the graphics aren't
up to today's standards by a longshot, they're still far
better than the "old-school" games and the program is also
relatively robust comparatively as well. I'm finding that
designing retro games is fairly rewarding to me when it
comes to my hobby-programming (as opposed to anything I
might be doing for money). They're relatively easy to make
because they don't require complex 3D calculations, or
heavily ray-traced graphics, or high-res true-color video
modes. And don't even get me started about hand-painted
graphics (or even rendered/raytraced), music, and custom
sound effects. Ugh, those are the hobbyist's worst
nightmares due to the amount of time they take to create.
Even the graphics in this game took quite a while to
develop, so much so that next time I may do 16-color with
pixel-enlarged sprite placement. :-)  I've considered
doing 16-color images but combined with a 256-color palette
to facilitate smooth lighting transitions; imagine light
fields like the ones in this game for its light sources,
but with smooth fall-offs instead of sharp edges, and also
different light sources could have different brightnesses.
This in effect would make the game look like low-res EGA,
but with the addition of the cool lighting effects.

As it is right now, while programs of similar "appearance"
existed back when we all had nothing better than 386-25's
(or even maybe 286's) you still really need a pentium to
play this game properly. This is due to the fact that I
chose design simplicity over performance optimization. What
happens is that the entire scene on the screen (except the
status area on the right) is redrawn from scratch 18.2
times per second, right down to every last object, rock,
shrub, monster, and blade of grass. This kept the code
simple, especially since it has that pseudo-3D effect with
object occlusion/eclipsing. Using multi-layered buffers,
including a Z-buffer could have vastly improved things, but
since this is a DOS program, I don't have the left-over RAM
for such things (and I really hate XMS and EMS and DPMI,
especially since you can't make any assumptions about the
user's system configuration if you want things to work
flawlessly) :-)

Since the program does complete redraws, it might as well
have been a scrolling game. This method is not very
efficient, but it keeps things simple. I did however put a
few things in to help the performance, such as using a hash
system for Y sorting, and also to shut off light sources if
there is no darkness nearby. This last one made a huge
difference, at least at first. For a while there was a
bug that made it draw the light-circles multiple times
(about 13 times each instead of just once), which made it
such that on my Pentium-150 having all of the dragons on
the screen worked fine in a lit room, but in the darkness
the game began to slow down with all of them present. Now
that it is corrected, the game can fly along with all of
them present, even in the dark. Basically the error was due
to the fact that the light code was accidentally placed
inside of a loop that it was supposed to follow instead.
The resulting performance loss wasn't very noticable since
the game ran at a good speed most of the time anyway, but
I'm glad I spotted it before release. Currently my pentium
seems more than adequate. With this in mind, you might
actually be able to play the game on some 486's. :-) A good
way to tell if the program is running at the intended speed
or not is to toggle the timing/speed control. If you can see
a speed difference when hitting the toggle, then the game is
running fine (at least in that room anyway). If you can't
tell the difference, then your computer is just barely
keeping up, or it is in fact running slow.

As it stands, the whole game actually got scaled up more
than I had originally intended. The map is 16x16 rooms,
each of which are 18x12 cells in size. Not all of the rooms
are even in use. Of the 256 rooms, 71 are completely
inaccessible to anyone except the dragons (who of course
go anywhere they darn well please!), and of those that
are accessible, many are empty and serve no use (you'll
see a lot of those connected to the sides of many of the
mazes) except maybe to give you room to maneuver when
messing with the dragons. I'm not sure how many "rooms"
there were in Adventure, but Dragon's Domains 2 & 3 (#2 was
probably the best in terms of fun-factor) had maps that
were 8x8 in size (64 rooms), each consisting of 15x10 cells.
With that in mind, even with all the unused space, the map
for Dragon's Mandate is still quite huge compared to those
previous games. But not only is the map larger, but also
the number of dragons. I think Adventure had 3, and all of
the Dragon's Domain games also had 3. Dragon's Mandate has
10 of them, all under orders to turn you to ash.

One of the other things, in addition to graphics, that I had
to make some dicisions on was the sound. At first I figured
that I'd have digital sound effects, but going in that
direction would leave me two choices- either use my current
digital sound system (which is completely windows-hostile),
or design a new one. Neither sounded appealing at the time,
so I opted for a simple internal-speaker system reminiscent
of the sounds in Adventure on the Atari. Nothing special,
but it's better than silence. :-)

________________________________________
Are there any "easter eggs" in the game?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Maybe... One or two... Shhh! :-)

________________
Revision History
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  1.10 (August 2007)

    - Increased brightness of dark areas significantly

    - Minor map adjustments to make some passageways
      easier to navigate around corners.

    - Dragons are slightly easier to kill.

    - Player runs 25% faster in the four cardinal
      directions.


 1.11 (August 2007)

    - Added a second bat

    - Added second hourglass, candelabra, and wand.

    - More minor map tweaks.

    - More peon monsters in the later mazes.

    - Bait is slightly more attractive to dragons now.

    - Added a dragon kill-tracker.

______________
Thanks, Bones!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hey! That's not a question! Oh well... you're welcome. :-)

                                                    -Bones

------------------------------------------------------------
Dragon's Mandate, Program and all associated data files are
Copyright (c) 1998 Ed T. Toton III, All Rights Reserved.
------------------------------------------------------------
Distribution in an unmodified state and free of charge is
permitted via disks, Internet, BBS's, and shareware archives
------------------------------------------------------------
