Kasei: Ninja vs Pirates

Thank you for downloading Kasei: Ninja vs Pirates, an action combat demo entry for Gamedev.net's "4 Elements" Competition.  This demo was constructed entirely within the 3 month timeframe of the contest - the entirety of the combat system, all of the art resources, all of the content, all of the AI, most of the sky system, etc were all built within the 3 month timeframe.  An existing game engine of our own design was used, which was in turn built apon Nebula 2 originally.

If you're interested in Elium (Kasei serves as a sort of combat demo for Elium, as Elium is an action RPG - all content developed for Kasei will become part of Elium), please watch http://www.elium.tk for further updates.

Installation:

1.) Copy the contents of the kasei .rar file to a folder of your choosing
2.) It may be required that you run the DirectX update to add a few DLLs not included in current public DirectX releases - chances are, you will, unless you're a software developer.  Simply run /directx_update/DXSETUP.exe and follow the on-screen instructions.

Starting the game:

Run one of the bat files (kasei, kasei_dx7 or kasei_windowed).  kasei.bat will run the game full screen at 1024x768 resolution, and kasei_windowed.bat will run windowed at 1024x768.  The resolution can be changed to any desired resolution by editing the appropriate .bat file... in each, you'll see a line that resembles:

-w 1024 -h 768

If you wanted 1280x1024, you would change that to:

-w 1280 -h 1024

... and so on.

kasei_dx7 is a special-case.  It includes an extra command "-featureset dx7" which hard-locks the rendering to DX7 levels.  This is useful if you have a PS/VS 2.0 spec card, but you want to run in lower-detail mode.  You can add "-fullscreen" to the bat file if you wish to run in DX7 mode with fullscreen.


Playing the game:

You are a ninja, a ninja that hates pirates.  You've infiltrated their encampment, and you know there are at least 7 pirates in the camp, as well as two mysterious leaders (probably to be found at the important-looking tower).  Your solemn duty as a ninja is, of course, to kill all of these pirates.

Your health is indicated via the heartbeat sound.  The closer you are to death, the louder the heartbeat.  If you stand still, your health will regenerate slowly, but it does take some time (the heartbeat sound will stop entirely once you're at full health).

The controls are as follows::

w/s/a/d - move forward / backward / left / right.
spacebar - jump
left mouse - primary attack
right mouse - secondary attack
shift or alt - parry (can be held for a limited time, must be re-pressed to re-enable parry after the sword drops)
mouse scroll wheel - zoom in/out
f8 - toggle "GUI mode"
Esc - quits

"GUI mode" unlocks the mouse cursor from the window.  This is necessary, if you're running windowed and wish to switch to a different window (though we highly recommend running in fullscreen mode only for now, it's the most tested).


Advanced Manuevers:

- You can dodge by pressing a direction + parry.
- If in mid-air, you can press and hold a button or button combo and it will be activated as soon as you land.
- You can control the direction of your dodge by rotating the camera as you dodge.  This allows you to dodge around an enemy, to a point.


Known Issues:

- Due to a problem with the physical integration that was discovered too late to fix before the demo, the game runs very slowly - much more slowly than it should, logically speaking.  It should remain playable, but the best experience will be had on machines greater than 2ghz (incidentally, this is why there are only 9 enemies and no rocks or anything else in the demo, along with many other simplifications).

- The terrain LOD isn't "stitched" together, which means you can see gaps between the levels depending on your angle of view to the terrain.  Another casuality of the short dev period alotted.

- There is no real game intro or outro due to yet another too-late-discovered problem with the engine, this one with the speed of text rendering in the GUI.  As such, after winning or losing, you will need to quit via "Esc," it won't exit for you or any such thing.

Advanced:

To open console, press f1 - type "exit" to quit (assuming you're in full-screen mode), or do whatever else you want.  Anything you see in entity_test.tcl can be done in the console, it's all "just script."

If you'd like to see an example of a storm blowing in (and are running in PS2.0 mode instead of DX7 mode), open the console and type "$skysphere.enableoverride true" - this will blow a storm in over the course of 1 in-game hour (about 8 minutes real-time) - type "$skysphere.enableoverride false" to blow it out again, same speed.  If you're impatient, want to see the clouds move really fast like in time-lapse films, or just generally want to see the full day/night cycles without waiting around for 2 hours, type this: "$worldserver.settimescale 400" (or any number you want, really, default timescale is 12).

Note that the flare around the moon is presently bugged, so nighttime will look a little... strange.  Both sunrise and sunset look great, though, as does the entire day cycle.


The author hereby removes herself of any responsibility or liability involving this program.  If it eats your PC, if it destroys your HDD, if it hits your kitten over the head with a 2x4 - I will not be held responsible.  (though it shouldn't do any of those things - especially not harming kittens, I like kittens)

Have fun,
- The Kasei Team