======================
= THE ATOMIC BUTCHER =
======================

#include <shitty_ascii_art.h>

        ||||
         ||

         ()
       /    \
     ///    \\\
     //      \\


#include <std_disclaimer.h>

   "I do not accept responsibility for any effects, adverse or otherwise,
    that this program may have on you, your computer, your sanity, your dog,
    and anything else that you can think of. Use it at your own risk."

===============
1. Introduction
===============


Welcome to Atomic Butcher. In this post-nuclear jump'n'run game,
you play the role of a crazed mutant freak who is sent out from the bunker he lived in
in order to collect as much meat as possible. To do so, you have to kill everything in
sight and collect the corpses; if you have collected enough, you may proceed to the next level.
If you think this is a stupid and unnecesarilly violent concept for a game, you are right and paid attention;
congratulations, you now understand a lot about the current state of computer games.


============
2. The Story
============


In the not so far future the world as we know it has been destroyed by a terrible atomic war.
Civilization with all its glorious inventions  was
destroyed in the glimpse of an eye by the nuclear fire of a thousand suns.
But what was the reason for the great war? Who cares.

The fact is that 95% of humanity was wiped out and the few survivors either managed to flee into
underground shelters or were hideously transformed by the radiation in complete defiance of the fact
that in reality you just die from radioactivity.

The Atomic Butcher was one of the people who were able to save themselves in a shelter,
but still caught a great dose of radiation before he managed to reach it and thus mutated.
After that, he became incredibly stupid, but his physical strength increased immensely and his hunger for
fresh meat was by far exceeding that of normal humans.

Just as the other people in the shelter were about to gather to lynch him because he simply couldn't be
kept from eating other shelter-inhabitants it was noticed
by the leaders that the food reserves were becoming very sparse, and so they reconsidered and had a far
better idea: They sent him out on an epic quest for meat and...well... even more meat!

===============
3. Instructions
===============

If you want to play "Atomic Butcher" in windowed mode, just start it with the command-line
parameter "-windowed". To start the game with the console enabled, add "-dev".

Controls:
---------

A/D             - Walk left and right
SPACE            - Jump
1-7           - Select current weapon
MOUSE        - Aim
LEFT MOUSE    - Shoot
E/Q/MOUSE WHEEL - Cycle through your weapons
I        - Inject drugs
P          - Pause the game
F1         - Help screen
+/-        - Increase/ Decrease Particle count in order to increase performance on older machines
ESC        - Return to main menu
F10        - Quit the game immediately
F12         - Take screenshots


Main menu:
----------

In the main menu you can choose to either start a new game or load an old game; to select
menu items, use the arrow keys and Enter. (Or w, s and space - just like the controls during the game)
If you start a new game, you can select one of 5 Savegames; after every level your game will
be automatically saved in the savegame you select at the beginning. If you load a game, it
will continue at the beginning of the last level you played - there is no saving during a level.

Playing the game:
-----------------

You control the Atomic Butcher with the keyboard and the mouse. With the keys A/D you can walk left
and right, regardless of the direction you are looking in. The mouse is used to aim; you will always aim
directly towards the crosshair. If you shot an organic enemy, then he will in most cases leave a corpse
that you can collect simply by walking over it. Different enemies give you different amounts of meat, and
once you have enough meat (which is displayed at the status bar right of the third icon) you may leave the
level through the exit. WARNING: Non-organic enemies will explode when they die - be careful!

If however you collected MORE meat than the minimum for a level, the extra meat will be put into your meat
pool. After every level you will be informed about how much meat is in the pool; if this value exceeds
60 meat pieces, you can UPGRADE either your health or one of your weapons. Choose wisely, for you
probalby won't find enough meat to upgrade everything!

In the levels, a plethora of hazards will wait for you: Enemies, Acid lakes, Spikes, Fire, Traps, that sort
of things. You will know them, when you see them; and always watch out for WARNING SIGNS!

HINT: Always read the messages that are displayed either in the middle of the screen or on the upper
left corner! And watch out for signs and computer-screens.

Weapons:

Urine        - The butcher's standard weapon. Small range and damage, but infinite ammo. Don't ask.
Grenades     - Will be thrown farther if you keep pressing the mouse button. Be careful; those dish out
               quite a lot of damage and if you release the button immediately, the grenade will just
           be put on the ground before you, so be careful with them! They also bounce when a detonation
           occurs next to them, so don't throw too many grenades on a spot - you don't know where
           they might land...
Revolver     - Inflicts medium amounts of damage and has a very high range and good accuracy, but a slow fire rate
              and needs reloading every 6 shots.
Shotgun      - The perfect close range - weapon. Brings your enemies great
               amounts of pain if you hit directly but sucks at longer distances. Has strong recoil, that
               you can use to jump higher if you're dextrous enough!
Flamethrower - Well, acutally, this is an even better close-range weapon than the shotgun, but you won't
            find as much ammo and if you aren't careful, you are likely to set yourself on fire with it.
            Should that happen, you would be well advised to change your weapon immediately, otherwise
            your gas tank will explode. All in all, a powerful weapon, but dangerous for you at the same time!
            NOTE: The flamethrower is excellent against organic enemies, but doesn't do very much damage
            on robots.
Grenadelauncher - Shoots Proximity mines that explode on contact with enemies. Real fun, try it!
Assault Rifle - High fire rate, does lots of damage and looks nice. But only shoot small bursts with it,
                otherwise you won't be able to aim well. Has only medium range.
                
HINT: Be careful when fighting robots; those explode when they are destroyed, and when you're close enough,
      one explosion can kill you, no matter how much armour you have.

CHANGING THE CONTROLS:

There is no way to change the game's controls while playing. You can however reconfigure them
by manually changing the text file "autoexec.cfg" (with notepad or another ASCII-Editor).
In this file you will find a list lines of the form "bind KEY_XXX EVENT". What you have to do now is 
simple: For every action that you can perform in the game there is one such key-event pair.
If you, for instance, want to change the key for selecting the grenade to "g", all you have to do is
find the line that says "bind KEY_2 EV_GRENADE" and change it to "bind KEY_G EV_GRENADE".
Do not change any formatting or the names of the events, only the KEY_XXX-Part of the bind-commands.
                
Checkpoints:
------------

There is no way in Atomic Butcher to save during a level. The game saves automatically when you
finish a level, and that's it. However, there are a lot of checkpoints scattered throughout the levels
in the form of big floating skulls. If you collect one of them, you will reappear where the checkpoint was
once you die.

HINT: Be very careful about WHEN you collect checkpoints; sometimes, it is not wise to collect all checkpoints
      immediately, and it would be better to destroy all enemies in the vicinity before you pick up a checkpoint,
      so you don't have to fight all of them again everytime you respawn.
                
Armour:
-------

In Atomic Butcher, there is no way to refill your health during a level (well, actually there is exactly one in the game,
but you know what I mean, when you see it...), so you're stuck with collecting
armour. Before your health decreases when you're hit, your armour will slowly fade away, so be careful to
always wear one; armour can be replaced, your helath can't be restored!
There are three types of armour: A light leather armour, a medium one  made of junk parts
and a strong one steel armour.

Drugs:
------

Sometimes you will find small syringes filled with a yellow liquid. This is a special drug that's really
popular in the radioactive wastes; it will make you stronger and get better reflexes. Be careful not to get an overdose! As a matter of fact, this drug can even harm the butcher. Simply don't inject a drug as long as the last one still flows through the butcher's vains and everything should just be fine.

Rad-Damage:
-----------

There is also an extra called "rad-damage" that looks like a little radioactive-Symbol. Collect it, and
your urine-ray will become extremely destructive for a few seconds!


===========================
4. About "Das Humankapital"
===========================

We are two computer-science students from Austria who had always loved computer games and have both
been programming for about 8 years now. This is finally the first finished game we managed to produce
after...well...lots of less succesfull tries, you know what I mean. This game originally started out as
a little experiment and it's development should only take about a month; when we started, we didn't have
the slightest idea what we actually wanted to make except for "some kind of jump'n'run". Well, that was
in January 2004, and somehow the whole thing got out of hand. In hindsight, it seems like a miracle
that the game actually works, but we've learned a lot in making it and will be much more professional with
future releases. So keep looking for more games from us, and if you want to help us with graphics,
sound, music, programming, whatever (but especially graphics!), you are more than welcome to contact
us at:

indeterminatus@dashumankapital.net
rolandmoritz@dashumankapital.net

or just look at

www.dashumankapital.net

This game was programmed in C++ using the MinGW-Compiler and DevC++. All the graphics were drawn by us,
the music was made by a nice person from the allegro.cc forums called Astheth.

And thanks of course to Allegro, which spared us the agony of having to deal with
DirectX directly.