JOIN THE ABUSE GAME DEVELOPER PROGRAM AND MAKE MONEY CREATING EXCITING NEW WORLDS WITH THE ABUSE ENGINE! Crack dot Com's Abuse Game Developer Program has made it a piece of cake to earn money doing game design using the Abuse engine. If you enjoy making interesting levels or new games using the Abuse engine, send them to us by November 1, 1995 so that they can be considered for the Thanksgiving Abuse Data Pack. If the submission is approved, we will send you profits from the sales based on the quality of your work! If you have missed this deadline, give us a call at 512 306 1835 or e-mail gamedev@crack.com. We may release more than one data pack! Guidelines for submission: First off, do not call our 1 800 number about this. They won't have a clue about this. Make sure that your level or game is playable fresh out of the archive you sent it in, or we'll get the nasty first impression that you don't care about appearances. How large or complete does it have to be? Use the Abuse levels as a guideline. Try to fill roughly the same area (or more) and get a similar amount (or more) of gameplay in there. If you're doing game design on a Pzillion with 64Mb RAM, watch yourself, or your level may not turn out well-suited to mortal machines. The levels should also be decorated nicely with lighting and textures applied. If your level is of an inadequate size, duration, or needs any other form of polish, we will help you with suggestions. Just make a submission as specified below and we'll send you back design comments. If you're using zip file(s), make sure that you zip starting in the abuse directory and recursively get the entire directory hierarchy. When it is ready for us to check out, you can send your data as follows: By FTP / E-mail (preferred) : 1. Put your data in a .zip, .tar.gz or .tar.Z archive. 2. FTP to crack.com and store in /pub/incoming or 2. Uuencode the archive & E-mail it to us at gamedev@crack.com. 3. E-mail another letter with your name, phone number, e-mail address, where you want checks delivered, who you want them made out to, your social security number, and a short description of your submitted data to gamedev@crack.com. By US Mail : 1. Put your data in a .zip or .tgz archive and get it on a 3.5" floppy, zip disk (using MSDOS or ext2 filesystem), or CDROM with iso-9660 filesystem. 2. Mail it to: Crack dot Com, c/o: Game Dev., PO Box 163025, Austin, TX 78716-3025 3. Include a letter with your name, phone number, where you want checks delivered, who you want them made out to, your social security number, and a short description of your submitted data to gamedev@crack.com. Now to get some ugly legal stuff out of the way: Any original artwork, sound effects, or LISP code that you do FROM SCRATCH, you maintain the complete copyright to. However, levels (contained in our .spe file format) contain specific data that we maintain the copyright on, even if you think you're doing them from scratch. We reserve the right to control distribution of level data as well as any artwork, sound, and LISP code from our shareware or registered versions of the game. Our guidelines on how level data may be distributed: 1. You may distribute level data if you do not collect any compensation for it. For instance, you can upload it to an ftp site or BBS or online service public download area, as long as you aren't receiving compensation for it. 2. You may submit it to us so that we may consider distributing it for you. We will pay you profits directly based on the quality of the work you submit. We will have an answer for you within five business days of the submission date. 3. If we turn down your data for distribution, you may then either seek a third party distributor, if you wish to seek compensation for the data, or you may of course choose to release it for free. The exception to the above three rules: You may not publicly distribute any modified or original levels from the REGISTERED VERSION. You may not distribute any modified or original artwork, sound, or LISP code from the REGISTERED VERSION. This includes everything in the REGISTER subdirectory and levels 5 through 18 under the LEVELS subdirectory. You may submit modified versions of the above to us to consider publishing. However, you may not have it published through a third party if we refuse. That's the end of the evil ugly legal stuff. Questions? If you have questions about anything in this file or how the distribution program works, you may also call us at 512 306 1835 or e-mail gamedev@crack.com. Good luck, and we look forward to working with you! -Dave Taylor Partner Crack dot Com More detailed info on how to sumbit your data -------------------------------------------------------------- If your level(s) do not contain any new artwork, sound effects, or lisp code, you can just use pkzip to package them into one file and compress them. Then uploaded to crack.com. Be sure to include the above information to expedite our processing of your level and so we know how to get in touch with you. To compress, first go to the directory where your files are, then : **NOTE : replace joesmith with your name ** DOS users : pkzip joesmith.zip level*.spe UNIX user : tar cvf - level*.spe | gzip -9 -c > joesmith.tgz Upload to ftp://crack.com/pub/incoming Or mail on a 1.44 disk to : Crack dot Com, c/o: Game Dev., PO Box 163025, Austin, TX 78716-3025 Complex levels : If you've made your own artwork and/or characters, you need to create a package that we can easily install and play. To do this you should make your own LISP startup file which loads your artwork from a seperate directory and then calls the original abuse.lsp startup file. Read the file addon/example/example.lsp on how to do this. Look at the example game "pong" in addon/pong/pong.lsp to see how to add on whole new games. Jonathan's Rules of Thumb for Level Design ------------------------------------------ 1. Fill in the level nicely. Take your time and pick out textures that fit/look well together. Use lighting to enhance these. Don't just hit 't' for flood fill, and don't just use the default light setting. You must combine lighting, textures, and ambient sounds to create the atmosphere needed to keep the player immersed. 2. Avoid sharp edges in textures and lighting. Do not use half-lights in the middle of a room. 3. Avoid using teleporters unless you have to. The player can easily get lost with doors and teleporters jumping all over the place. 4. Keep rooms seperated. Don't let the player see another part of the level he/she cannot get to yet. If enough space is not given between areas the play will feel like a mouse in a maze, and not immersed in the game. 5. Let the player kill everything. People want to kill. Avoid puzzles where the only solution is to run away. 6. Pace the action. Don't keep the player running forever. Give them resting points. On the other hand don't let them run down long hallways with nothing to do. 7. Surpise the player. They dig that. 8. Don't make it too easy, nor too hard. The level should be barely passable by experts on extreme and passable by good players on hard. If a player makes it through the whole level the first time, then it is too easy. 9. Don't be repetitive. Each problem the player encounters should be different. 10. Lead the player, but don't let them know you are leading them. Make the level mostly-linear so the player does not have much chance of getting lost (and frustrated), but use tricks to make it seem less linear, like back-tracking over the same area with different puzzles appearing the second time. 11. Avoid using a lot of ladders. They are slow and drag down the action. 12. When using doors, do not let the new area the door takes you to loop back. When you go through a door, you are going into a new area, and it disorienting when you come across the door you just went through. 13. Stock the player with ammo according to the task. Don't be to stingy, and don't give them so much the level becomes too easy. 14. Avoid over-using the ANT_CRACK. Sure it's easy to put one down and have tons of aliens pour out of a wall, but if used too often it loses it's excitement. 15. Avoid jumping puzzles. Jumping from one platform to another platform gets old real fast.