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GATE 88 - Game Manual
Jonathan Mak (aka queasy)
Webpage:http://www.queasygames.com/gate88
Forums: http://www.queasygames.com/forums
Email: [email protected]
Any comments or feedback will be extremely helpful!
Table of Contents
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Objective
Controls
o In-Game Controls
o Replay Mode Controls
Game Modes
Game Interface
Action Menu
Radar System
Making Buildings
Researching
Building Ships
Commanding Your Ships
Viewing Replays
Setting Up a Multiplayer Game
Server Commands
Technical Details
Objective
The objective of the game is to protect your command post while destroying your
enemy. You'll build various buildings and give command to fighters to help
eliminate your opponent. Each building and research item requires resources. Your
ship will automatically gain resources over time. As well, the shipyards that you
build will automatically construct fighters up to its capacity. Use the action menu
to launch these fighters.
Controls
In-Game Controls
Key
Description
Left/Right Arrow Keys Rotates your ship.
Up/Down Arrow Keys Thrusts forward and backwards.
Double-Tap Left/Right Double tap the left or right arrow keys to do a barrel roll. This is
Arrow Keys
sometimes useful as a last-ditch effort to dodge a bullet.
Double-Tap Down
Arrow Key
Brakes.
D or Joystick Button 1 Fires your primary weapon.
S or Joystick Button 2 Fires your special weapon.
W or joystick Button 3 When held, opens the full screen radar.
A or Joystick Button 4
When held, opens the action menu. Use this to build, research, and
give orders to ships.
N
Skips current song.
Tab
Shows scoreboard (multiplayer mode only).
T
Allows you to start typing a chat message (multiplayer mode only).
Enter
Selects the highlighted menu selection.
Escape
Opens the main menu.
Menu shortcut keys
The following keys are provided as convenient shortcuts to submenus wtihin the action menu.
Q
Opens the "General Buildings" sub-menu of the action menu.
E
Opens the "Turrets" sub-menu of the action menu.
Z
Opens the "Red Group" ship orders sub-menu of the action menu.
X
Opens the "Green Group" ship orders sub-menu of the action menu.
V
Opens the "Blue Group" ship orders sub-menu of the action menu.
Note: On some gamepads it is hard to press the up or down buttons without
pressing any of the other buttons. This, unfortunately, makes navigating the action
menu almost impossible.
Replay Mode Controls
Key
Description
A + Arrow
Keys
Moves the camera around. Letting go of 'A' will focus the camera back on
the player.
S+Left Arrow Puts the replay into slow-motion.
S+Right
Arrow
Fast-forwards the replay.
ESC
Pressing this once will start the "What if" feature. This stops the replay and
gives you control of the ship.
Please see Viewing Replays.
Game Modes
Mode
Description
Tutorial
Learn the game and experiment. No enemies will spawn, and you will start
with an abundance of resources.
Practice
Enemy bases spawn around your base at regular intervals. You must destroy
them before they destroy you. A message will tell you when a new enemy base
has spawned.
Connect to a server and attempt to wipe out the other player's command post. If
you destroy an enemy player's ship, you gain resources depending on how
Multiplayer upgraded his/her ship is. If your command post gets destroyed, you will spawn
with more resources to help you make a comeback. You will be cloaked when
you have no command post.
Game Interface
Instead of an intrusive heads-up-display, Gate 88 embeds a lot of information
within the graphics itself. Each destroyable game entity has a coloured circle in its
center. The colour represents it's affinity towards you. Green entities are your ships
and buildings. Red entities are your enemies. Gray entities are buildings that have
lost power.
The intensity of the colour will tell you health status of an entity. The brighter the
colour, the healthier it is.
Your ship also has a ring around the center circle. The intensity of the colour of
this ring represents your battery power. Battery power automatically regenerates.
Finally, depending on the state of certain entities, they will animate accordingly.
Action Menu
Hold the action key to bring up the menu.
The bottom the screen will show you how many resources you have, your current
research status, and information about your fighters.
Radar System
Indicators on the edge of the screen will show the position of important entities
that are off-screen. The following are descriptions of each indicator:
Indicator
Description
Large Green Circle Your command post.
Little Green Circle One of your buildings.
Large Red Circle
Enemy Command post.
Rotating T
Current target of your ships. The colour indiciates for which group.
Flashing Red Circle One of your buildings or ships that is under attack.
Additionally, you can press the 'radar' button (W) to open the fullscreen radar. This
will show the positions of all friendly buildings and fighters (in green) as well as
enemy command posts (in red). Their positions will be relative to your ship's
position.
The fullscreen radar also differentiates between the three different fighter groups.
Each friendly fighter appearing on radar will have a coloured circle to match its
group colour.
Making Buildings
Use the action menu to build buildings. When you open the action menu, you will
see a blue circle around your command post and power generators. You can only
build within these blue circles. Power generators enable you to build within a
radius of it. Shipyards are self-powered and can be built anywhere.
In the central part of the screen is a keyboard driven pie-menu that allows you to
build buildings, do research, and give orders to your fighters. This may seem
daunting at first, but as you get to know the menus, you will be able to pull off
actions very quickly. It is a good idea to first go into the tutorial mode to get to
know the menus. Note: no menu is ever more than three levels deep.
Researching
To research, you must first build a research lab. Once the lab is built you will be
able to choose one of the research options from the action menu.
You can only research one item at a time. However, building more research labs
will speed up the research time.
Building Ships
First you must build a shipyard using the aciton menu. The shipyard will
automatically build ships for you up to the maximum limit. The ships that you
build will remain docked until you give them an order. If one of your ships gets
destroyed, the shipyard will automatically start building a replacement (which will
remain docked until orders are given).
Commanding Your Ships
All ship commands are issued from the "Ship Orders" menu in the action menu.
You have three groups ("Red", "Green,", "Blue") to which you can issue
commands. Each new shipyard you build will default to the "Red" group. You can
reassign shipyards by using the action menu.
There are three orders that you can give to any group. Below is a table describing
the various orders.
Order
Description
Attack
Fighters launch and fly to the target. Ships will only engage the enemy near the
target point.
Set
Target
Sets the area to attack.
Dock
Fighters fly back to the shipyard. When they dock they will be restored to full
health.
So to attack a turret, for example, set the target near the turret and issue the attack
command.
Viewing Replays
To view replays, choose the "Replay" menu option. Replay files are loaded from
the "replays/" directory. At this time, it will only show the first 10 replays found in
the directory (sorry! I'll fix that soon).
When the replay is running you can move the camera around, play it in slowmotion, fast-forward it, or initiate the "What if" feature. The "what if" feature
allows you to take control of the ship and continue playing from that point on. You
can use this feature if you've ever thought "if only I did this move instead
of that move..."
Please see the Replay Mode Controls to learn how to control these features.
You can view other people's replay files by copying their .replay files into the
"replays" directory.
Setting Up a Multiplayer Game
To setup a multiplayer game, one player has to act as host. Any player (preferably
the player with the fastest computer and internet connection) can be the host by
choosing the "Host Network Game" from the "Multiplayer" menu. All other
players can connect to the server by either finding it in the "Server Browser" menu
or by entering the IP address of the hosting player via the "Known Address
Connection" menu item within the "Multiplayer" menu.
The hosting player can choose a different port to host on via the multiplayer
settings menu. To specify the port in the "Known Address Connection", suffix a
colon (":") to the IP address followed by the port number. For instance, if the game
was hosted at IP address 192.168.0.1 on port 1234 then connecting players should
connect to:
192.168.0.1:1234
When the player chooses the "Host Network Game" option, an additional window
will popup. This window is the actual interface for the server. The player will still
be able to play the game by focusing on the main game window.
It is possible to run a dedicated server by running:
gate88 server
The server interface window will appear. To start the server type "init".
Server Commands
The following commands are available to the server. To run a command, type it
into the "Gate88 Server" window that appears.
Note: all commands are case-sensitive.
Command
Description
init
Initializes the server.
endround
Ends the current round.
setroundtime Sets the time limit per round.
getclientinfo Displays information about all connected clients.
setinitialres
Sets the amount of resources players gain when they place their command
post.
setresinc
Sets the amount of additional resources per command post death.
Tehcnical Details
For technical details please see the readme.txt file.
Last updated September 10, 2004.
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