
                           Xenocide: the roguelike


Table Of Contents

  About The Game
  The Story
  How to play
     Main Screen
     Attirbutes
     Basic Commands
  Thanks


* About The Game *

"Xenocide the roguelike" is a single-player game that uses ASCII (text)
graphics. It looks similar in appearance to ADOM, NetHack or Crawl,
the main difference being the world in which the game is set.
In Xenocide you won't find goblins, magic or knights - the action takes
place in the future.

* The Story *

The year is 2129, and man has taken to the stars. With him he had brought
all of the wonders and horrors that he was wrought throughout the ages;
joy and sorrow, peace and war, life and death.
He has also found that he is not alone...
 
In 2058 a huge leap forward was made in the world of interplanetary
expedition. An international group of brilliant scientists,
along with large grants from various nations and private organizations,
developed a prototype hyper-drive engine, a device capable of accelerating
matter so that it would be able to move at speeds faster than even light
could travel.
 
In 2076 a stable hyper-drive unit was developed, and the device
was successfully tested. Gone were the days of conventional space travel,
taking months to get from one planet to another; now a ship took only
a few days to travel between stars.
 
So man began to expand his empire. Various nations utilized the hyper-drive
engines to begin colonizing other planets. They started with Mars, and then
the moons of Jupiter.
 
Flash forward to the year 2099 Vast interstellar corporations have been
developed, their purpose to explore and colonize far off worlds.
Most of the planets they have found cannot support human life,
and so enormous Biospheres have been build; domes containing oxygen and water,
made to replicate the ecosystem of Earth. There were other planets that man
could live on without artificial aid, but these were few and far between.
 
The year was 2121. As we made our way from one end of the Milky Way
to the other we had discovered various alien life forms;
everything from harmless plant-life to bizarre beasts and fantastic creatures
that even the wildest of imaginations could not have conceived outside
of a dream. For all of the organisms that man had encountered, however,
he had yet to run across anything that was even remotely intelligent.
That was about to change.
 
On Earth date 19-11-2121 AD, at approximately 20:45 GMT, the deep space
exploration vessel Columbus encountered a strange metallic object,
roughly the size of a mega-freighter, orbiting a large asteroid.
Upon closer inspection the asteroid appeared to be colonized,
and the object appeared to be a ship of some sort, though one unlike
any that man had ever seen. The human race had had its first glimpse
of an intelligent alien civilization.
 
The crew of the Columbus attempted to make contact with the alien vessel,
but they received no response. They waited for ten long hours,
transmitting the same message of greetings and peace.
Then, just when most of the crew had begun to suspect that the alien
vessel might be abandoned, they received a response from it.
The response did not come in the form of a communication, it came in the form
of a missile, a missile with an antimatter warhead.
 
Needless to say, the Columbus was obliterated. No one survived the attack.
The entire crew, people who had once been fathers and mothers, brothers
and sisters, sons and daughters; were nothing more than dust, floating amidst
celestial blackness.
 
Thus began the war. On one side the humans, a race of beings who had believed
themselves to be the invincible masters of the cosmos. They were now realising
the extend of their own mortality.
 
On the other side of the war were the aliens, beings known only as the 'Enemy'.
Other than the fact that they were hostile and that their weapons were
far more advanced than the humans, little was known about them. The forces
of Earth had no idea what kind of organisms they were up against,
though several reports from the front lines seemed to indicated that
the creatures may have been insectoid in appearance.
 
The war raged on for seven long years, the forces of the Enemy slowly making
their way toward Earth. The alien creatures seemed to serve no other purpose
than to spread chaos and death. They were evil, evil to the core, and they
had to be eliminated.
 
The year is 2129, and the war has come to a standstill. The Enemy can not
advance any further, but it refuses to retreat. You were a worker
on the mega-freighter Atlas, a cargo ship owned by the GenTech Company whose
purpose was to transport raw ore from mining colonies to manufacturing
facilities where the ore would be processed and refined.
 
The next stop for the Atlas was the planet Tartarus 3, a small world
that existed far away from the lines of battle. This planet could support
human life, and a mining colony had been built to harvest the valuable
minerals that lay deep beneath the surface. It was the next unnamed colony,
where refuges usually find place to live.
 
You had heard that the miners told strange stories about creatures that lived
beneath the mines. Supposedly there were hideous monsters that dwelt
beneath the surface, and whenever a miner or other colony worker went missing
his disappearance was blamed on these beasts. Some even said that strange
genetic experiments were being performed in a secret base beneath the colony.
You didn't really believe any of those stories, though. After all,
genetic manipulation was illegal.
 
As the Atlas approached Tartarus 3, the onboard view screens began to show
that the planet's surface was strangely inactive. The colony should have been
as busy as an anthill, with miners running about to make preparations for the
arrival of the shuttle, but everything seemed to be so quiet, so still, so...
 
...dead. Everything seemed so dead.
 
The Atlas' captain tried to hail the colony. No one was surprised by the lack
of a response. Something was seriously wrong, and everyone knew it. As the
captain was about to order the ship's retreat, disaster struck. At that very
moment a volley of missiles leapt up from the planet's surface and struck the
ship head on.
 
The force of the ensuing explosions knocked you from your feet. As you fell,
you hit your head, and passed into unconsciousness.
 
When you awoke, you were unharmed, aside from a splitting head ache.
All around you the floor, ceiling and walls were stained with the red blood
and the tattered bodies of dead men. This wasn't caused by the missiles;
someone - or something - had torn your fellow crewmen apart.
 
Then you heard it; a sound, like the sound of some small creature scurrying
about. You are not alone; something is lurking about the ship, and whatever
it is, you get the feeling that it's responsible for the deaths of the crew.
You don't care what horrors lie on the planet below, anything is better than
this. You have to make it to the escape pods on the bottom level of the ship,
and get the hell out of here. You can worry about the Enemy forces later;
your only goal right now is to escape and survive. Survive...

* How To Play *

Most of the time you will see the main game screen, like the sample shown
below:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ##############                                                              
    #............#  #########                                                   
    #............#  ..#.......                                                  
    #............#  ..#........                                                 
    #............#  ..#.........                                                
    #......####+#####.#.........                                                
    #......#........#+#..........                                               
    #......#........#............                                               
    #......#.>......#.rr.....w...                                               
    #......#........#............                                               
    #...%..#........#.@...........                                              
    #..%.;.#+########....####+##.                                               
    #............#.##+####                                                      
    #........###+#.......#                                                      
    ##########.........%%#                                                      
             #......##%###.....#                                                
             ########..........#                                                
                    #%........%#                                                
                    #%...;.....#                                                
                                                                               
                                                                                
                                                                                
The door has closed.                                                            
                                                                                
 HP: 18/20          STR: 10 DEX: 7 SPD: 25 END: 10 INT: 10 EXP: 1\212 (1)       
                    ( Knife                        [ Leather Jacket             
                    Target: Claw Rat                       Space Shuttle lev. 1 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* Attributes *
STR
DEX
END
INT
* Basic Commands *

You can move player character with numeric keypad
- make sure that NumLock is on.
(1-9 are directions, 5 is wait command).
To gain info about other commands - press '?'.
Keyboard can be defined in data/keyboard.def.

The game is still in development, so don't expect stability.

If the game runs slow, you are probalby running Windows version.
The slowness is caused by Windows port of PDCurses.
Try the DOS version (it works fine under W9x/ME/2K/XP).

* Thanks *

- to Stephen Pasquella for new monster descriptions, ideas, the story and help
  with my English language.
- to Antti Hukkanen for new item descriptions, bug reports
  and interesting discussion about the game.
