A downloadable game

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       ++  BEAT CANCER AND EMPIRE PROTECTOR  ++

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Requirements

  • Any Amiga with 1MB chip ram and at least 3MB of other ram. 2MB chip ram recommended for music.
  • Any CPU, but 020+ is definitely recommended!
  • Kickstart 3.0 or better (does NOT work with other roms).
  • An Emulator capable of reading Amiga .HDF files.
  • Optional: A way to copy the files onto a real Amiga. 2.6MB free space required.
  • Optional: Assign CanDo: to the destination location. A HDD launcher is provided.


OPTIONS:

* Select the options and difficulty before starting a new game, by clicking with the mouse or joystick.

* A light will highlight which options are active.

* Then click the scenario to start a new game.


AIMS:

* Battle against Cancer or Ancient Enemies.

* Move your character with the joystick.

* Landing on a square at the same as an enemy will destroy it. The human player can't be killed.

* After 1 turn, the enemy will respawn from it's home base; which will flash.

* Land on an enemy base square before a new enemy appears to destroy the whole base. 

* When all the bases are won, you win the game.


CONTROLS:

* Moving Up, Down, Left or Right will move your marker by one square. Diagonal movement is not supported.

* Press Fire to skip a turn. The enemies will move but you wont.

* Relax the controller to pause the game.

* If you get lost with Snake Tracers active, pressing the left mouse button over the square with your character on it will make it flash.

* Press fire in the Strategy Demo to collect or drop troops.

* 2nd Fire Button Quits to Menu.


SCENARIOS:

1. Beat 6 Diseases around the body. The bases will disappear when destroyed.

2. Beat Cancer; which is 1 disease but in 6 locations. With Tracers on, it makes things more difficult.

3. Beat 6 Barbarians; the Visigoths, the Persians, the Ostrogoths, the Saxons, the Slavs and the Huns. The bases/camps will not disappear when destroyed.

4. Beat Hitler; one enemy, but in six locations. Mayhem with difficulty and tracers on.

5. Strategy Demo. An unfinished demo for a game. There is no scoring in this demo, so no high scores will appear on the options screen.


HOW TO BEAT THE ENEMY:

* Move close to an enemy and try to anticipate the square where it will move next. Move there.

* Squash the enemy and watch for another to respawn from its home base.

* Move closer to the enemy base, and take out the next enemy.

* Try to kill an enemy within 1 square of the enemy base, so you can move to the enemy base square next.

* When the base is destroyed, the 06 on the panel will drop to 05, and this shows your progress.

* If you land on a base square but nothing happens, press fire to skip a turn, to force the attack.


THE PANELS:

Each game contains a panel showing:

1. The total number of Battles you encountered/won.

2. The total number of enemy Bases alive.

3. The total number of Moves you have made so far.


The option screen also uses panels, which show:

1. The previous score made from any game type.

2. The total number of Body games played.

3. The high score from the 'Body' scenarios.

4. The total number of Map games played (not demo)

5. The high score from the 'Map' scenarios.


SCORING:

* Score= Difficulty Options - ((Moves*100) + (Battles*300))

* Enemy AI off = 1M

* Enemy AI on = 4M

* Tracers off = 0

* Tracers on = 2M

* Difficulty 1 = 1M

* Difficulty 2 = 2M

* Difficulty 3 = 4M

* Beat 1 Cancer = 2M

* Beat Hitler = 2M

* The max score is close to 12M.


DIFFICULTY MODES:

The A.I will run away from the player, and so the score for A.I  is worth a lot more.  On Difficulty 1, there are no re-revivals. With Difficulty 2 and 3, the enemies revive in a set pattern on a set number of clicks/movements.  Sometimes several will revive together, although if the enemies were already alive, it wont respawn them. The Difficulty will eventually stop reviving enemies after a set number of clicks/movements, to stop the game becoming boring.


HISTORY AND INFO

The idea for this came after completing my Holiday game using CanDo V3. I wanted to get the joystick  working, and after playing with a demo deck included with the package, I made a simple 24 x 24 grid, where I could use a joystick to move about.

Then I wanted to make a Defender of the Crown type of game, which is entirely possible with CanDo, but along the way it turned into Hannibal, when I found and used a map of Europe instead of Britain. But making a Strategy Demo was boring, and slow, and it would take way too long. So after discovering that I could make trails appear by accident, I realised this would make for a much more interesting high speed battle experience. The whole thing took about a month to make.


Changelog

V0.2 - Strategy Demo (29 Sep 2023)

V0.3 - Added a fast battle option for Europe.

V0.5 - Added Beat Cancer mode and body map.

V0.4 - Added Options Menu and drew Analysis panels

V0.6 - Added Beat Hitler, and difficulty respawning.

V0.7 - Added Beat 1 Cancer, and High Scores page.

V0.73 - Demo Released (8 Oct 2023)

V0.74 - Quit Buttons fixed and Added SFX

V0.75 - Finished options menu and (this) info text.

V0.77 - Added Music and balanced the audio volumes.

V0.8 - Speeded up music in WWII game if Diff=2 or 3

V0.9 - Added fancy transitions, and joystick menus.

V1.03 - Final Release (18 Oct 2023)


CREDITS:

Made With: CanDo V3.0, by INOVAtronics, Dallas, TX

Design/Code: lifeschool @ LemonAmiga.com

Graphics: Wikipedia creative commons, and me.

SFX: Pixabay, Videovo.net, YouTube (scream)


MUSIC CREDITS:

Title: il tramonto del sol, by Maciej Grochowski
Body: Machinery, by Robert Szczepaniak
Battle: hanibalihaligali, by Romeo Knight


MUSIC NOTES:

Select the WWII scenario with music, and difficulty  2 or 3. The music will speed up as the action gets hotter.

It was not possible to play music and SFX together. I tried many different ways, but it is a limitation of the music player which I used, not CanDo.


BUGS:

* If you select auto-fire, and hold down fire while moving, the character will move 10 squares before it finally stops.

* If playing on more than 11 dates, your position on the high score table will wrap, but the high scores won't. To fix this, click the 'Clear Todays Best' button on the options screen on each new date of play, so your new scores are overwritten on the old high score table.


DISCLAIMER:

Cancer is a serious subject, and I am not trying to make light of that subject with this game. There are games similar to this one, which are made to occupy those suffering from real cancer. My game is not a substitute for those. Please see your local cancer awareness groups for more information.

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

BeatCancerV1.03.lha 1 MB
BeatCancerV1.03.hdf 3 MB
BeatCancerV0.73 - Demo - High Density (1.76MB) ADF 1 MB

Development log

Comments

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Nice game!

I've now released Beat Cancer V1.02. Please let me know all your comments. Maybe there are things I need to change?  Is the game too easy??

Couldn't get it to work.  Seems some libs are missing when I check SnoopDos for the files it is looking for.

Ah, thats a shame. It was an incredible squeeze to put everything on the disk, and I had to delete almost all the unessential libraries. If you can install this somehow, and copy the libraries from my Holiday game, it should work.
In the meantime, I'm up to V0.9, so not long now. I'll release the game as a .HDF so I can fit everything on.

You could consider Powerpacker or Crunchmania to compress your executable and/or data files.  A good rule of thumb is; when you zip all your data and it is less than 880kb, you can most likely fit it on a single standard disk using the tools I mentioned.  Sure, the decrunch will take a few seconds but on today's machines (accelerated or emulated), no one is likely to notice the difference.

So the final size is 2.6MB on disk, but I havent put back all the libraries yet, so lets say 3MB. I would be struggling to fit this on to a disk even with packers. So I'm going with the .LHA and .HDF route for now. Launch will be this week at some point.

(+1)

Hi everyone. Here is another game I am making - yes, I really caught the bug! I know CanDo is very basic, but it fits with my very limited programming skills.
The latest version is now here for you to test.  The game is 95% complete, but there are maybe a few fixes to make (if you guys spot any bugs, let me know) and of course maybe music and sound effects.
The V0.73 test is available as a HD ADF, so make sure to switch your emulator options to HD Floppy, and not DD floppy. The game itself could be compressed onto one floppy I guess. There is a HDD launcher on the disk. Just copy the contents over to your HDD and run it. You will find the game loads much faster!

-btw, you can't quit the Hitler (map?) scenario due to a bug.