Scream of the Stickster

The pages are no longer safe, for a vicious creature stalks them, searching for anyone it can find to satisfy its neverending hunger for living line segments. A band of brave but foolhardy stick figures has taken it upon themselves to rid the planes of the beast, determined to kill him as many times as it takes to keep him from coming back. The only thing standing between each of them and certain death are their guns and their companions--preferably their companions.

The Stickster resides in a maze of twisty passages and exposed chambers, where he prowls tirelessly for fresh victims. Legend has long held that he can outrun his unlucky prey, whether bounding after them in the open or ambushing the unwary in blind alleys.

As one of the hapless stick figures, your task is to rack up as many Stickster kills as you can. Your only defense is your dotgun, which has only 6 shots. To fire the gun, press the center key (numpad 5). Your gun will reload slowly, giving you a new round of dots every 3 seconds. That's a long time to wait when a hungry Stickster is on your tail, so conserve ammo when he's nearby. The Stickster takes 3 hits to kill. You lose points for killing other players, unless they have a negative score.

If you're stuck in a series of passageways and can't find an open space, or if you don't have enough room to get a good shot on the Stickster, you can shoot through walls instead. A wall will break after 5 hits, unless it's one of the outer maze walls. The Stickster, too, can crash through a wall, but this is done mostly by accident while dodging dots.

Your dotgun can fire diagonally, but it's hard to hit the Stickster solidly in that direction. It's also possible to shoot up or down ladders, if something is blocking you.

Ladders will appear whenever a new maze level opens up. This happens whenever the Stickster is killed; he reappears on the lowest level. Once the maze reaches 6 levels in size, it will stop growing, and the Stickster may reappear on any level. Level 1 is the top level.

To go from one level to another, find a ladder going in the direction you want, then use the Up or Down commands, or the Insert key (up) or Delete key (down). Up ladders appear to be freestanding; down ladders go down through a hole in the floor. But don't think you can escape the Stickster so easily: He can climb too. The Stickster will go to any level it has to to find a player.

Sound carries throughout the level. If you hear a sound in the distance, it's someone on your level.

Your state-of-the-jot tracking device can help you track down the Stickster, roughly predict its movements, and avoid it when necessary. If the Stickster isn't on your level, the tracker will tell you which level it's on. Otherwise, it will tell you the Stickster's direction and approximate distance.

It's important to know where you are in the maze. The northwest corner is 2-40-level, and the southeast is 40-2-level.

You can coordinate with other players by typing Say and a message. If you like you can tell them where you are in the maze, but nothing says you have to be honest about it. Whether you want to help the others or feed them disinformation is your call. If other players wander into your field of view, you can find out who they are by pressing the Backspace key or typing the Who command.

The game is played in rounds of 10 minutes. Whoever has the most kills at the end of the round is the winner. If a player takes the top spot, they will win unless another player passes their score.

The host of the game may kick out unruly players with the Kick command.

The BYONDscape 4K Challenge 2002 limits all participants to under 4,096 bytes of actual code within their .dm source files, no hand-altered .dme files, but unlimited sound, graphics, and other files. To fit the requirements of the competition, this game's source code is within the 4K limit.

I believe this game packs in a list of complex features that no other contender can touch:

• Maze generation. Each maze is generated on the fly by a compact routine. The mazes are made more playable by delibarately creating 5×5 open areas.
• 47-state space. 47-state walls are a bit of a pain. Instead I opted to use 47-state open space to draw the wall borders, which is just as difficult, because 47-state walls could give away contours of the maze that should be out of view. They're coded efficiently into this game.
• Intelligent movement. Movement is fluid, allowing players to move smoothly, and turn and fire at the same time.^* Movement diagonally against a straight wall will move along the wall instead of stopping the player. If you move in a new direction while in motion, your direction will turn (and still animate smoothly), allowing you to get off a shot quickly.
• 2-level sound effects. Each sound effect has two versions: One is played for players close by, another for players far away but on the same level. This compensates for BYOND's lack of volume control but also adds a nice echo.
• Pathfinding AI. Sure, it isn't top-notch, and it's slow, but it works most of the time. Taking z-levels into consideration complicates the issue tremendously and bloated the code something fierce. This is hard to incorporate with minimal code.
• Rounds of play. The game plays through 10-minute rounds, and resets for the next round without rebooting the world. This feature was unbelievably expensive to add.
• Score sorting. Players are listed in order from highest score to lowest, except that each player sees themselves at the top. The score is sorted such that achieving a tie score with another player won't change your ranking, put passing them will. Also a very expensive feature.
• M:SS timer. This feature is a tremendous byte glutton, but it's snazzy.
• Splash screen. The splash screen is displayed between rounds instead of a blank field.
• In-game HTML help. You're reading this, aren't you?

There are a few other touches in the game that give it a more complete feel. Attention was paid to detail, even at the expense of size.

• Smart names. Players with lowercase names aren't referred to as "the" by mistake.
• Smart keys. Climbing ladders is easy: Players can use the Insert or Delete keys instead of the Up and Down commands. For help, they can type Help or press F1. To shoot, the usual numpad center key is used, but the space bar will work too.
• HTML block. Players can't use HTML when they talk.
• Glitz control. If a player changes direction mid-stride, they won't jump to the next tile instantly. The speed at which players and the Stickster move is linked to the movement speed dictated by the game.
• Host credit. The game's host is listed when it is viewed in the hub listings.
• Death delay. A player who's just been killed has a few seconds to see the aftermath of their death before respawning.
• Persistent scores. A player who logs out and logs back in during the same round (perhaps due to a disconnect, or an attempt to cheat) will retain their score.
• Hidden commands. To ensure the stat panel always stays on top, all verbs are hidden. They will still appear in expansion lists.
• Kick command. This was a byte-munching feature, but very important to add. For ease-of-use, using the command calls up a list of other players to choose from, and also allows the host to cancel the command.

Serendipity is responsible for some of unexpected features that add to the game's completeness. Early on I discovered that the Stickster can dodge shots, a side effect of the built-in functions used in the AI. Because of the way the AI is written, if the timing is right to allow the Stickster to dodge, it will keep trying to dodge until successful, sometimes bumping into walls enough times to knock them down.

Another unexpected feature was that players can shoot up or down ladders; this was never intended in my design. However, it seems that two bit flags I was using to represent movement up or down happen to match two undocumented bit flags BYOND has reserved for future use. These directions are considered valid by some of BYOND's built-in functions. A little tweaking was needed to make sure this feature didn't act as a bug too, but it was a welcome discovery.

This game was inspired by a game from an old programming magazine (Compute!) in which a monster chased the player's footprints through a maze, forcing the player to backtrack into side passages while collecting treasure. Ultimately this game little resembles the old, but it is a distant offspring of the glory days of 8-bit computing.

In almost any game there are known bugs. This is no exception. What do you want for 4K?