Manual

#include "std_disclaimer.h"
"I do not accept responsibility for any effects, adverse or otherwise,
that this program may have on you, your computer, your sanity, your dog,
and anything else that you can think of. Use it at your own risk."

1. Introduction

Welcome to Atomic Butcher. In this post-nuclear jump'n'run game, you play the role of a crazed mutant freak who is sent out from the bunker he lived in in order to collect as much meat as possible. To do so, you have to kill everything in sight and collect the corpses; if you have collected enough, you may proceed to the next level.

If you think this is a stupid and unnecesarilly violent concept for a game, you are right and paid attention;
congratulations, you now understand a lot about the current state of computer games.

2. The Story

In the not so far future the world as we know it has been destroyed by a terrible atomic war. Civilization with all its glorious inventions was destroyed in the glimpse of an eye by the nuclear fire of a thousand suns. But what was the reason for the great war? Who cares.

The fact is that 95% of humanity was wiped out and the few survivors either managed to flee into underground shelters or were hideously transformed by the radiation in complete defiance of the fact that in reality you just die from radioactivity.

The Atomic Butcher was one of the people who were able to save themselves in a shelter, but still caught a great dose of radiation before he managed to reach it and thus mutated. After that, he became incredibly stupid, but his physical strength increased immensely and his hunger for fresh meat was by far exceeding that of normal humans.

Just as the other people in the shelter were about to gather to lynch him because he simply couldn't be kept from eating other shelter-inhabitants it was noticed by the leaders that the food reserves were becoming very sparse, and so they reconsidered and had a far better idea: They sent him out on an epic quest for meat and...well... even more meat!

3. Instructions

If you want to play "Atomic Butcher" in windowed mode, just start it with the command-line parameter "-windowed". To start the game with the console enabled, add "-dev".

Controls:

Main menu:

In the main menu you can choose to either start a new game or load an old game; to select menu items, use the ARROW KEYS and ENTER (or W, S and SPACE - just like the controls during the game).

If you start a new game, you can select one of 5 Savegames; after every level your game will be automatically saved in the savegame you select at the beginning. If you load a game, it will continue at the beginning of the last level you played - there is no saving during a level.

Playing the game:

You control the Atomic Butcher with the keyboard and the mouse. With the keys A/D you can walk left and right, regardless of the direction you are looking in. The mouse is used to aim; you will always aim directly towards the crosshair. If you shot an organic enemy, then he will in most cases leave a corpse that you can collect simply by walking over it. Different enemies give you different amounts of meat, and once you have enough meat (which is displayed at the status bar right of the third icon) you may leave the level through the exit.

WARNING: Non-organic enemies will explode when they die - be careful!

If however you collected MORE meat than the minimum for a level, the extra meat will be put into your meat pool. After every level you will be informed about how much meat is in the pool; if this value exceeds 60 meat pieces, you can UPGRADE either your health or one of your weapons. Choose wisely, for you probalby won't find enough meat to upgrade everything!

In the levels, a plethora of hazards will wait for you: Enemies, Acid lakes, Spikes, Fire, Traps, that sort of things. You will know them, when you see them; and always watch out for WARNING SIGNS!

HINT: Always read the messages that are displayed either in the middle of the screen or on the upper left corner! And watch out for signs and computer-screens.

Weapons:

HINT: Be careful when fighting robots; those explode when they are destroyed, and when you'reclose enough, one explosion can kill you, no matter how much armour you have.

Changing the controls

There is no way to change the game's controls while playing. You can however reconfigure them by manually changing the text file "autoexec.cfg" (with notepad or another ASCII-Editor).

In this file you will find a list lines of the form "bind KEY_XXX EVENT". What you have to donow is simple:
For every action that you can perform in the game there is one such key-event pair.
If you, for instance, want to change the key for selecting the grenade to "g", all you have to do is find the line that says "bind KEY_2 EV_GRENADE" and change it to "bind KEY_G EV_GRENADE". Do not change any formatting or the names of the events, only the KEY_XXX-Part of the bind-commands.

Checkpoints:

There is no way in Atomic Butcher to save during a level. The game saves automatically when you finish a level, and that's it. However, there are a lot of checkpoints scattered throughout the levels in the form of big floating skulls. If you collect one of them, you will reappear where the checkpoint was once you die.

HINT: Be very careful about WHEN you collect checkpoints; sometimes, it is not wise to collect all checkpoints immediately, and it would be better to destroy all enemies in the vicinity before you pick up a checkpoint, so you don't have to fight all of them again everytime you respawn.

Armour:

In Atomic Butcher, there is no way to refill your health during a level (well, actually there is exactly one in the game, but you know what I mean, when you see it...), so you're stuck with collecting armour. Before your health decreases when you're hit, your armour will slowly fade away, so be careful to always wear one; armour can be replaced, your helath can't be restored! There are three types of armour: A light leather armour, a medium one made of junk parts and a strong one steel armour.

Drugs:

Sometimes you will find small syringes filled with a yellow liquid. This is a special drug that's really popular in the radioactive wastes; it will make you stronger and get better reflexes. Be careful not to get an overdose! As a matter of fact, this drug can even harm the butcher.

Simply don't inject a drug as long as the last one still flows through the butcher's vains and everything should just be fine.

Rad-Damage:

There is also an extra called "rad-damage" that looks like a little radioactive-Symbol. Collect it, and your urine-ray will become extremely destructive for a few seconds!

4. Legal issues

This game was programmed in C++ using the MinGW-Compiler and DevC++. All the graphics were drawn by us, the music was made by a nice person from the allegro.cc forums called Astheth.

And thanks of course to Allegro, which spared us the agony of having to deal with DirectX directly.

You may distribute the game freely, as long as you

• don't charge any money for it.
• leave the package unchanged.

Enough of the boring stuff, what are you still waiting for? Download the game and PLAY!