MAXWELL MOUSE AND THE MISSING GAME MYSTERY v1.1
© 2015 Remainder Software
DISCLAIMER AND BORING LEGAL STUFF THAT NO ONE EVER READS, SURELY
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This software is provided 'as is' and is used at your own risk. We will not be held responsible for any loss
of data, sanity or other damage that may otherwise be caused through the use of
this software.
Maxwell Mouse And The Missing Game Mystery is freely distributable on the
condition that all files in the archive are intact and unmodified. No money may be charged for this software
except if distributed as part of a magazine's coverdisc.
No mice were harmed during the making of this game. Can I go now...?
NOT QUITE. HERE COMES THE GUIDE TO
GETTING IT ALL UP AND RUNNING...
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Right then, so do you have an Amiga computer with at least 1MB of Chip
RAM? Then keep reading.
If you don't, then sorry, your name's not on
the list, you're not coming in.I mean,
have you seen the state of your trainers?
What happens next largely depends on what archive you've downloaded.
If you're reading this from the floppy disk,
then simply reboot your machine and ta-da... your Amiga will sing, dance and
make tea (oh, alright then, the game will load automatically - just sit back
and relax, anyway).
If you've unpacked the lha archive onto your hard disk, then you'll be pleased
to know you don't have to do anything else other than double-click on the Maxwell
icon and you're up and running. No
additional libraries or fonts need be installed.
Right. Now it's time for the fun stuff.
BASED ON AN INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY...
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Honest. It's a tear-jerker so have those
tissues at the ready.
Maxwell the cool blue mouse (who insists on wearing sunglasses and a backpack)
had just woken up after a very pleasant night's sleep. He was excited because
just yesterday, he had gone and bought a fabulous new Amiga game. He had given
the game pride of place in his special disk box ready to be played as soon as
he got up that morning.
But disaster had struck. The disk wasn't
there. The box was empty.
It hadn't been left in his Amiga's disk
drive. In fact, it was nowhere to be
seen. "Oh, botheration! My floppy
diskette appears to have gone missing.
This is a most unfortunate turn of events", is something Maxwell
didn't quite say but as it's before the watershed... well, that was the gist of
it.
There's only one real explanation - someone must have got in, somehow, and
stolen it. But how? Who?
Why?
In the absence of anything worthwhile to do, Maxwell decides to go on a
little adventure to try and retrieve his game.
After all, it's a small village, and there are one or two shady characters
lurking about. Not everyone likes
Maxwell and indeed, not everyone likes the Amiga...
"Now, what did I do with my door key?
Typical, the one night I don't go out drinking heavily and listening to
mouse, sorry, house music at the local club is the night my key goes
missing..."
WAS THAT REALLY WORTH SPENDING FOUR PARAGRAPHS ON?
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Of course. Now you know the background
and the task ahead for poor Maxwell, and now it's time to put his little world to
rights by leaping on platforms, deftly dodging strange little creatures and
talking to the village's inhabitants, perhaps doing them a favour or two along
the way.
To start the game, simply press fire on the title screen.
You'll be treated to a couple of intro
screens before your quest begins. Note
that the game also supports CD32 joypads - press right at the title screen to
use a CD32 pad, left for a normal joystick and then press fire (or Red).
Here, then, is where you'll want to know how to perform the various functions
needed to do well: (CD32 pad controls in brackets)
Left and right - move Maxwell, er, left and right.
Also used to scroll through the inventory
items when the inventory is activated.
Fire (Red button) - jump
Up (Green button) - talks to other characters if you're in contact with them,
and provides an inspection of one or two objects, too.
All of the text will appear in the grey box
and can be advanced by pressing fire (Red).
Down (Yellow button) - Picks up any items you're hovering over and switches
control to the inventory. The top right of the screen shows the items Maxwell
currently has in his possession. Moving
left and right at this point will move the red cursor and the text in the grey
box will change to show the item's description. From here, you can either drop
an item either in a general area, use an item on a character or other object or
just exit without dropping anything, all by pressing the fire button (Red) when
you're ready.
P (Play/Pause button) - pause/unpause the action.
You can also press fire (Red) to unpause.
Esc (Both shoulder buttons) - quit back to the titles (doing this on the title
sequence exits altogether).
On your travels, you will also find several annoying creatures and insects
roaming around. Coming into contact with
these will cause you to lose a health point (represented by the little hearts
shown on the top panel) and losing all of these will cause Maxwell to lose a
life (represented by the little Maxwell heads also on the top panel).
When you lose a life, you'll restart at the
last point he touched the ground and will be invulnerable for a few
seconds. Keep in mind that anything
flamey will also hurt and as for water... well, this mouse isn't known for his
swimming ability so no amount of health points will help you here...
HAVE YOU FINISHED NOW?
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No, not quite. Here, have a few credits.
Maxwell Mouse And The Missing Game Mystery was brought to you by Remainder
Software, Blitz Basic 2.1 and these human beings:
Graham Humphrey - Programming, Game Design
Predseda - Graphics, Game Design
Chris Clarke - Graphics
Mihcael - website creation and maintenance
Music was taken from whatever public domain source I could grab them from.
Currently I haven't got any music produced
specifically for the game but if I do get a couple of MED tunes made up, I'll
update the archives with them and credit them appropriately.
Do follow our progress at http://www.facebook.com/RemainderSoftware and email
me at grahamhumphrey1986@hotmail.com with any feedback and so on.
Big thanks to the guys above for their invaluable help and encouragement in
getting this demo finished, I am incredibly grateful to them for their hard
work, enthusiasm and ideas. Without them
this wouldn't have happened.
I GUESS THIS IS THE SELF-INDULGENT, RAMBLY BIT COMING UP...
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Damn right.
Maxwell was started way back in the halcyon days of November 2012.
This was several months after Downfall had
been released and I was keen to work on something a bit more ambitious.
I had always wanted to write a Dizzy-style
arcade adventure featuring character interaction, puzzles to solve and a large
world to explore, as well as more than a couple of elements of the
old-fashioned 8-bit platform games that were so popular on the ZX Spectrum and
the like. This seemed like the perfect
chance, so Predseda (artist on Downfall) and myself began work on this new
project.
It only took a month or so to get a very basic skeleton up and running.
Predseda had drawn me some place-holder tiles
and I came up with a small map which you could roam around, jumping about and
falling and all that happy stuff. But I
hit a few issues with collision, picking things up and some really tedious bugs
that I got bored of so I put it on the back-burner from about January 2013, not
properly resuming again until about September/October that year when suddenly
things took off.
We had a new, larger map, we placed some enemies to avoid, some water to drown
in, a character or two to interact with... everything was working and we had a
basic engine in place. We then bolted a
storyline and some more items and people onto what we had and before we knew
it, our proof of concept demo became a little game in its own right and the
momentum and enthusiasm gained from each little milestone reached (even from
little things like the conversations popping up in the panel, characters giving
you new items and so on) took us to the edge of completion in January 2014.
Then things dropped off, with real life getting in the way and some serious
challenges lay ahead in getting some new graphics for our map.
It was all a bit too... well, dark and
featureless. Many months passed with
little activity until about September when Chris Clarke - creator of the
excellent amigapd.com website, book author and programmer - was keen to get
involved in graphic creation. So after
some discussions, he started to draw some new tiles for the map, and did more,
and more, and more, until out of pretty much nothing we had a full, colourful
set of graphics to use. Quickly I
implemented these, and any changes I wanted were patiently dealt with and also
put in. He also knocked together some
new enemies for me to use and - along with Predseda - had his own influence on
the game's style and features. Predseda
then came up with some lovely presentation screens and before we knew it, we
had a proper small game, and a nice demo to show off our engine in preparation
for a bigger game.
If the graphical style seems a bit disjointed and inconsistent, then you now
know why, but it's certainly colourful and nicely drawn.
The only thing we haven't had in time is some
music to go with it so I've chucked a couple of tunes in that I thought fit the
mood of the game, which isn't ideal but it's nothing that can't be solved
later.
This is only a demo, believe it or not - we have a full game we want to start
working on which will use this engine, but undoubtedly with some tweaks (like a
nicer status panel, some new bad guys and animation for the non-player
characters) and a level-based approach (like Crystal Kingdom Dizzy) which will
see four separate maps used to advance the story (no relation to this storyline
by the way). This will take quite some time
to plan and prepare this but as there aren't any real techincal issues, we can
concentrate on getting the game design just how we want it.
If you've read this far, well done. I
will try to keep people posted with progress as much as I can, and I hope we do
our ideas justice enough to release physical copies on both disk and CD-ROM, if
people want it. Let me know what you
think, and thanks for reading and playing.
Graham Humphrey, 8th January 2015.