File	Date	Author	Commit
COPYING	2013-02-25	Sami Lahtinen	[0b1f3b] Updated license info and added COPYING file
Makefile	2013-02-06	Sami Lahtinen	[647039] Added points system to show your score in the end
README	2012-12-15	Sami Lahtinen	[878ee5] Added an ingame daytime
minihack.c	2013-02-25	Sami Lahtinen	[0b1f3b] Updated license info and added COPYING file

Read Me

					Minihack, Lifeless Planet Software
					
	Minihack is an old-school text-based fantasy roleplaying game.
	In Minihack you must fight against both hellish army of demons
	and hunger, to which many adventurers have died.
	
Story:
	When the portals of Hell were opened, doom spread all over the land.
	You, a young and determined adventurer, are the only person who can
	stop this bloodshed and plunder.
	
Character classes:
	First thing you will do in Minihack is choosing character. Your
	choice will (hopefully) affect your gameplay very radically, so some
	background information is in order.
	
	Warrior:
		What you would expect warrior to be. He has great health but
		low damage. His special ability is warcry, which may scare mobs
		away.
	Archer:
		Archer has medium health, but due to ranged weaponry he has
		small damage boost. His special ability is tri-shot, which fires
		3 arrows to the enemy causing triple the damage.
	Magician:
		Magician has low health, but also packs a lot of punch in damage
		section. He has Magical Shield as his ability, which blocks
		all enemy attacks for 5 turns.
	Priest:
		Priest has medium starting stats, but his specialty, heal, easily
		replaces the lost health and damage. This character makes for
		longer games and increased tactics.
	Assassin:
		Assassin has very low health, but his weapons are unmatched.
		His specialty is single-hitting 100% sure-to-kill backstab. This
		character usually has shorter lifespan, but it makes for extreme
		tactics and the most interesting games.
		
	When playing for the first time you should play as Warrior, Archer
	or Magician until you understand the basics. You should then try every
	class in the game and find one that suits your style. 
	
	If you prefer shorter games with trading and tactics, you may find 
	Assassin and Magician great characters.
	
	If you, on the other hand, like long games full of character leveling
	Warrior and Priest are more suited for you.
	
	Archer is a general character, made for medium length games with
	no specific special abilities. You may find it interesting when
	actually trying to beat the game, instead of your highscores.
	
Gameplay:
	Instead of the typical Rogue or Nethack style of gameplay, I went
	with more familiar MUD-style command interpreter. It understands
	basic one-word commands like "attack" or "cast". To refresh your
	memory you can use the "help" command to list all available commands
	and what they do.
	
	Also, remember to read all the information you are given, at least
	when playing for first times! For example, if you don't give a notice
	to your health levels, you may find yourself fighting agaist a demon
	with no chance of surviving. Hunger is another important aspect, to 
	take care of. Many adventurers have fallen due to the simple fact 
	they found nothing to eat.
	
	Each game lasts for 5 to 20 minutes. You should also remember, that 
	you are going to die A LOT. Even I have trouble keep my character alive
	and I am, after all, the creator of the game!
	
Gameplay aspects in detail:	
	Moving around and exploring your surroundings:
		First thing you need to do is get around in the world. This is
		achieved by using commands "west", "east", "north" and "south".
		Before each turn you are given information about the place you
		are currently at. This data isn't currently too important,
		except when hunting for food.
	
	Figting and special abilities:
		Second most important thing is to know how to fight. The world
		is a dangerous place and if you don't know when and how to fight
		your journey is doomed from the beginning.
		
		When moving around the world you find enemies "spawning" near
		you and they will try to kill you. Only ways to keep them from
		achieving their only goal in life is to either fight or run.
		
		To fight you can use command "attack" which does random damage
		from 0 to your current damage level. You may also "cast" a special
		ability, which has either passive, offensive of defensive effect. 
		To see which ability each class has, check the "Character classes" 
		above.
	
	Hunting for food:
		Without food your character dies of starvation pretty quickly.
		To prevent this, you must either hunt for food or buy food from
		local villages. Because villages are pretty rare and because it
		is expensive to buy food from them, you should know the basics of
		hunting. To hunt you use the "hunt" command. After this the game
		tells if you found anything or not. This depends on your luck and
		which biome (environment) you are in. Thick and dark woods are
		most obvious places finding food, while deserts rarely have
		anything in them.
	
	Interactions with villages:
		Villages are great places to rest and buy new equipment. To
		simply rest, you can use the "wait" command, which will also
		restore some of your health. You can also use "buy" command to
		buy health potions, food and weapons. The buy command takes you
		to shopping interface, which is simple list/select interface
		similar to class selection.
		
	(Actually) winning the game:
		After wandering a while you might wonder how to really win the
		game. For variety TWO conditions have been set under which you
		may win the game. 
		
		Number one is to kill 5 demons, so the army of evil will lose 
		its leadership and disperse. This condition is for those who
		prefer fighting over adventuring, but it may take time to find 
		all the necessary foes.
		
		Second way to win the game is by finding the Library of Awesome
		Truth (shortened: Library of Truth) to find a way to cast the
		evil army away from your realm and close all the Hell Portals.
		The library is set into random coordinates and you will have to
		manually find it, but there are rumours that the location was
		written to few scrolls that were scattered all over the land.
		To win the game this way requires patience and curiosity. You
		also need to travel further and be extremely careful with hunger
		and village locations.
		
Gameplay tips:
	1. 	Use 'wait' and 'hunt' in forests to gain much health.
	2. 	If you are a magician, use 'cast' when you want to 'wait' or
		'hunt'.
	3.	Exploit the 'cast' command every time possible.
	4.	Don't spend too much time on swamps.
	5.	If prices are too high on villages, wait a bit and try again.
	6.	Don't panic.
	
About the project:
	Minihack borned out of frustration with current roguelike games
	that have keymaps that are simply too hard to remember correctly,
	especially in the middle of a tight battle with dozen of kobolts.
	(Yes, that really happened and I ended up running into walls...)
	
	After that failure I decided to make a combination of roguelikes
	and text adventures. Currently game has a single word "parser" and
	a random map generator. This combination has worked very well,
	because every game is different and I can still remember every
	command I need. Decision to go with parser was also influenced by my
	previous experience on creating small text adventures.
	
	Minihack is currently in quite early state, although all originally
	planned features have been implemented. New features will be added
	however when they are come up with.
	
	Minihack is also free software (free as in freedom) so you can take
	the code and build on top of it or re-use code from it. You can
	also send feature requests. (I am not sure if I implement them,
	but at least they give me another point of view into the project.)
	For Minihack I went with GNU's GPL to quarantee freedom also for
	those, who use redistributed versions or forks of Minihack.
	
Special thanks:
	Iceknight93,
		for your awesome reports and feature requests. Also, thanks for
		being open-minded about my game, even though it is most likely
		the simplest game you've ever seen. You are also the first one
		to truly roam the whole map (3600 locations).
	Kimtu/Jantucent,
		for excellent conversations and helping me stay on good mood.
		Although you will probably never play the game, on your own way
		you have helped me create it while staying sane.
	JanTTuX,
		for bug reporting and cool development ideas regarding porting
		Minihack to different platforms.
	My dad,
		for good advice on programming. He also helped me when I decided
		to learn about programming a while back.
		
	... and many others. Sadly, I don't have enough space to credit all
	of you, there are simply too many people, that have influenced my life.