﻿You Have To Win The Game          (2012) (Pirate Hearts and Kabuto)
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THE BASICS
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Run and jump, explore and backtrack, activate switches and avoid enemies,
ring bells and gather cash. That's pretty much the gist of what you'll
do in You Have to Win the Game. The environment is filled with twisted
passageways, forked tunnels, and seemingly inpassable spots marked by
platforms and noving lifts. You'll need to find a few switch to
activate or deactivate certain blocks, much like the colored switch in
another practically ancient favorite, Super Mario World. Along the way,
you'll ring bells to actvate checkpoints and pick up tiny bags of
cash you come across, all in the name of turning that little 
exploration percentage number into a full and healthy 100%.


CONTROLS
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Use joystick in port 2, and it will be obvious. In this G*P release we
did add an option to use fire instead of up when you want to junp. Use it
if you like it.


SPECIAL STUFF
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There are some stuff you will learn to use:

Springheel Boots will give you the option to jump mid-air.

Spider Gloves will give you the option to grip and slide down walls.

Red Bricks will activate red platforms and walls.

Blue Bricks will do the same to blue platforms and walls.


BACKGROUND
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Words from the original game creator:

"The first computer I ever played was The Ancien Art of War by Dave and
Barry Murry, published by Brøderbund in 1984. My parents taught me and my
brother how to boot DOS and launch the game, and the rest was history. Our
family computer was a Commodore PC-compatible machine, some flavor of
PC-10 if I'm not mistaken. It had two 5.25" floppydisk drives, 640 KB RAM
(512 KB remaining after the OS took its share), no internal storage, no mouse,
and - of course - a CGA monitor.

My brother and I began teaching ourselves to program at the age of five,
copying GW—BASIC code out of the backs,  of issues of 3-2-1 Contact, a children
science and technology magazine. Most of these were simple text-based guessing
games, but  it was "SCREEN 1" and its bright, blocky pixels that most excited
me. I wrote programs, mostly attempts to clone the PC and NES games I
loved, although with no concept of a main loop, what little gameplay I could
conjure was mostly releegated to meaningless binary choices. "TAKE THE
SWDRD (Y/N?)" I prompted the player in what was ostensibly a retelling of the
Legend of Zelda. A crude line drawing of the weapon provided the only visual
context. A negative response would terninate the program.

You have to Win the Gane represents a marriage of these origins, the ideals of
the games I wanted to make at that age, and at least a superficial nod to the
technology of the day, with my love of modern hard platformers like VVVVVV and
Super Meat Boy.

The original game gas programmed for Windows, entirely in C++, on custom-built
technology. There 1s a popular notion among indipendent game developers
that time spent  building engine tech instead of actively producing games ls
time wasted. I do not subscribe to this view. While I appreciate the
proliferation of available game engines frameworks and the growth and range
of expression it was afforded the community, I find myself drawn as much
to the engineering aspect of development, of wanting to understand
what makes things tick, as I am to the concepts of game mechanics design and
content creation.

I suppose I'd be lying if I said I didn't also find a great deal of joy 
and fulfillment in solving the problems that arise in rolling my own tech. They
say it's the journey and not the destination that matters, and indeed,
it has often been my experience that the process of making a game - or of
makinf the tools to make a game - and not the act of releasing it into the
wild is what I find most compelling. But, on occasion, I do get the urge to
put my foot down and ac actually ship something.

So, after several months of sleepless nights piled on top of many years of
engine iteration, I'm thrilled to be able to deliver a game of which I am
immensly proud and which I'd like to think encapsulates nearly everything
I ever loved about video games in the first place."

- J. Kyle Pittman, April 2012
