Misfit

Instructions for this Basic tutorial's concluding game, Misfit, by Sean McManus

This game is called Misfit (on the disc). It's a sliding puzzle affair with a stereo soundtrack and the option to define your own designs. The definer can be used by itself for creating sprites, since it saves data in the same format as our sprite routine, although it's a bit limited for large projects (without amendment: cue audience participation). Its very basic instructions are shown on screen.

Misfit, the game, works by enlarging your design (or one of the two presets in the program) and cutting it up into tiles. The top right tile is always removed, and this should be kept in mind when designing puzzles. Additionally, you should try to ensure that the design has enough variety in it to make it clear which tile is which when the game begins. Having scrambled the tiles, the game challenges you to slide them back to the correct place in the time limit given. The keys used are those on the numeric keypad:

• 8-move tile into space above
• 2-move tile into space below
• 4-move tile into space to left
• 6-move tile into space to right

You can choose three levels of time limit and three levels of difficulty based on the number of shuffles the computer makes before letting you play.

Although the original issue of The Basic Idea did not include them, the disc now also includes several games from Amstrad Action and Amstrad Computer User magazines. They also draw extensively upon the techniques in this book and have their code unprotected for you to investigate.

Postscript

In 2003, I created a version of Misfit in Javascript which you can play online now.