Sylph Wind instructions Manual
Assembly 07 gamedev combo version; revision 3
(c)2007 Pieslice Productions

Table of Contents:

* Introduction * How to play - Keyboard controls * Scoring mechanics * System requirements & troubleshooting * Credits * Links * Contact |

Introduction:

Note: for a list of bug-fixes and improvements over the revisions 1 and 2, please read the Readme text file. Sylph Wind is vertically scrolling shoot'em'up (shmup) game. The main objective of the game is to beat levels consisting of pre-determined enemy sequences and end-of-level boss enemies. The player is also encouraged to achieve high-scores by taking excessive risks. |

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How to play:

The primary gameplay mechanic in Sylph Wind is called 'Scratch'. Scratching means that the you must be in the constant vicinity of the enemy bullets. Because of the risky nature of the scratch, you have an incentive of performing such a dangerous maneuvers. By scratching, you will earn energy which will be used to power up your fighter. On the left side of the game display, is the energy gauge which shows how much energy you currently have. The gauge fills up as you perform the scratch maneuvers. When the gauge is full, you will gain a level-up. When the level-up occurs, you will be granted a force shield for a brief moment and a special lightning weapon is discharged. The lightning weapon damages all enemies on screen. Now you might ask; But how can I be in constant vicinity of the bullets without getting shot? |

You can also perform a maneuver called roll. By holding the roll button, your ship will hastily spin around. Rolling will dramatically increase the rate at which you will gain energy but it will slow down your ship quite a bit. Rolling in tight spots can turn to your advantage, because apart from the extra energy, it might help you to cope tight bullet patterns more easily. Much of the advanced game strategy is tied around the roll maneuver; in order to conquer Sylph Wind, you must know when to roll and when to move quickly. You can also ram enemies while you are shielded; this is called invincible contact. Whenever you destroy an enemy with an invincible contact, you are granted with an instant energy bonus. It means that you can also level-up by using invincible contact apart from scratch. | As you can see, there are two important sections around the ship. The weak spot, and the halo. Everytime an enemy bullet is within the halo, you are scratching and will gain energy. But if a bullet comes in contact with your weak spot, you will get hit and lose a life. When you are shielded, for instance after a level-up, you can point-blank enemy bullets over your weak spot and rapidly get loads of more energy. You can even re-fill your energy gauge before the shield decays and gain a new level-up. Gaining level-ups while the shield is still active is called level-up-chain. This is one of the main methods of getting high-scores in Sylph Wind. Please refer to Scoring Mechanics section for further details. |

You have also three smartbombs at your disposal. These can be detonated at any time by depressing the bomb key. When you release a smartbomb, your fighter will release a wave of energy which deals considerable damage to all enemies within the screen, and also will give you a brief invincibility window, similar to the shield you gain after a level-up. |

Keyboard Controls: Arrow keys: Steer fighter Z: Shoot X: Roll C: Smartbomb P: Pauses game. Press this if you need a regenerative break. F9: Restart game. You are going to need this. ESC: Some people have reported this button puts you back to windows. | In-game view:

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Scoring mechanics:

Like all of the other modern shoot'em'ups, the gameplay of the Sylph Wind is very score-oriented. The basic concept of scoring is the chain. A chain is generated by scratching. While you scratch, the energy gauge will be blinking. As long as the energy gauge is blinking, you have a running chain. The chain must be maintained by scratching continuosly, or else the chain-timer will run off and a chain is broken. Everytime you perform a scratch, the amount of score you'll get goes up along with the chain counter. The chain-timer can also be maintained by shooting down enemies, but this won't increase your chain value. In order to get successful chains, you must not shoot all enemies instantly, but instead let them to spam some bullets for you to scratch on. Chaining is all about timing and route prediction - you must carefully adjust your movement speed, hold off the roll to hastily move towards a swarm of bullets and roll around it to gather some energy, and then haste to the new bullet swarm and scratch it. If you seem to have no time to scratch new bullets before the chain-timer runs off, just shoot down couple of enemies in order to keep the chain running. By collecting the level-up-chains mentioned in the How to play: section, you can increase a chain multiplier, which'll, well, multiply your chain value. The value of the chain-multiplier is the amount of consecutive (eg. leveling up before the shield falls off) level-ups you have obtained. If you lose the shield, the chain multiplier will be reset. Collecting high chains with high chain multipliers requires a skill, practise and knowledge of the level. Exploiting the scoring system can lead you to ridiculously high scores. Pieslice Productions' record for this one-level demo is 2.78 billion points. |

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System requirements & troubleshooting:

System requirements Operating system: Windows XP CPU: P3 or AMD equivalent RAM: 256mb Video card: * ATI Radeon 9600 or better * NVidia GeForce FX series or better. (Recommended: GeForce 6600 or better, Radeon x850 or better) Sound Card: DirectSound compatible sound card. This game uses software mixing for audio. Known problems & troubleshooting: Radeon 9600, Radeon 9800 display drivers: You will need quite up to date drivers for these video cards. When playing with a system with either of those cards installed and the game appears mostly plain gray with only some graphical effects visible, please update your drivers for correct graphics output. GeForce FX series display drivers: While using pre-stone-age display drivers, the game crashes on startup. Please update your drivers in order to run Sylph Wind. You might want to set the resolution to 640x480 for GeForce FX series. The game runs slowly on AMD x64 DualCore systems: Because of the hardware glitch on AMD x64 DualCore motherboards, the method used to limit the framerate of the Sylph Wind does not work correctly. This will cause the game run slowly. There are two workarounds for this glitch: * The hard way: Update your mother board drivers. * The easy way: Set the Vsync from your video drivers to "always on" or "application preference". By enabling the Vsync from the display drivers tells Sylph Wind to use vertical sync for framerate-limiting and bypass the timer-based framerate limiter. As a bonus, all of the tearing artefacts are gone! Please refer to the readme text file for further details on the frame rate limiting. The game runs slowly: * Check if you have insanely high AA and AF settings. Set them to 2xAA+2xAF or something. Sylph Wind does not benefit much from these anyway. * Lower the resolution: Please refer to the readme text file for further details how to change resolution. The game's aspect ratio is incorrect on 16:9 display devices: Please refer to the readme text file for further details how to change to widescreen mode. The widescreen mode has a game running on 4:3 window in the middle on the screen and black borders on both sides of the screen. Aargh! My ears are bleeding: Please refer to the readme text file for further details how to change the sound volume. |

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Credits:

Code: Pauli Merilainen Design: Pauli Merilainen Gfx: Pauli Merilainen Sound effects: Pauli Merilainen Music: Pauli Merilainen and Teemu Voipio Explosion samples provided by: Groovy Audio Pro Stock Library FMOD Ex Soundsystem: Firelight Technologies Cg Shader Technology: NVidia Corporation |

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Links:

Sylph Wind thread on GameDev.net A decent playthrough on Google Video |

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Contact:

piesliceproductions (at) gmail.com |

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