Santas Present Drop 4 - Grunch's Revenge

The Story So Far...
Santa has been through a real crisis over the last few years. He started off happily dropping presents down chimneys, but got complaints about the wrong presents going to the wrong families.  So, he installed the Gift-o-Matic 5000 to help with present sorting. This was very unpopular with the over-worked elfs and rumour has it that they sabotaged the device, causing it to explode whilst flying over the alps, leaving Santa the job of Skiing to collect them all.

Unbeknown to Santa, was that whilst he was away, The Grunch broke into the toy factory at north pole and elfnapped the top four head elfs meaning all toy production stopped. The Grunch was happy. He could now take Christmas off as there were no more presents to steal!

On return to the north pole, Santa discovered what had happened, and enlisted you to travel to The Grunch's lair to break out the elfs, armed with the ability to command the elfs, and a drone. Santa will be waiting on the roof, ready to fly them to safety...

Game Specs
Levels: 40
Controls: Mouse (and optional joystick)
Platform: Amiga!
Minimum Requirements: 1MB RAM  (OCS/ECS)
Note: 1MB Amiga - disconnect extra floppy drives
Recommended Spec: A1200 (it's a little slugish on an A500)
HD Installable: YES
Difficulty: Increases

Game Play

Use the mouse to guide your Elfs to the exit on each level. Elfs aren`t stupid, they won't just walk off the edge of a platform.  

You can use the control at the bottom of the screen to issue walk/swim/stop/climb/turn around/jump actions, OR you can right-click an elf and enter command mode which works more like a point-and-click adventure. In this mode you can pickup, put down and use objects, as well as move to/travel around the level without any further interaction needed (its much quicker too!)

You also have the control of a drone, that you can drag around with the mouse, or move with a joystick. This can be used to pick up and move various objects within the level.

Please don't share level codes in the comments

Tips

• Right Click an Elf is king! For example: Right Click Elf - then hover over item (eg: Toolbox) and Left Click.... Elf picks up Tool Box. Then, Right Click Elf with Toolbox, and hover over a rope. The status bar says "Use Toolbox with Rope!"
  
• Sometimes you have to combine a few items to make them function properly
• Be careful of the little red dot  on some levels, it often triggers something nasty.
• Not every item can be picked up with the Drone, and not every item does what you might expect. Consider the Sleigh Bell.... throw them off the edge of a platform and they explode on impact!
• Every item in the tool bar has a keyboard alternative. It's worth learning them all...
  

Inspiration

It's no suprise that this game was inspired by other games, and whilst Lemmings is one of them, other games such as Bills Tomato Game & The Incredible Machine played into the design as well. Theres also Monkey Island and Simon the Sourcerer as there's a real 'point-and-click' feel to this game too. This game has been about 5 months in the making. The source code is around 10,000 lines long. It has a seperate level designer and also a level packing/naming program too... oh, and if you complete all 40 levels you'll be treated to a little ending sequence with a clue to a later game that I may make...

Special Thanks
Bapstarcade for the music, and NIVRIG Games for the Grunch sprite.

Other Credits and Thanks
This game was created using AMOS Professional, but don't let that put you off, and I think I've pushed it as fast as I can. This is now being slowed down by AMOS treating everything as a 'long', and there's nothing I can do about this, its just a limitation.  The game, before being compiled, is also ran through a home-made preprocessor that switches out all the variables I use as constants, to be literal fixed numbers that don't need to be looked up, and so run faster. It made quite a difference (and made the program smaller).  I also run the APEO on the resulting execuitable, and that helps quite a bit too.