GoldPusher is a game with a mixture of puzzles, strategy and action.
It is strongly inspired by an old 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".
• A graphical game editor called "Gold Edit". 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.
• This file, containing a short user guide.
Features:
- *104* rooms with action, strategy and difficult puzzles.
- make your own rooms with the graphical editor.
- choose your own order to complete the puzzle- and arcade rooms.
- save feature remembers which rooms you have completed
- snapshot feature can take you back into the middle of a difficult puzzle
- 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.
Short guide to the game:
• goal
In the game you are the "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. GoldPusher cannot break the iron rocks and the gold pot.
• 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 five kind of monsters in the game: snails, orcs, spiders, icebears and rock-piercers. The snails are slow and move in straight lines. Only when they find their way blocked, they try other directions, with a strong preference (75%) 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 rock-piercer moves like a snail, but it crushes all rocks and balloons it comes across.
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
In the title bar of each room you can see how many points you can collect. Because the rooms can have very different characteristics (arcade action, strategy or just a puzzle), you can choose freely which ones you want to solve, according to your taste.
Once a room 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 and GoldPusher is flashing).
• taking a snapshot
Some rooms contain more than one difficult part. When you solved a difficult passage, you can take a snapshot of the actual situation before continuing. When GoldPusher dies in the next difficult part (or when you abort in a hopeless siuation), you don't have to do the room all over again, but you are placed at the position of the last snapshot taken.
Once loaded that particular snapshot is gone, but you can take as many new snapshots as you want. When you are repositioned at a snapshot, but you want to restart from the beginning, you can use the abort command (because the snapshot is gone, once loaded).
• scoring and screen lay-out.
The scoring follows a simple scheme. Every room completed adds a bonus to the total score. This bonus depends on the difficulty level of the room. Each monster killed also adds a small bonus depending on the "intelligence" of the particular monster.
Every time when 200 bonus points are gained, you earn 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 when 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. With a snapshot you loose a life but you keep the accumulated points.
• saving and loading
Only at the beginning of a new puzzle, thus when the previous puzzle has been succesfully completed, you are 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.
The snapshot feature allows you to save a snapshot in the middle of a room. However you can only return to the snapshot when you die or abort. A Snapshot is not remembered when you save the game.
• keys and mouse
GoldPusher can be moved 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. Another alternative is using the mouse. When the item "mouse-control" in menu "help" is enabled, GoldPusher will try to follow the mouse-cursor. I do not recommend mouse-control because it is less accurate then key-control when fast reactions are required.
Spades are picked up by walking over them. Hitting the spacebar throws a spade. A mouse click or typing 'p' (or tab or cmd-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 frame by frame, 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 or kill them. E.g. you know that a snail will turn with high probability into your direction when it bumps into something.
Many unexpected tricks can be played in the physical reality of GoldPusher. To find it out is part of the fun of the game. E.g. you can throw a spade in the air just in front of a passing icebear. The icebear is not hit by the spade, but it bumps against the flying spade and thus changes direction. In some puzzles you have to use this trick to guide the icebear to the right place. This trick requires precise timing. If you throw too late the ice bear will be hit by the spade and is lamed. If you throw too early the icebear won't bump and won't change direction. Another trick is to use the spade as an umbrella agains a falling rock.
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 four items: room-number, pattern-ID, room-bonus 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 ...
In the same dialog window for the background pattern you can also specify the room bonus as a number from 1-400.
• In the scroll-list of the rooms you can make a multiple selection (shift-clicking or shift-dragging with the mouse or using shift+arrow-key). You can delete this selection using the backspace key or the menu item 'delete room'. Or you can move the selection by clicking inside the selected area and dragging to where you want the first room to go.
• The menu item "Append" in the file menu allows you to append another room-file to the current room-file being edited.
• The editor makes sure that a room has one and only one GoldPusher. If you had more it deletes them, if you have none it adds one.
• You cannot make a new empty room-file with a single menu command. The easiest way to make a new empty room file is to duplicate an existing room file in the Finder and to delete all rooms in this file. To do this you open the duplicate file with Gold Edit, select the first room, shift-select the last room (all rooms are now highlighted) and press the backspace key.
• You can protect your rooms with a password. Only works with room-files created with this release. Each room in a room-file is now protected with a CRC-check. Rooms from old room-files won't pass this CRC-check. That means you can't store a password and the bonus value is not trusted and fixed to 20, even when you specified a higher bonus with the editor.
The password feature is not quite finished. It is meant for future use in full-proof topscores.
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.
Improvements in version 1.0 compared to the first release.
GoldPusher:
• Added 56 new fascinating rooms of Erich Friedman. These Rooms are 17-20 and 53-104.
• Most puzzles now have a perfectly safe solution. If you do it in the right way you will never get killed. However, it may take you hours to find the right strategy.
• Rooms with an unsave solution (i.e. you can get killed even when you know how to solve the puzzle) have a title starting with "Arcade level: ....", so you can skip them if you don't like playing arcade-style. Some of the Arcade rooms are very hard and require precise timing.
• A new monster added: the Rock Piercer. It crushes rocks and balloons that it encounters and it stays alive when you drop a rock on its head.
• Added the Unbreakable Iron Ball, with clank-sound. Added a money-sound to the Gold Pot.
• Added a Snapshot feature. In the middle of solving a room you can take a snapshot at any time you like. When you die in that room or when you abort, you don't have to redo the whole room, but you are taken back to the exact situation at the time of the snapshot.
• When the game is paused the GoldPusher is flashing, allowing you to locate him quickly in a complicated room.
• Added text to the score-display so you can see what the numbers mean.
• You can disable all sounds or only the step sound.
• Pause/Play also switches when 'p' or Cmd-P or TAB is pressed.
• Changed the physical reality in GoldPusher in such a way that you will always get killed when you move a rock away under another one on top of it. In the old version you could sometimes crush both rocks by pressing the left- and up-key in quick succession. This spoiled some of the puzzles.
• Increased the maximum number of moving objects in a room to 100.
• You get a file selection dialog when the program can't find the Rooms-file in the current directory. Formerly the program would quit with a fatal error.
• Each room now has a different room-bonus. The harder the room the more points you get.
• Transparent wallstones are now also in colour indistinguisable from real wallstones. Some puzzles therefore have become a real challenge!
Gold Edit:
• The Rock Piercer is added to the monster menu.
• Added the unbreakable Iron Rock to the monster menu.
• You can edit the room bonus.
• You can select multiple rooms, by shift-click, shift-drag or pressing shift-arrow.
• Selected rooms can be moved by clicking into the selected area and dragging to the destiniation, which has to be outside the selected area.
• Selected rooms can be deleted by pressing backspace or using the menu item "delete rooms".
• A new menu item "Append" in the file menu allows you to append a room-file to the room-file being edited.
• The program now makes sure that a room has one and only one GoldPusher.
• You can specify the background pattern "0", which means no background (=white). The old program wouldn't allow you to enter a zero for the background pattern.
• You can protect your rooms with a password
• And, of course, several bugs have been repaired in GoldPusher and GoldEdit.
