Adventure Alive Readme
26 November 2002
Greg Hedger

Overview

Welcome to the world of Adventure Alive!  Adventure Alive represents an amalgamation of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Lode Runner.  It looks and plays kind of like the former, but is structured like the latter, complete with a comprehensive GUI map editor with integrated reference.

Basic System Requirements:

Apple IIGS running System 6 or higher
1 MB RAM
Joystick strongly recommended

Game Concepts

You (Martin) must collect enough crystals to escape each world, and find the exit, all while  avoiding the Shadow Voids.  Sometimes you must solve basic puzzles.

Controls

Move - Joystick left and right
Crawl - Joystick down while standing on solid ground
Jump - Button(0).  The faster you are running (even if up against something) the higher you jump.
Swim stroke - Button(0).  Press up-left or up-right while pressing button(0) repeatedly to emerge from water.
Climb - Up or down while on ladder or hillside.
Dig - Button(1) while standing above diggable ground - the meadow-looking tiles.
Enter - Button(1).  Martin needn't be on solid ground to enter a door or cave, as in some cases he must jump in the air to reach it.
Suicide - Delete.
Pause game/show menu bar - Esc.

The keyboard, while supported, is grossly awkward for this game; joystick highly recommended.  If you do use the keyboard, the keypad moves, but you will be hitting the keys continuously.  Open- and Solid-apple (aka Option) perform the same functions as button(0) and button(1) respectively.

Items

Crystal - In each level you must collect a certain number of these to advance.  This is the analog to the "gold" in Lode Runner.

Key - These come in many colors, and each key will unlock one door of that color, as in Monty's Revenge.

Shovel - This lets you dig in the dirt (the meadow-looking tiles).  In this you will find keys and crystals.  Look for visual clues:  In the first level, for example, you will see near the beginning a collection of blue tiles up in the air shaped in the likeness of a down-pointing arrow.   Dig directly under this.  Be careful! Don't dig yourself too deep.

Jetpack - This gives you a few seconds of freedom to fly to otherwise inaccessible locales.

Sword - The sword will take out one Shadow Void when you touch the latter with the sword in your possession.

Rod of Continuum - The long golden staff "saves" your progress at the point you get it.

Health Nut - This "nut" contains healing water which will heal all your wounds.

Known bugs and caveats

* Adventure Alive includes multiple musical scores that are part of the game.  In order to hear them, you must boot GSOS with "System Sounds" disabled.
 - Immediately (you must very quick) at the beginning of boot, hold down the Control, Shift, Option and Open-Apple keys until you see "No Inits/DAs" or "ExpressLoader" in the load progress dialog.

* The keyboard interface needs work.

Miscellanea

The future: I am working on an engine for Adventure Alive II, which is a complete rewrite of the current engine.  All of the major pieces have already been rewritten but I am still doing some tweaks and fixing some bugs.  The new engine will write all shapes directly to the screen, offering Rastan-like performance and animation.

Let me know what you think; hearing from Apple II users will make this effort worth the while, as I am releasing AA as freeware.  Include your suggestions.

hedger@sbcglobal.net