INSTALLING KIT A TREE HOUSE OF MY OWN™ CD-ROM 1. Insert the Kit A Tree House of My Own™ disc into your CD-ROM drive. 2. If you have the AutoPlay feature turned on for your CD-ROM, left-click on the install button and skip the next two steps. 3. If you don’t have AutoPlay enabled, select Start and then Run from the Windows Taskbar. 4. Type d:\setup.exe (d: refers to your CD-ROM drive. If your CD-ROM drive letter is not d: use the appropriate drive letter instead). 5. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen. 6. To be able to play the game, you must also have DirectX 9.0c or higher installed on your computer. If you don’t have it, the installer will install it automatically. After installation is complete, you will find an icon for Kit A Tree House of My Own™ on your desktop. You will also find an icon in the Kit A Tree House of My Own™ menu item within Programs under the Start Menu in the Windows Taskbar. Click on either icon to run the game. STARTING UP On the Main Menu Screen, choose from three options: New Game: Lets you start a fresh game! Load Game: If you’ve already started playing, select a saved game off of this menu. Quit: Exits the game. HOW TO PLAY Kit A Tree House of My Own™ In Kit A Tree House of My Own™, you play the role of Kit Kittredge, a thirteen-year-old American Girl® living in Cincinnati, OH. Help Kit build and decorate her very own tree house by helping the boarders in the house with their challenges and earning prizes along the way. Moving around There are several ways to move Kit from place to place. If you point to a spot with your mouse and click on it, Kit will walk there. Or you can use the up, down, left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to directly control Kit’s movement. Talking to people Talking to people is easy! Just point to a person with your mouse and click on them. Kit will walk over to the person and initiate conversation. When a conversation is complete, you can choose whether to help the player with their task. The House Walk around and explore all of the rooms in Kit's house. As you make your way around the house, you’ll meet people who will need your help. Soon you’ll know the house as if it was your own. The Tree House Before it can be decorated, the tree house needs to be built. Earn the required items needed to build the tree house by successfully completing the first level of each mini-game. Once that's accomplished, the tree house is ready for decorating! Earn more prizes and decorations by completing subsequent levels in all of the mini-games. Your Inventory There is a suitcase icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. Click on it to look inside. Your inventory stores all of the items you have earned over the course of the game. You can see the name of any item in your inventory by pointing at it with the mouse. New items will be added to your Inventory frequently as you explore and earn rewards. A sparkle effect over the Inventroy icon will alert you when this happens. The Menu There is a Menu icon in the top-left corner of the screen. Click on it to open the Menu panel. Buttons on the Menu panel allow you to start a new game, load and save games, access various game-related options and quit. Consult your owner’s manual for more information on these functions. Playing Tips Go everywhere. Explore every corner of every available location. You never know where an interesting person or object may be found. Keep an eye on your Inventory. Its icon will sparkle when new items are added. When new items are added, go back to the tree house to see how they look! TROUBLESHOOTING For optimal performance we recommend that you close any other applications that are running on your computer prior to playing Kit A Tree House of My Own™. The quality and performance of this game principally depends on the capacities of your graphics card! We recommend you have the latest graphics cards with ATI and NVIDIA chipsets. We also strongly recommend that you obtain the latest DirectX compatible drivers for your video and sound cards. Using drivers that are not compatible with the latest version of DirectX can have unpredictable results. Updated drivers are typically available at no charge through your hardware manufacturer’s website. Popular video chipset manufacturers include: * ATI – www.ati.com * Intel – www.intel.com * Nvidia – www.nvidia.com For additional information on DirectX, please visit www.microsoft.com/directx/ UNINSTALLING Kit A Tree House of My Own™ 1. From the Start Menu click on All Programs, THQ, American Girl and Kit A Tree House of My Own™. 2. Select Uninstall to uninstall the program. 3. You may also do an uninstall by using Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Minimum • Windows® XP/Vista • Pentium® 4 1.4 GHz or higher processor • 512 MB RAM • DirectX® 9.0 or higher (included on CD) • 32MB DirectX compatible video card • OpenGL or DirectX compatible accelerated 3D video card • DirectX compatible sound card • 4X CD-ROM drive Recommended • 1.4 GHz Pentium® 4 or compatible • 1 GB RAM • nVidia or ATI accelerated 3D video card TECHNICAL SUPPORT Questions or problems? We’re here to help. For updates, answers to frequently asked questions and 24-hour Technical Support visit our web site at: www.valusoft.com or write to us at: ValuSoft, A Division of THQ Inc. 3650 Chestnut Street North, Suite 101A, Chaska, MN 55318 or call 1-952-442-7000 extension 4 or email us at tech@valusoft.com