RABBITS AND ROBOTS (c) 2024 Keith Bergman for Orphantech.com Rev 1.0 - Last Manual Update 9/9/2024 INTRODUCTION ------------ It's a simple assignment, they said. You'll be done in no time, they said. They sent you to the edge of the valley with five obsolete maintenance bots. All you had to do was build conduits across the valley. Power pulses travel from one side to the other along the conduits. You pack up, come home and get paid. Then you saw the rabbits. They looked weird, but they seemed just like your typical fuzzy bunnies. Sure, they ate a lot of grass, and seemed to leave scorched earth in their wake, and yes, there were a lot of them, but how big of a problem could the little furry rodents be? Then you saw holes in your conduits before your first robot had even reached the other side of the valley. Then you saw your readings go haywire as they smashed into your 'bots. And still they came. More and more and more of them. Pretty soon, you realized someone in the head office didn't like you. OBJECT ------ RABBITS AND ROBOTS is a 1-player strategy game for the Texas Instruments TI 99/4A home computer. It is written in TI BASIC and designed to be playable on an unexpanded 99/4A, loaded from cassette tape. Use your five robots to build red channels across the screen from left to right, allowing power pulses to cross the playfield. Rabbits move at random and will wreck the red channels and damage the robots. GAMEPLAY -------- The game takes place on a rectangular playfield, the green valley you need to traverse. Your five robots are stationed on the western edge. Fifteen rabbits spawn and begin munching grass. Every tile they "eat" turns yellow as they leave it. The rabbits mill around at random, eating. If two rabbits collide, both are killed, and new rabbits will respawn, either this round or the next one, in a random location. A "+5" powerup will appear, which will give the player five more moves if picked up. Rabbits can mulch over the +5 powerup and it will disappear. Rabbits are allowed to 'wrap' around the screen, but robots are not. (Teleporting bunnies that can eat metal conduits? There must be something in the water around here.) If a rabbit traverses a yellow tile, nothing changes. If it lands on a green one, it eats all the grass and turns it yellow. If a rabbit moves onto a red conduit, it turns that tile yellow as well, and power pulses can no longer pass through that tile. If a rabbit collides with a robot while it is moving, it dies (and respawns later), but the robot takes 20% damage. When the rabbits are done, it's the robots' turn to move. You get ten moves per turn, plus one for each day that has passed. Switching to a new robot, even if you pick the same one you were just moving, uses up one move. If your robot walks onto a green tile, it will turn red, indicating a successful piece of conduit has been built. If the robot walks onto a yellow tile, it will be turned green (re-seeded with grass) and you'll have to walk on it again to build. Robots cannot walk on the gray border tiles, and will incur 5% damage running into them if they try. Conduits need only be built to touch the eastern side. Power pulses can pass through robots as well as conduits, so positioning a robot to stand in a gap at the end of a turn can sometimes save the day. If a robot steps on a rabbit, it's a bloody fight to the finish with lasers and karate. Just kidding - maybe in the sequel! The rabbit is killed instantly, but the robot takes 10% damage (all that fur gums up the moving parts). This isn't the most fast-paced of games, so two robots colliding by accident should be fairly rare. However, in emergency situations, you can crash one robot into another, which will cause all tiles around them to turn red, kill any rabbits on those tiles, and teleport the robots back to random starting tiles on the left, each with a 70% loss of health. A collision ends the player's turn. (If a third robot happens to be in the 'blast zone' of the collision, it will remain unharmed). If a robot reaches 0% it is broken and cannot move again. If all five robots reach 0%, the game is over. After the rabbits and robots each have a turn, the electrical grid will attempt to launch five power pulses across the valley, starting from the five tiles where the robots started. They will travel eastward, and can turn left or right if blocked, but they cannot backtrack. NOTE: you are prompted "skip power pulse?" at the end of each day. If it's obvious there's no path to the eastern edge, you can hit Y to skip the graphical display and save yourself some time. Or not! I don't wanna tell you how to run your operation. If they are blocked, or if they change direction more than a few times (due to a particularly twisty path or being stuck in a dead end), they simply fizzle out of existence - no damage is done by the pulse at any point. Pulses can pass through a red tile, or through a robot, only. Every pulse that successfully makes it to the eastern edge of the playfield scores the player (100xDAY) points. This means the further into the game you get, the more each successful pulse scores. At the start of each new day, any robot in one of the five 'docking ports' on the western edge (the spaces where they started) will recover 10% health, to a maximum of 100. A small audio cue, just before the rabbits start moving, will chime to indicate a robot repair. There is no penalty for pulses that don't make it across the valley. However, starting on Day 6, a Power Goal will be set, which will then increase as the game continues. The goal will go up 1% per day until day 11, then increase to 2% daily until day 21, then 3% daily, and so on. Player can check the health of all five robots, or tally their current score, by pressing H or T during gameplay. These options do not subtract from the total moves in that turn. The game ends when the percentage of successful power pulses is lower than the Power Goal, or when all five robots have been disabled. STRATEGY TIPS: ------------- - A dead robot can still conduct energy pulses, and rabbits who run into it will still die, so planning a conduit around one of your fallen comrades gives you a ‘safe’ tile to work with. - Focus on building a conduit several tiles wide, to make it more likely that pulses can still make it across even if rabbits damage one side or the other. But don't take too long to get a pulse or two through - you'll need at least one to have made it by Day 5, or the game will be over. - Conduits from the top and bottom launch points can ‘feed into’ a common conduit across the middle. - A "dead" robot in the field at 0% can be brought back to life. You've probably already figured out how. - Sometimes when there's a lot of damage to your conduits, your strategy for repairing them will take a few days to implement. Getting four or five pulses through on a day when things are less hectic will increase your percentage, keeping you in business for those few days at a time when none can cross. Even late in the game when the rabbits have destroyed almost everything, it's (usually) possible to keep a conduit open and hang on for a higher score. - Do not take the rabbits home. Metal-eating, teleporting, robot-attacking, eternally voracious valley rabbits are a lifetime commitment, not a cute Easter present. A NOTE ABOUT SPEED: ------------------ This game is written in TI BASIC, a notoriously slow language, and deliberately designed to be playable from cassette tape on a "stock" TI 99/4A. My goal was to create a game that could have come out in 1980. Obviously, this is not for everyone. The game can be played on the "CPU Overdrive" setting on the Classic99 emulator, but it is not optimized for speed, and the controls and sound effects will not be optimal. It would also be possible to compile the code, and I can't stop you from doing that, though I ask that you keep any compiled versions for personal use and not distribute them. My suggestion is to play it as-is and embrace the slowness. We're goofing off with ancient computers here. If you want lightning fast action, there are other options. Some of my favorite TI moments have been playing old games like Khe-Sanh, Diablo, Atlantis, Adventuremania, and other cassette-based classics where speed takes a back seat to strategy and atmosphere. That's the spirit I'm trying to capture with Rabbits and Robots. If that's the experience you're looking for, I hope I was successful. Keith Bergman Toledo, Ohio, USA September 2024 CONTACT: ------- Visit www.orphantech.com Email exiletoledo@gmail.com Write Keith Bergman, PO Box 140651, Toledo OH 43614, USA ###