--Spaceboard--

Spaceboard was made in July of 2003 for a 72 hour game development competition held on the "Pixelation" forums. It didn't win anything, probably in large part because it didn't really fit the theme of mindless violence and destruction, but I decided the game was worth releasing to the public anyway.

--Technical Notes--

The game was built with version 5 of Mark Overmars' "Game Maker" program. It also makes use of an external .DLL to play the Ogg Vorbis music. If you're getting a blue screen crash try moving the MpgLib.dll, OGG.XXL, and Vorbis.dll files elsewhere or deleting them. The game should still run, but without music. If that doesn't solve the problem then it's probably a Game Maker problem, which I can't solve(having no access to the code).

--Gameplay--

After loading, the game will start in full-screen mode. You can press F4 to resize to a window or M to toggle the music.

Select one of the 10 levels, in roughly increasing order of difficulty, by pressing the corresponding number keys running along the top of your computer's keyboard.

Then control your man by pressing the four arrow keys. He can only go forward, and he will accelerate as you hold a key. Advancement movement information: His vertical acceleration is lower than his horizontal acceleration, and he will brake horizontally faster than he accelerates.

You can play for time attack or for medals, by collecting coins found on the course. A gold medal is 100% of the coins, a silver 50%, and a bronze anything below. Gold medals on every course will get you a small reward on the title screen(I would have made it bigger but the competition pressed me for time).

Touching anything but coins and the thumbs-up goal sign will kill your man. The moving obstacles you will encounter:

-Bullets. There are various kinds of guns that fire these, all at the same rate. Slow down and make your move when they aren't in your way.

-Mines. These come in three versions, slow(white), fast(red), and tracking(blue). When you get close enough to the slow or fast ones they will move directly towards you. The tracking ones, however, will predict your path and try to intercept you. They can all be tricked into hitting walls, fortunately.

-Snowflakes. They come down fairly randomly, unlike the mines and bullets. Each time you play a level the wind direction will change, too. Navigate through them like highway traffic - carefully and deliberately. Fortunately, they're more predictable than highway traffic.

-Fireballs. They'll leap out of lava unpredictably. You can try to stay above them, but there will usually be some sort of deterrent keeping you from staying too high.

--Version History--

Version 1 - Original release.

Version 2 - Small updates. Installation is through a normal zip instead of a self-extracting .ice file. It's now feasable to remove the .dll files(error checking turned off) and there is some additional documentation on the title screen, as well as this readme.