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ONCE UPON A CRIME
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A Fairytale Whodunnit
by Bjrn "Ghost" Ludwig

made with Adventure Game Studio 2.72
by Chris Jones

OUAC copyright (c) 2008 Bjrn Ludwig / Lost Craft
AGS / AGS runtime copyright (c) 2008 Chris Jones


Please! Take your time to read this document; it contains all the information you need to play the game.


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WELCOME
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Hello, and thank you for downloading a copy of Once Upon A Crime- my first "true" release of an adventure game. I hope you'll
enoy this little tribute to the classic genre of point-and-click adventure games as much as I enjoyed making it. And I enjoyed
that at lot! 
OUAC was made using the Adventure Game Studio, quite possibly the best toolkit I've yet had the pleasure to work with: It's a 
free editor to create adventure games, and you can get it at new.bigbluecup.com. The forums of the AGS home might, by the
time you're reading this, already have a hint thread about OUAC, and I'm there quite often, too. So if you wish to dabble in some
game design, if you're stuck or if you just wish to tell me how utterly great or bad my game is, come and give us a visit:

OUAC Homepage				http://www.freewebs.com/daemons-in-the-attic/
AGS Homepage				http://new.bigbluecup.com/
OUAC Game In Production Thread		http://new.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=33153.0
OUAC Complete Game Announcement


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INSTALLING THE GAME
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Installation is very simple- Just unzip the archive you just downloaded into a directory of your choice and then run OUAC.EXE. The
game is using a setup that should run on most computers.
To uninstall the game, just delete the game directory. OUAC doesn't leave any entries in your Windows(tm) registry.


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THE STORY
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Parodise- a realm of fairytale lore, a place for all the characters of children's books to live together. A strange realm, true, but
supposedly there is a reason for it to exist...

And sometimes tales run wild.

Red Riding Hood, for once, grew tired of being the passive little basket deliverer. She took the courses, she bought the equipment,
she got herself an attitude and became a junior detective. A PI, of all things- but then again, Parodise may need a skilled gumshoe
right now- for a strange crime has been commited, and it's up to Red (and you) to solve the case, right all wrongs, and save the 
day.


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SETUP
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If the game does for some reason not run properly on your machine, you can run WINSETUP.EXE to tweak the settings. You can
alter the game's resolution, sound and midi drivers etc. - quite hopefully so that your machine can run it. 

Note: The original resolution of OUAC is 320x240. It uses a resolution of 640x480 by means of a "x2 filter". I chose this as a default
setting because some modern computers don't support the very low 320x240. Should you experience speed issues because you
own a true dinosaur of a computer (we're talking less than 200MHz here) you may want to disable the filter and reset the game to 
the original 320x240 resolution.


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PLAYING THE GAME
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Once Upon A Crime is a classical point-and-click adventure game, and you play it by, well, pointing at things you see and clicking
on them. Your actions will cause reactions, and thus, you explore and manipulate the game's world.

Click on any of the action verbs in your GUI, and then click on something in the game- for example, click on "look" and then on
a door to examine it (and have Red say something meaningful about it), or click on "use" and the door to step through into another
location.

Red has an "inventory" where she stores everything you pick up. You can use these inventory items on other things (even other
inventory items) by clicking "use" and then the inventory item. The cursor will then become this item, and you can "use it on
something else".

A right-click will always deselect any currently selected inventory item, as well as switsching back to "walk mode".

Speech can be skipped by pressing "." on your keyboard.

You can also use the following keyboard commands to activate actions:
WALK	"w"	or	"1"
LOOK	"l"	or	"2"
GET	"g"	or	"3"
USE	"u"	or	"4"
TALK	"t"	or	"5"

If you touch the upper part of your screen, you will bring up the "System Bar". Click it to open the game's "Butler" where you 
can load or save your game, as well as reading some legal information. You can also use the Butler to quit the game.


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STARTERS & SPOILERS
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* Often enough something you do will make things happen in the game's world. After gathering new information, make sure to
  revisit old locations- maybe something new can be found, or maybe people will have new dialogue topics.

* Occasionally, interesting things are hidden in the foreground...

* Think like a fairytale PI. Just because something sound totally ridiculous, that doesn't mean it won't work...

* You cannot die in OUAC, and you cannot end up in a state that makes it impossible to solve the game. 


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HISTORY 
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Dec 27. 2007	: v1.0		Game content and scripting completed
Dec 29. 2007	: v1.1 		OUAC home testing completed
Dec 30. 2007	: v1.2 		Beta Testers started their work

Jan 03. 2008	: v1.3		First Release


Known Issues:
* No gameplay issues have been reported right now, but I suspect there are two potential situations where using objects on each 
other will create a text too long to display in the GUI bar. This will not affect the game but will make it hard to read the command.


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CREDITS
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Story, Scripting, Graphics & GUI Code		Bjrn "Ghost" Ludwig

Beta Testers				Francesco 'bicilotti' Ariis
					Jon

Thanks to				SSH		- for the credits module
					Nikolas 		- for kind words and file hosting
					Aussie 		- for never-ending faith in DITA
					and 
					Chris Jones 	- for the AGS engine

Special thanks to				Elke Drokur	
					Sebastian Groll	
					Tanja Frster	

I would also like to thank all those forum members who found the time to give a little comment in the GiP thread and for
putting up with my first extremely newbie questions. I've been part of a great many crowds, but this one's special.


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APPENDIX: FAIRY TALES
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The "Big Bad Wolf" is a common fairytale beast, but he originally appeared in "Little Red Riding Hood", the same tale that
is the source of the game's main character. "Little Red Riding Hood" is an old fairy tale and was made popular by the
Brothers Grimm. Known to have dark undertones, it has often been reworked into mature content, and often enough for the
worse of it.

"Mr Geppetto" and the "Log" are, of course, based on the tale of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi. Who doesn't know the countless
parodies? I'm a bit sad that I could not find a puzzle that involved the growing nose...

The "Steadfast Tin Soldier" is based on the tale of the same name, by Hans Christan Andersen. I still own a record, an actual
*record* with a beautifully orchestrated version of this tale. Even Disney's "Phantasia" can't beat it.

The "Three Little Pigs" are also quite well-known. Their tale was published by the Brothers Grimm, but was also made
widely known by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. The origin of the tale seems to go as far as Aesop, by the way.

"Granny Smith" is a very archetypical fairytale witch, but mostly she resembles the one mentioned in "Hansel and Gretel", a 
highly traditional german tale. Hansel and Gretel was made common fairy tale lore by the ubiquitous Brothers Grimm and, 
somewhat earlier, by Giambattista Basile (who seems to be of some importance to the fairy tale lore).

Who would need to introduce "Captain Hook", "Smee" and wee "Tinker Bell"? These characters were taken from the pages
of "Peter and Wendy" by J. M. Barrie. It's arguable if the story of Peter Pan is a true fairy tale, but in my eyes it qualifies by, 
well, having a fairy in it.
By the way, I own a very old copy of the book, and the German translation makes Tink "Bimmelchen", roughly to be
translated into "Jingleling" ! I keep that book around in the hope that one day the ghost of said translator passes by. 

The ghost "Guldenstern" is based on a little known fairy tale my grandfather used to tell me. The german title "Der traurige Geist"
can be translated "The Sad Ghost", and I wanted to include it as a slighty sad and thoughtful element. It was published by one
Jonas M. Matthus in a small compilation called "Rheinische Geistergeschichten". The book is long out of print, but worth owning
for this story alone, so should you find it somewhere, by all means get it!

The Bogey Man has more stories written about himself than I could name here, and is also a classic tale-monster. The version I
use is slightly more menacing than the Bogey Man appears to be in most tales, though. I refer to him as the *other* Teletubby.
And you cannot get much scarier.

Some mention is made of other famous fairy tale characters, as well as some more modern elements. All of them are, of course,
totally made to fit the context of the game.