- Once upon a time, the city Arcadopolis was attacked by the evil Slime people, who intended to enslave the poor citizens of the city. However, their evil plans were discovered by the Arcadopolis Special Intelligence. A special defense system, the Slime Defense Initiative, was organized. When the slimes arrived, the defense system was ready...
- Stop it! Stop it! Please, what are you trying to tell us? It's just a stupid game, no science fiction novel!
- Ahem... OK, I guess you are right. How about this, then. This is Slime Invaders, a shoot-em-up game for the Macintosh. The game is in the Space Invaders genre, with a gun at the bottom of the screen and various enemies attacking from the top. 8 different enemy types, fast enough to be enjoyable on a Classic (or at least a Classic II). Color or black-and-white graphics.
- Much better.
2. News in this and recent version
- Revised b/w graphics - at least a little better.
- Fixed a bug that caused the fast graphics to crash on some Macs.
- The game now works properly on read-only media (by using a preference file in the
System folder when necessary).
- New address.
- More bug fixes and cosmetic fixes than I care to remember.
- Welcome message while loading.
- Coffee break (i.e. intermissions).
- Color.
- Slimy cod in a toaster, codshots.
- 2.0.1 fixes a bug that caused the toaster not to appear sometimes after the first game ends.
Slime Invaders 2.0 is the first color version of Slime Invaders. It does, of course, support 4-bit color and works on 12" color screens, for those of you who can't run Solarian™ (popular game by Ben Haller that is likely to cause lots of Mac gamers to ignore this one).
You are allowed to make changes for personal use only, e.g. replace sounds if you don't like the present ones, but you may not redistribute it in such a form. If you want something changed in the distributed version, ask me and I might put it in.
3. Using Slime Invaders
Start a new game with "New game" in the "Game" menu.
During the game, you do not have access to menus, but you can pause the game with cmd-p or abort it with cmd-period.
The game itself should be rather intuitive. Shoot everything, don't get hit. The gun is controlled with the mouse. When (not "if"!) you do get hit, your next gun appears on the right, and will not enter the game area until you click the mouse button. The same holds for re-entering after a coffee break.
Just watch out for the slimy cod in a toaster. Shoot it *once*, and then catch the falling cod for an extra codshot. You fire the codshots with any of a set of keys. I recommend tab for "up-shot" and shoft for "down-shot". See the online documentation.
A few notes on the enemies: The "slimes" are present in all levels, but the stuff they throw at you varies. Note that this game, like many arcade games, has "smart bombs" - but not used by you... To make matters worse, the horrible "death" appears if you take too long to clear a level.
If you switch from Slime Invaders to another application, the game hides its game window. This is done to give you a chance to access the disk icons, trashcan etc (esp. for Sys 6 where there's no "hide" option).
4. Compatibility
Slime Invaders should run on all Macintoshes regardless of system version as long as it has enough memory, with or without MultiFinder including System 7. The game has been tested on a wide range of Macs. It was developed using an accelerated Mac SE (16 MHz 68000) and a Mac LC both running System 6.0.7. The development system was Think Pascal version 4 with the TransSkel library by Paul duBois.
I have made quite an effort to make this game run on all Macs, especially with various screen sizes (centering the playing area on the screen). Om multiple screen systems, it will use the primary screen (with the menu bar).
For a game like this, the speed of the graphics is very important. It is highly recommended that you set the screen to 1-bit (b/w), 4-bit (16 colors) or 8-bit (256 colors) mode.
To achieve high speed, most games draw directly to the screen, but this often makes them brittle. Slime Invaders allows you to choose whether to do this or to use the standard routines (slower). To get faster graphics, check the "fast animation" menu item. BUG FIX NOTE: The fast routines caused crashes on some Macs (some Powerbooks, 24-bit cards) in version 1.0. This problem was fixed in version 1.1.
Another option that is included for compatibility reasons is the "allow background tasks" option. With this option checked, your background tasks (e.g. SuperClock) will run. However, the game may run less smoothly, and there is a risk that you happen to switch to another application by mistake by hitting the icon in the right end of the menu bar (System 6).
Also, when you die and get a new life, it is very nice if the game changes the mouse position, but this relies on a feature that is not guaranteed to stay, so if the program breaks just when you try to re-enter the game field, try unchecking "Reposition Mouse". (This might be necessary under A/UX, but that is just a guess of mine.)
Older versions (i.e. 1.0) used the old Sound Driver regardless of system version, and did not save scores and settings when stored on read-only devices. Version 1.1 and up has a more flexible sound handling scheme, and saves scores and settings in the System Folder if it can't write to the game file itself.
5. Acknowledgements
The help from especially Eva (who doesn't even really like arcade games), and all ideas and suggestions from the testers are much appriciated (e.g. Fredrik Bonander who suggested the coffee-breaks). Special thanks to Juri Munkki for help solving the direct-to-screen graphics on some Macs where it didn't work before.
6. Final words.
I made this game because I wanted to learn how to make decent animation on the Mac, animation of several objects over a background the way that shareware authors like Duane Blehm (Zero Gravity, Cairo Shootout) and John Calhoun (Glider, Glypha etc) do. I'd say I manage pretty well. In case someone wonders why I waste my time writing silly games, my answer is that I both learn a lot about fast graphic algorithms (an important issue in my work), and I keep my programming skill alive during periods when my work is only report writing. The only real waste is polishing and writing doc files like this one…
As stated above, the game is free, but if you send me at least $15, I will send you a diskette with the latest versions of my games. (Bikaka, Hexmines, Slime Invaders, Classic Daleks, MacSokoban, Bachman, HeartQuest.) This also counts as registration for Bachman (color version).
On payment:
• Cash is ok for all currencies that I can convert to crowns, including US$, UK£ etc.
• No US or other foreign checks, I can't cash it.
• International postal money orders are ok (but will cost you some extra).
• Paying on swedish postal giro 620831-2014 is probably the cheapest safe method.
I also enjoy fan mail, suggestions and bug reports. Send them either by E-mail to ingemar@isy.liu.se (or, if that fails, try ingemar@lysator.liu.se), or by ordinary mail to:
