*************************************************************** *COPYRIGHT * *+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++* * This Game can only be redistributed in its original form. * * If you update this game do not release it till I have * * * approved it. * * * * If you wish to sell this game or a game based on this for * * profit then contact. * *************************************************************** FIREFLIES As far as I know this game is totally original due to the obscure nature of its conception. The game is deliberately simple so I could get it finished working on my own. In this game you have to kill all your rival male Fireflies to further your chances of mating. On your first go I suggest you ignore the options just press return many times on the options screen. You should be on the game screen now, in fact if you are still reading this then you are probably dead. Press return to start the next round. CONTROLS: fly up /----\ |Fire| dive down ^ \----/ on the I closest fly left <---+---> have a guess opponent I v fly down There should be two fireflies on the screen one computer controlled and the other controlled by you. You must kill the computers one to do this you must fly above him then dive down on him. When two Fireflies collide the one moving down fasted at the time of collision will knock the other unconscious. If a firefly flies to close to the water it may be eaten by the fish. The kingfisher on the branch indicates the position of the fish. The frog will also kill if you are not careful. Just see that you opponent comes to some serious harm. Keep playing until you can beat the computer. You can have up to five players. As you play you might find it fun to punch your opponent if he kills you. For more than three players you will need a four player adaptor in your parallel port. I have not tested this option yet because I do not own an adaptor or four working joysticks (so it may not work). The fire button will allow you to swoop towards the nearest attackable firefly. I have included the source code if any one wants to expand the game here are a few ideas: 1) Females in mating mode: These will fly above the lake, when they are ready to mate they will flash a sequence of pulses using their light. You must repeat this sequence with your light. You must then fly up to the top of the screen as fast as you can. The female will follow you and mate with you. But your worries are not over yet, after mating the fireflies remain joined end to end. This inhibits their flying ability so that they can not maintain a constant height and slip down the screen. To disengage the fireflies you must try to find the correct combination of joystick manoeuvres. If you can not disengage before you get to the water then you will be eaten by my fish or my frog. 2) Glow-worms: After mating the female will fly to a tree, the bank or a bull rush and lay her eggs which hatch into glow worms (represented by pixels the same colour (but at a lower intensity) as their father). 3) Intelligence: Have about ten or twenty male fireflies to choose from. Each with its own personality. This will include differing tale lengths, different masses, different acceleration, different AI routines and varying amounts of sexual magnetism. The females will have varying intelligence. More intelligent females will give a longer sequence of flashes which need repeating. They will also require a more complicated disengagement sequence which has more steps (I will actually make it so that the females series of flashes can be decoded to give away the disentanglement sequence (but it will take a die hard player to work this out)). After the male has given the correct sequence of flashes there will be a docking manoeuvre, ie male and female fireflies must collide. The tarty females will head for you like a bullet (depending on your sexual magnetism) barely giving you time to reach the top of the screen. Intelligent females may be a little more shy and back off when you make a move. Intelligent females will be more reluctant to mate with aggressive males who murder other males, where as tarty females find nothing more appealing. you can increase your social standing by tormenting the fish making it jump without catching you or irritating the frog so it jumps off its lily pad. More intelligent females give birth to more intelligent glow- worms which stand a better chance of survival. If all but one human firefly dies then after a short time the game will end and the number of surviving glow worms will be totalled up. The winner will be the player with the most surviving offspring. 4) Graphics: One thing I have not implicated very well with this demo is the graphics. The idea of having a one bitplane playfield for the background was that it could feature superb full motion animation. There should be enough remaining memory for about 100 frames of animated backdrop. One idea is to digitize real trees and bull rushes in a gentle breeze then play this in the background rather than have it static. This would also allow us to let gusts of wind effect the fireflies. Another idea is to rig up the pond in 3D on Imagine III then render it in solid black. Placing the camera in 100 different positions along a horizontal line. This will give the smoothest 3D animation (50 frames a second) ever scene in an Amiga game. The camera could then be used to (appear to) track the action in the game allowing us a slightly bigger lake. The fish and frog would also be given around 200 frames of animation each. 4) Rare events: we would also add about 10 rare events. These would add to long term appeal. So each time you play the game there is a 1 in 500 chance of a duck landing on the water. Or a 1 in 1000 chance or UFO landing. 5) Date events: The game would detect the presence of a clock and then wish people happy Christmas, happy New Year or inform them that one of the programming team has a Birthday coming up. Perhaps we could also get a respected astrologer to write down events which should be in the news on certain days and players could see if they were coming true. Perhaps on certain days in December the pond could freeze up leading you to skid on the ice. 6) I would like to fade in the gravity and acceleration at the beginning to stop people dying as soon as the game starts. The effect would be more smooth than slowing down the frame rate. A Much Bigger Fireflies Project This would need to be funded by advertising or Piracy would kill it. If we expand the game of Fireflies into 3D and stick it on the Internet. The idea would be that one player would play on each terminal. This lets us to abandon the single screen lake allowing us to have a vast 3D lake. The greater freedom of moment will allow us to have perhaps around 2000 players (if we can share the work out between the machines and some central servers). It is very important that each player should only receive information about the part of the lake relevant to them. The new rules 1) Male Fireflies must be played my real life males. 2) Females fireflies must be played by real life females. 3) Your tale colour and length will represent your social interests. Once on the lake you can do what you like. So if your a female Take That fan then you could go and drown some East 17 fans. Outer Limits Vs X-files, PC Vs Amigas and all Vs The Young Conservatives. We could even hold political debates where one view point kills the other. Mating would also be different after finding a firefly of the opposite sex who's interests are similar to yours you would mate however both would be in control of signalling and decision making. To disentangle you would both have to pull the same direction simultaneously a certain number of times. Both Fireflies could then fly off to a tree or bank. The screen would then split four ways as shown. One part would show a zoomed in female laying her eggs with the male beside her. Another would show a quarter screen version of the game so you can look out for rival males (or make sure the girl you met last night does not catch you with someone else). The rest of the screen would allow you to talk to each other, view each others dubious self portrait or digitized photo and exchange E- mail addresses. Once up and running the system would be improved allowing the best players to be reincarnated as fish, birds, moths, frogs, pike & tadpoles. Each with its own life cycle, we would keep on upgrading the game until we have a complete ecosystem. Perhaps even a plant simulator, where you have to decide if you should invest energy in new leaves (and decide where you should put them) or perhaps more energy should be put in to reproduction may be your route network needs to be expanded. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that it does not require a wild leap of imagination to see why girls might find it interesting. This game is intended to be very social and its lack of score and purpose makes it quite different any other game. The game will run in a similar fashion to a TV show. With two half hour games each evening. The lines to log on will open 10 minuets before the game starts and players must log on early to be sure they get a place and to give us time to set up stuff. Before the game starts there will be adverts from our sponsors (perhaps tailored to the players personal taste) and trailers for your forth coming games then the theme music titles and the game begins. Celebrities could also be invited to play imagine what chaos there would be if Take That were playing. I wonder how long Salman Rushdi against the fundamentalists would last. Interests Mental: 1) Computing - animation, programming, AI, 3D rendering and just generally replicating and bending physics. 2) Cutting edge science - The future of mass storage, nano technology, holograms, pseudo 3D, super dense atoms, fundamental particles and the workings of the brain. 3) Wildlife - Flying squirrels, ants slow worms & pond life. 4) French bangers - what haven't we done with them. 5) Performing - Although sometimes quite shy I do enjoy performing on stage. I have got through to the finals of the school spoken English twice and won it once. I would enjoy pushing products and ideas publicly. 6) Advertising - I have an instinctive desire to impress, would love influencing people. I would like to bring advertising to the games industry in a way that the product placement just adds atmosphere or the ads are so good they just enhance the product. I firmly believe total sponsorship to be the only sensible way of funding link up game with hundreds of players. It also turns Piracy into a good thing rather than it being bad. 8) Space the moon and quantum physics. 9) The paranormal - magnetic resinance, spoon bending & UFO's 10) Dreaming. Physical: 1) Skiing - I just love it (specially black runs). 2) Climbing - very good fun. 3) Badminton and Squash - good convenient fun. 4) Generally hanging from things - I'd love to do my own motion capture stunts. I can hang from my arms (only) continuously for five minuets. I can also hang from one arm and juggle with two balls in the other hand. 5) Building and being the first to test a 24 foot high death slide made from a length of rope and a plastic water pipe. Also 5 people on a rope swing over a stream was fun. 6) Cycling - we live in the bottom of a valley so where ever you go is up hill I can now cycle up Kit Hill (two miles of solid steep up hill) with out stopping. 7) Cycling down Kit Hill. 8) Snorkelling - sea cucumbers, squid, eels and crabs. I respect: Animation 1) Aardman Animation - Loves Me, Loves Me Not 2) Nick park - A Grand Day Out, Archy's Concrete Nightmare, Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers & A Close Shave. 3) The Sandman - A scary animation this to horror what a Grand Day out is to comedy. 4) Blindscape - This depicts a blind man stumbling through a forest, puts its point across very well. 5) Manipulation - Good Oscar winning stuff. 6) The Cat Came Back - Funny. MUSIC [Sleeper]: (Louise Wener), I should be going to see them live at Bristol Anson Rooms. Crowded House: Private Universe is prehaps the best song ever written. Pulp: Very good a performing. Britpop in general. Comedy 1) Jeremy Hardy - A public speaker just breaking into TV (a good friend of Jack Dee). His first book "When did you last see your father" is incredibly funny. So was the first Radio 1 & Radio 4 series Jeremy Hardy Speaks To The Nation. 2) Black Adder - This did for sarcasm what Monty Python did for the surreal. 3) Monty Python - You probably know them. 4) Faulty Towers - Genius 4) Whose Line Is It Anyway - Ryan Styles is very funny. 5) Have I Got News For You - Getting a bit old now. 6) Alan Partridge, The Day Today and The Saturday Night Armistice - all these have the same people in and behind them these people should now make a film. 7) Fist Of Fun - The last few episodes of the first radio series was brilliant. Then came the new controller of Radio One and the next two radio series were not very good. The TV series was OK but tended to repeat radio material. They are also good friends with people behind 6). 8) The Young Ones - and Bottom. 9) Red Dwarf - nice. Film 1) The Dark Crystal - very strong story line and just so many nice touches. A very well conceived world, brilliant characters (none of the mutant humanoid rubbish which has become so common now). 2) Monty Python Films - You must have seen them. 3) Jason and The Argonauts & Clash of The Titans - very strong stories, told well. 4) Time Bandits - Brilliant observational humour superb escapist plot. 5) Dead Poets Society - Sad. 6) Box of Delights - very good BBC drama. TV Stations Channel 4 & BBC 2: Good stuff. Books Disk World Novels Roald Dahl The Emperors New Mind CONTACT I've just made my A-level grades to go to the university of my choice which is Bristol (Maths B, Chemistry B and Biology C). However I do not know my address yet. I will be reading computer science so you can E-Mail me there: ph5885@bristol.ac.uk. I have long holidays around Christmas, Easter and Spring. Where you can send lettes to me at home: Philip Holden Greenscome Barn Luckett Callington Cornwall PL17 8LF