README file for Star.P.G.

This is Star.P.G., a free/open source computer game.

About

Star.P.G. is an arcade style, side scrolling space shooter.

It was just supposed to be a one month game project...now it is over a year in the making. :P Star.P.G. is a personal project, an enjoyable experience writing the code and learning from it. I only placed Star.P.G. on the Internet in order to utilize the benefits of version control systems, and also as it may be of use or interest to someone. I am not currently looking for help or contributions to the code. Although if you are an artist or musician, and wish to improve the games resources, I would be happy to include them and give due credit.

Features

• Multiple language support.
• Customizable spaceship.
• Particle engine, fire, smoke and shrapnel.
• Six unique experience based weapons with three levels, all having unique sounds, movements and power-ups.
• Five different shields.
• Three different thrusters.
• Bomb and health support drops.
• Save, load and resume game anytime, with fully textured
  menu, change graphics and sound options at will.
• Various power-ups.
• Randomly spawning "Bomb" power ups! (kill everything on screen!)
• Four unique support ships, with unique weapons and/or effects! Each having 3 levels of awesomeness!!!
• Achievement system, kills, score.
• Twenty five unique levels all with different enemies and
  background music!
• Twenty five different enemies with unique sound effects,
  projectiles and movements.
• Parallax backgrounds.
• Loading screen.
• Touchscreen support.

More information can be found in the changelog.txt file.

Usage

• "Left" -> Move starship left.
• "Right" -> Move starship right.
• "Up" -> Move starship up.
• "Down" -> Move starship down.
• "Space" -> Fire weapon.
• "B" -> Use a collected bomb.
• "P" -> Pause.
• "ESC -> Menu, Quit.

Compiling

Included are the project files for use with the Code::Blocks IDE. (http://www.codeblocks.org/) Also required are the SDL librarys.

Multiple language support.

You can set your desired language in the config file. (Star.P.G..cfg) The value to set should be identical to the language files name, excluding the ".txt". ie. for "english.txt" set Language = english in the config file. Please note that language files have to be save in UTF-8 format, else they may fail to function correctly.

Known bugs

As this is still a work in progress, the format of the savegames may, and does change quite often. It is recommended you either overwrite your older savegames with new ones, or delete the older ones when upgrading to a newer version of Star.P.G.. Or better still remove the older version of the game completely, before installing a newer version. If the game fails to load, try deleting the Star.P.G..cfg file, it may be caused by recent improvements to the game.

Credits

This information can be found in the credits_license.txt file.

License

Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Paul Wortmann.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the gpl.txt file for more details.

Contact

• Paul Wortmann: physhex@gamil.com
• Website: http://www.physhexgames.co.nr
• Downloads: https://sourceforge.net/projects/starpg/
• Development, bug reports, feature requests and general questions are handled on GitHub: https://github.com/Paul-Wortmann/Star.P.G.

Final words:

Although I could continue adding to this game and polishing it further, I have decided to cease working on this game from version 1.0. I may however add to the game in the future or create a sequel....but for now I wish to try my hand at making an Action RPG. There are still a variety of features I would like to add to Star.P.G., they may or may not be implemented in the future, and if they are implemented, it will be a long time till the next release of Star.P.G.. I hope you enjoy this game as much as I have enjoyed creating it! Paul Wortmann. (RoboPaul)