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SPACE TREAT
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© 2002 Fabrizio Zavagli
© 2002 Hozer Video Games
- GAME PROGRAM INSTRUCTIONS -
INTRODUCTION
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Your planet, a peaceful Class M world, has always been living in harmony and
this allowed its people to quickly evolve into the space era. Anyway, as you
might have guessed, no good is going to last. There came a time where the forces
of evil, namely your neighbor planet, started to strike against you. The evil
planet's inhabitants are quite different. They don't care about nature and
peace. They are greedy, and only think about consuming the planet's sources to
gain more and more riches. This quickly led to a total draining of anything
their planet had to offer, making them more and more envious of your prospering
world. Unable to obtain any more of their environment, the evil planet sent its
combat drones to attack your world, aiming at stealing your food resources.
Unfortunately, they're succeeding in getting their tentacles on your valuable
goods, trapping them in a space cage above your planet...
OBJECT OF THE GAME
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Your mission is to bring back as much food as possible before the drones take it
away with them.
HOW TO PLAY
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To play Space Treat, use a joystick in the left port. Directions are as follows:
MOVE UP/LEAVE BASE
^
|
\|/
MOVE LEFT <--- O ---> MOVE RIGHT
/|\
|
v
MOVE DOWN/CONNECT TO BASE
- The joystick button starts the game.
- Use the Reset switch on your console to get back to the title screen.
- All other console switches are unused.
In order to complete your mission, you will have to guide your ship to the upper
level of the screen, where the cage (represented as a horizontal line) is
located, while avoiding the mortal contact with the enemy drones. Position the
ship under the opening (door) in the cage and push UP to collect the food. At
this point, the enemy will detect you and send a new drone, so quickly get back
to the base in order to move on to the next level. After the first few stages,
the door in the cage will become locked. You will be forced to collect a
Passkey, graphically represented as a square, to unlock the cage.
During your trips, you will have to keep an eye on the fuel level that
constantly decreases once your leave the ground. When it's low, it will become
yellow. Should it turn red, your ship will move slower and if it runs out, you'd
better prepare the next ship! But be careful, because you have a limited supply
of 6 ships. You will also lose one when crashing against drones. Getting your
ship destroyed will also result in losing the food you're carrying. Maneuver
carefully!
LEVELS
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Space Treat contains 99 levels of increasing difficulty.
The first 2 levels are the easiest ones, useful for basic control practice.
Starting from level 3, the cage containing food will be locked and you will have
to collect a Passkey in order to open it.
Level 7 and above are the most difficult ones, with speeding drones adopting
advanced movement patterns.
Level structures change each time you play.
Every new game is a different challenge!
SCORING
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The score corresponds to the level you reach. For instance, reaching level 10
means your score equals to 10. So your goal is to pass as many levels as
possible. Clearing level 99 is the ultimate challenge! At the end of the game,
the level number you've reached will be shown again before returning to the
title screen, ready for a new game.
PLAYING TIPS
- Always carefully choose the location where you will leave your base, as the
fuel will not decrease while you're connected to it, but you won't be able to
get back to the base until you collect the food.
- Take some time to examine the movement patterns of the drones to find the best
place and time to start your trip, both upward and downward.
- You can take a break between levels, since the game will wait for you to push
the fire button before starting a new screen.
THE SCREEN
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ABOUT THE GAME
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Space Treat was started in May 2002 as my first homebrew. The idea has evolved a
lot during the creation process, with many features being included or scrapped.
A lot of suggestions came from the people on the Stella List, and great support
from the AtariAge forums and other individuals.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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I started my programming experience as a kid, once I understood that creating
games could have been at least as much fun as playing them. Being quite too
young to fully understand 6502 assembler on my Commodore 64, my early years
passed by with mostly basic programming. But the call for speed was strong, and
I often tried my hand at 8-bits assembler. By the end of the '64 era, I'd
managed to grasp the basics of machine language. After the C64 came the Amiga,
along with the powerful and readable 68000 assembler. That's where I've had most
of my assembler activity, coding demos that were released in the, at the time,
intense demo group scene. Long hours spent on assembler can really open your
mind to the inner workings of hardware and software, something that's being lost
as more and more generations of programming languages surface. Nowadays, even if
my daily job is not related to games or low-level programming, I keep doing asm
coding for fun, both because I love Atari and since it's a great exercise.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Without the help and support from the following people, this game would have
never been started and much less finished:
- Cristina
- Randy Crihfield
- All the people on the Stella List (Thomas Jentzsch, Eckhard Stolberg, Andrew
Davie, Paul Slocum, Manuel Polik to name a few, sorry all others I've
forgotten!)
- AtariAge (Albert and Alex)
- Daryl Litts
- All the great guys from the AtariAge forums
- Davide Pasca (Kazzuya)
- Fabrizio Farenga
- Fabio Pacifici (Jag)
- Antonio Daniele
- Christian Padovano
- Sergio Paolantonio (Raoul)
- Daniele Mancini
...and everyone else who took the time to write in to support the creation of
Space Treat!
CONTACT INFORMATION
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Order from Hozer Video: http://www.hozervideo.com/
Contact Fabrizio Zavagli: http://www.rasty.com - [email protected]
HISTORY AND NOTES
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- Space Treat first Solid State release: CGE2k2 (August 10-11 2002) as a Special
Edition
- Space Treat .BIN release: August 12, 2002
- Developed with z26 and CyberStella emulators and a CuttleCart. Will not work
on older versions of Stella or PCAE.