Help for Drop

Introduction to The Game

Send a falling ball to the bottom of the screen without hitting anything in the way.

Sound easy? Think again.

To start off with, there are blocks in your way. Yeah, but that's the easy stuff. As you go, you need to collect points (if you want a prize at the end of the game...) and deal with the evil narrator. This guy will discourage you and throw more obstacles in your path. Each level gets harder and harder. Can you make it through thirty levels of this?

Boy, that's a great introduction, isn't it? I love the way it catches your attention. Hopefully, now you're all excited.

Before You Begin

Before you can start playing, you need to create a game. To do this, type in your name and click on "Create File". You can then select your name from the drop-down list and click on "Continue Game" to begin! You can also delete old games by clicking on "Delete Current File".

Note: The games are saved only on your computer, or the computer you created them on. You can save up to three games on one computer. This game makes use of cookies. You must have cookies enabled, along with JavaScript and images. For most browsers, this is the default setting. I reccomend Internet Explorer 5.0. However, I am working on making my games compatible with Netscape also. (Want to help? Play the game until you get an error, and then report the error to me.)

Playing the Game

The object of the game is to get your blue ball, which will fall from the top of the screen, to the bottom of the screen safely. On the way you can collect points, which add to your score. If you have a score of 2,680 at the end of the game, there's a neat surprise.

There are two different ways to control the ball. One is with the mouse. Click on the screen, and the level will begin. The ball will start falling from the top center of the screen. Move the mouse to the left and right of the ball to make it move left and right. Don't start the mouse off way on the right of the screen, or the ball will zoom to the right, and probably crash! Most of the time, you want to start the mouse in the center of the screen. Note that the mouse's vertical position on the screen doesn't matter. Only its horizontal position relative to the ball matters.

The other way to control the ball is with the keyboard. Click on the "Start" button in the upper-right of the screen, or press Enter on your keyboard. Make sure the "Start" button is highlighted, or the arrow keys won't work! Press left to go left and right to go right. Note: Use the arrow keys, not the NumPad.

Scoring

As you go, hitting certain things will add to your score. Understand as you play, that it is not possible to get every "power-up" in the game. In symmetrical levels, it may only be possible to get a power-up on one side of the level, while the mirror power-up on the other side remains. Also, some power-ups are completely enclosed and impossible to get, and other power-ups may lure you to your destruction. (Ah ha ha ha ha ha!)


This will give you five points.


This will give you ten points...


and this will give you fifteen points.


This will give you five points and an extra life.

Completing a level will give you an extra thirty points.

Lives

You start the game with five lives. Every time you lose all your lives, you will get a game over. This does two things: it brings you back five levels, and brings your score down. If you are not yet past level five in the game, you will go back to level one. Here is how it brings down your score: it will subtract from your score the maximum number of points you possibly could have received from the past five levels, and then brings your score down five more points. Because of this, you will always lose points from a game over. When your game resumes five levels back, you will have five lives.

As you saw above, the one-up not only gives you an extra life, but also give you five points.

There are some complications with lives. For instance, what if you get two lives in a level and die, and do that over and over again to gain lives? It won't work. I'm sorry: cheaters, you will have to live with this. When you get a life, it adds that life to your life count. In that same level, if you get additional lives, they will only be added to your life count when you complete the level. So if you die, those additional lives will not be counted. The first life you got will be taken away, and you will restart the level with the same amount of lives you had when you started it.

The Controls

There are numerous controls at the right of the screen. This section explains them.

The Level, Lives, and Score boxes display the level you are on, the number of lives that you have, and your current score. That much is obvious.

The "Restart Level" button does the same thing as dying. You lose a life and restart the level. At the beginning of a level, before you have actually started playing it, this button will let you restart the previous level. The advantage to this is if you want to sacrifice a life in order to gain some power-ups that you missed in the last level. This is your only chance to go back to a previous level, so don't miss it if you want it. Note that if you gained any lives in the last level at all, you will restart it with the number of lives you had the last time you started it. If you did not gain any lives in that level, you will lose one.

The "Save and Exit" and "Exit (no save)" buttons exit the game. The first button saves your progress before exiting, the second button doesn't. You may want to save now and then, just in case you lose a large number of lives in one level and want to try again.

Well, that about covers the game. Remember, you will come across many obstacles as you play. Learn how they work!

Above all, have fun!

- Slime

 

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E-mail me with suggestions and game ideas: slime@slimeland.com