GoldPusher is a game with a mixture of puzzles, strategy and action.
It is strongly inspired by a commercial game named "Leprechaun".
However, it has quite different rules, graphics and features. And this game is VreeWare!
The package contains the following files:
• The game file "GoldPusher".
The user-interface is not the strongest part of the game. It isn't quite compatible with Apple's guidelines but it doesn't really cause great disasters on my MacII with system 7. You'll have to live with it.
• A graphical game editor called "Gold Edit" (this one has got a "real" user interface because I used the TCL-library). The editor is in black and white only.
• A file with puzzles, called "Rooms", which also contains the topscore, the save-information and the background patterns used in the rooms. The file has to be in the same folder as the game "GoldPusher", it has to be named "Rooms".
• This file, containing a short user guide.
Features:
- 45 rooms with action, strategy and difficult puzzles.
- make your own rooms with the graphical editor
- choose your own order to complete the puzzles
- save feature remembers which rooms you have completed
- topscore
- fast color animation and very fast BW-animation for old-mac users.
- multi-channel sound (SoundManager 3.0) otherwise single channel sound
System Requirements.
When Color-QuickDraw is available and the monitor is in a color-mode, the game runs in 8-bit color. In that case GoldPusher requires 900k of memory. Otherwise the game runs in black-and-white and only requires about 400k of memory.
In black-and-white mode the game is optimized with assembler-code for old-mac+ users. Hopefully this assembler-code also runs on other macs in BW-mode yielding blazing speed.
When system 6.0.7 or later is available, with SoundManager 3.0, the game uses multi-channel sound, otherwise it uses the old mac+ style sound procedures.
GoldPusher can run on very old mac's with very old systems (I like old systems).
Short guide to the game:
• goal
In the game you are "gold pusher", a funny little man who, for some reason, wants to push a pot of gold on top of a small "rain bow". When goldpusher succeeds in pushing the pot of gold on the rainbow, the puzzle is solved, you get a bonus and you move on to the next room.
However reaching the rainbow may be extremely problematic. There are voracious monsters hunting for goldpusher and the pot might get easily stuck by all kind of obstacles.
• pushing rocks and balloons
To help GoldPusher to complete his job there are rocks and balloons, which can also be pushed around. They can flatten the road to the rainbow or they can kill monsters. There is a kind of gravity, which only affects the rocks. When a rock falls down and a monster happens to be in the way it gets killed. The balloons do not fall, they rise, and again, when a monster is hit by a rising balloon it dies.
• lifting the gold pot
Also Goldpusher is killed by a falling rock, or when he tries to lift a rock. Actually, he manages to lift the rock a little bit but then his force yields and he is crushed by the full weight of the rock.
Remarkably enough, GoldPusher is not killed by a rising balloon. He can force a balloon down. He can even lift the gold pot (or a rock) by pushing it on a balloon (or pushing the balloon under the pot) and then pushing the pot upwards. He manages again to lift the pot a little bit, but now, immediately, the balloon comes to his aid and prevents the pot from falling back on GoldPusher and killing him.
• crushing rocks and balloons.
GoldPusher is quite strong. When he pushes a rock which can't move any further (against a wall for instance) the rock falls to pieces and vanishes. The same happens of course when GoldPusher pushes a balloon which can't move.
• using the spades
Another help for GoldPusher in some rooms are the "spades". He can pick up spades and throw them in the direction his nose is pointing. When a spade touches a monster, it freezes the monster for some time, so it can't move and hurt GoldPusher. Another use of the spades is in filling holes, so that the gold pot can be moved across the holes, where it would otherwise get stuck. Also spades can be used to capture monsters by blocking their way in e.g. a corridor. A monster cannot pass a way which is blocked by spades or rocks.
• monster intelligence
There are four kind of monsters in the game: snails, orcs, spiders and icebears. The snails are slow and move in straight lines. Only when they find their way blocked, they try other directions, with a strong preference for a turn into the direction where you (GoldPusher) are standing. So when a snail is moving freely and you are standing next to it, but not in its way, it won't attack you.
The orcs move like the snails but much faster. Icebears move like orcs but they can also push rocks and balloons! The icebears appear in room 43 for the first time.
Finally spiders are the most intelligent monsters. They constanly look where you are and try to find you. When they find their way blocked they will try all kind of possibilities to get around the obstacle.
• choosing rooms
I did not find it easy to put the 45-puzzles into any particular order, for instance in a sequence of increasing difficulty. With the exception of the first few rooms, all other puzzles appear to me equally difficult (very difficult actually). Some puzzles require an arcade-style agility with the keys whereas others require only thinking and strategy. (in most rooms there is a 100% save strategy to get the gold pot on the rainbow)
So I thought it would not be usefull to force a player to complete the game in a certain fixed order and to increase the room-bonus as the game proceeds.
Instead, once a puzzle is completed, the player has the opportunity to choose any other room, although the game automatically increases the room-number and presents that one as the next puzzle. To choose another room, a menu command is available. A completed puzzle can not be solved again, to prevent a player to increase his score by solving the same puzzle over and over.
When a player tries to change rooms in the middle of a puzzle in progress, the player is punished by loosing a life. The effect is the same as aborting the current puzzle and then choosing another room. One can only switch puzzles without the life penalty at the beginning of a puzzle, before the first move is made (the game is then paused).
• scoring and screen lay-out.
The scoring follows a simple scheme. Every room completed adds a fixed bonus to the total score. Each monster killed also adds a bonus depending on the "intelligence" of the particular monster. Every time when 100 bonus points are gained, the player earns a new life. The number of lifes is indicated in the top right corner of the screen. The total score is in the top left corner. In the bottom right corner the number of spades you picked up is counted.
The bonus points and extra lifes earned in a room only become permanent if the room is completed succsfully. That is, if GoldPusher is killed, you loose all bonus and extra lifes accumulated in this room and you fall back to the situation at the beginning of this room, minus one life.
• saving and loading
Only at the beginning of a new puzzle, thus when the previous puzzle has been succesfully completed, one is allowed to save the game. A dialog box is presented with four save-buttons. Each save button can store one saved game. So up to four different games in progress can be saved.
Loading a game can be done at any time. However, a saved game can only be loaded once!. This has to be that way, otherwise the concept of earning and loosing lifes has no meaning. If one could load a saved game over and over again, one would immediately reload a saved game as soon as one would run into a deadly situation.
• keys
GoldPusher can only be moved by using keys: h,j,k and l. h is left, j is down, k is up end l is right. As an alternative the numeric keypad can also be used. Spades are picked up by walking over them. Hitting the spacebar throws a spade. A mouse click or typing 'p' pauses the game. Only then the menu-bar can be used (and becomes visible on small screens).
If you set the speed to "single cycle" in the speed-menu, all movement on the screen will stop. You can advance the animation manually by clicking the mouse. To stop single cycle mode, hold both the command key and the 4 down, while clicking the mouse.
• hints
Many rooms have a title containing a hint how to solve the puzzle. Unfortunately the title-bar of the rooms is not visible on small screens (512x342). You may use the editor to read the room titles in that case.
When you know how monsters behave, you can use this knowledge to guide them to a place where you can trap them (e.g. using a spade).
Using Gold Edit
• When you start Gold Edit (use cmd-E when GoldPusher is paused) it will look for a file called 'Rooms' in the current folder. Otherwise you have to navigate yourself with the standard file dialog to a room-file.
• When a room file is opened you see a scroll-list of the rooms. Each row in the list shows three items: room-number, pattern-ID and room-name. The pattern-ID is the resource-ID of a 'ppat'-resource that is used for the background-pattern of this room.
• When you dubble-click on a room in the list, an autoscrolling-window is opened and shows the room as you see it in the game. You can add/remove things by just clicking in this window.
• The monster-menu and the stones-menu can be teared of the menubar and used as floating palettes when you edit a room-window.
• The room-menu allows you to create new rooms, to change the name and sequence number of a room and to change the background pattern. You can also change the order of the rooms by select-and-drag in the room-list on the screen.
• The editor only shows the background pattern in a dialog-window, when the menu-command 'change background' is activated. It does not show the background pattern in the room-window as you would probably expect. I might add this in a new version ...
History
I have written and improved the game during a very long period of time as an intermittend, low-priority excercise in programming, which still is, to me, a kind of fun. Long ago I wrote the first version of the game, using the now obsolete Turbo Pascal environment. Later I acquired THINK C and started to write a grafical editor for the game, trying out the Think Class Library. Again later I got hold of an old color MacII and started to convert the game into color. The result is not very coherent and consistent and I do not plan to do "real" software engineering to spoil the fun of hacking. So save me the comments on how everything should be according to the commandments of Apple and the latest, again thicker book of reference as to how to write programs under System x.y (x>=7, y>=1).
