GEMS - An "exciting" Windows game by Kurt Lundqvist of
Lundqvist Associates.

Its freeware and if you would like
the source code (you need Visual BASIC 4 to use it)
then email kurt@mutant.demon.co.uk and ask for it. You are
more than welcome to distribute it, but if you do please
keep this README.TXT file with the application. If you like
this game (I've done others too) then I would appreciate it
if you would email me (available addresses given at the end
of this document). If you hated it and resented the download
time it took (or if it didn't work on your machine) then,
again, I would (sort of) like to know. Anyway, enough of this,
on with the description...


Description
This game is a bit like Tetris, but rather more like SEGA's
"Columns" game. The idea is that stacks of three "gems" drop
from the top of the board. You can move them left or right
as they fall and rotate the individual gems in the stack too.
When the gems hit the bottom of the board (or land on top of
other gems) then if any line of 3 or more identical gems is
formed, these gems are removed from the board and any
gaps formed by this cause other gems to "fall" into them and
may cause additonal lines to disappear, etc.

Occasionally a weird looking stack will appear (the so-called
"magic gems"), when these turn up, whatever gem they touch will
be removed along with *all other gems the same colour*.

The game is over if a stack cannot be fit completely on to the
board (even if it's a magic gem, the gem removal is test is
performed after the gem has "landed" successfully).


Installing
Make a directory for gems and copy GEMS.EXE and the 4 BMP files
into it (must be kept together). Run GEMS.EXE from within Windows
to use it. It should run happily on 486 or Pentium machines
(I haven't tried it on a 386, but I don't think it will run too
good).


Playing
Select New game from the File menu and the game starts immediately,
the following keys are available during the game (other than the
menu, this game is keyboard driven):

Cusor left/
Cursor right - Shift column of gems to left or right (if possible).
Cursor Up    - Shift gems within the column "up" by one.
Cursor Down  - Cause the current gems to slide down the board at top
               speed. (Once you've done this you can't slow the
               current stack down again, so only do it when the gems
               are aligned the way you want.)
P            - Pause the game. Press again to unpause.
H            - Instantly minimize ("Hide") the game (effectively
               pausing it) - useful if you're playing Gems somewhere you
               shouldn't be...

Menu shortcuts:
Ctrl+A       - Shows "About" box (includes program version)
Ctrl+D       - Start self-playing (bonehead logic) demo
Ctrl+N       - Start new game with current Preferences
Ctrl+P       - Show Preferences dialog
Ctrl+X       - Exit game
F4           - High Scores for 4-game game (see Preferences)
F5           - High Scores for 5-game game (see Preferences)
F6           - High Scores for 6-game game (see Preferences)

The game also shows what gems will drop after the current ones have (if
enabled in Preferences) and a handy graph at the side shows the
distribution of gems on the board).


Preferences (from File Menu):
Selecting this during a game will end the current game and display end of
game stats). All settings are preserved when you exit Gems.
Difficulty   - Easy starts with an empty board
               Medium starts with 3 rows of the board filled up
               Hard start with 6 rows of the board filled up
No. of Gems  - 4, 5 or 6 different colour gems can be used. The more
               colour, the harder it it.
Doubles      - Never, 1 in 5 to 1 in 100. In each stack of gems that drop
               there is a chance that 2 will be the same colour. Since this
               is very nearly a complete stack ann you need to do is find a
               corresponding gem on the board to score. (There can never be
               a stack of normal gems all the same colour dropped.)
               Incresing the doubles chance makes the game easier.
Magic chance - Never, 1 in 10 to 1 in 100. As noted earlier, magic gems can
               remove lots of gems in one go, making a cluttered board
               nearly empty. Thus, icreasing the probability of these gems
               makes the game easier.
Show next    - Makes the game easier by letting you see which gems will drop
               after the current ones have.


Scoring:
Gems scoring is very much based on how many different colour gems you're
playing with. The more colours you allow, the higher the bonuses.

When you start the game, your initial score is calculated as follows:
# of gems           Difficulty              Prefilled
            Easy      Medium       Hard     Rows
4               0        50          100      0
5           1,000     1,500        2,000      3
6           2,000     2,500        3,000      6

If a stack drops onto the board, but does not form any lines you score
1 point if playing with 4 colours, 2 points when playing with 5 colurs
and 3 points when playing with 6.

When lines of gems are formed, you score 10 points for each gem removed if
playing with 4 colours, 20 points for each if playing with 5 colours and 30
points each if playing with 6. Plus the following bonus points for each
line longer than 3 gems:
# of gems           Line length
                4         5         >5
4              10        50        200       
5             100       250      1,000
6             250       300      2,500

If, after removing gems that formed lines and dropping others into place,
more lines form, you get 50, 100 or 150 points for each gem in a line so
formed (playing with 4, 5 or 6 colours, respectively) and the same >3
length bonuses as above.

Magic Gems scoring - because these offer the benefit of clearing the board
for you, they actually *decrease* your score, you lose 10 points for each
gems they remove if playing with 4 colour gems, 20 if playing with 5 colours
and 30 of playing with 6.


Other stuff:
For those interested enough, Gems allows you to change the look of the
playing pieces. There are two sizes of gems and two colour depths (16
colour and 256 colour) that Gems uses, so up to 4 complete sets of Gems are
required. (Gems uses the larger tiles if you are playing it in a screen
resolution of 1024x768 or above). Gems uses the screen attributes to
make up a file name to load the images in with, the files supplied with
it are:
  GEM24016.BMP       (24x24 gems, 16 colour)
  GEM24256.BMP       (24x24 gems, 256 colour)
  GEM32016.BMP       (32x32 gems, 16 colour)
  GEM32256.BMP       (32x32 gems, 256 colour)
The "GEM" part of the filename comes from GEMS.INI - if you change the
"FileTag" setting from "GEM" to any other 1-3 character value, Gems will
use that in the filename instead (for example, if you change filetag to
"ZAX" and are running Windows with 16 colours and in a 640x480 resolution,
Gems will look for "ZAX24016.BMP" to find its images). The BMP files must
always be in the same directory as GEMS.EXE.

Each Gems image file is just a boring old bitmap file containing 8 square
"tiles" arranged in a row, from left to right, these represent:
   1  The background (empty) tile
   2  Gem 1 (Blue)
   3  Gem 2 (Red)
   4  Gem 3 (Green)
   5  Gem 4 (Yellow)
   6  Gem 5 (Magenta)
   7  Gem 6 (Cyan)
   8  Magic gem

If Gems cannot load or is unable to find its image file, it displays a
message box and quits. It's probably easier to use the existing files
as a base.


Email:
You can contact the author at -
The Internet: kurt@mutant.demon.co.uk
CompuServe  : 100043,3143

