Warriors of Light

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                                  WARRIORS OF LIGHT

                        A Dungeon Crawling Role Playing Adventure
                                  for the Atari STE


                            (c) 2018-20 Wonderful Industries

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THE STORY SO FAR . . . 


In a strange future world, where a dimensional merge has led to the conjunction
of the realms of the real Earth and the realms of myth and magic, there exists a
preceptory of warrior monks, armed with the power of magic as well as the skills
of a warrior. They are the Warriors of Light, and you are one of them. You and
your comrades in arms protect humanity from any of the evils that may exist.
Gods, monsters, and men have all fallen to your order in the past.

Also inhabiting this mythic dimension are the Gorgons of Mars. A dying race, they
used to be feared in ages past for their cruelty and megalomania but of late have
been content to remain in isolation on the Red Planet ever since their queen, the
tyrannical Medusa, was toppled millennia ago. More recently, one of their number,
a sorceress named Haephaestia, was exiled to Earth. You were concerned about this
at first but it became clear that she intended to remain in exile in a fortress
hold that used to be named, in one reality, Maeldune. She stayed in her fortress,
and all that would occasionally be seen of her or her minion were occasional and
regrettable "misunderstandings" between her insectoid retainers and the people of
the outlying farmsteads near to Maeldune.

Then came the attack.

You were out of the Warriors' monastery meditating, as is the custom of the Order
at given times of the year, and the first you knew of it was a great pall of black
and filthy smoke arising from the monastery. You hurried back to it only to find 
that legions of insectoids, ophidians, and magically twisted beasts were laying
waste to it. Worse still, eldritch sorcery crackled and howled all around as none
other than Haephaestia herself cast terrible incantations that brought the very
stones of the monastery crashing down around each other. The brothers and sisters
of the Warriors of Light sold their lives dearly but all were eventually slaugh-
tered and forced to flee for their own sake. But to no avail, for Haephaestia had
tracked down each one and personally turned them all to stone.

One survivor was left. She told you between coughing up blood that Haephaestia
was responsible for this, then expired.

With all you know destroyed, you scavenged what equipment remained from the ruins
of the monastery and made for Maeldune. Perhaps, just beyond hope, you might be
able to determine why an exiled Gorgon of Mars would have committed such a fell
deed. 

And now you stand on the threshold of Haephaestia's fortress itself. 

Good luck.

You will almost certainly need it.


LOADING AND INSTALLATION


Warriors of Light requires that you have an Atari STE or are capable of emulating
same. If you don't, you may want to consider rectifying this before going further.

You will also need at least 4 MB of RAM in your machine. The game will let you run
it if you have only 2 MB but you may end up running out of memory. Don't say that
we didn't warn you. If you don't have 4 MB, you can get a set of 4 megabyte SIMMs
from Exxos at www.exxoshost.co.uk.

It also must be an STE. The game makes extensive use of STE hardware including the 
blitter and the DMA stereo sound interface. For maximum enjoyment, we recommend
that you connect up a pair of stereo speakers to the back of your STE. If you don't
have these and are just using a monitor, it will function but it will not sound at
all as nice. Furthermore, we use the stereo sound to allow you to hear where things
are coming from within the game world for additional immersion.

We also recommend the use of a hard disk or equivalent. This is playable from your
floppy drive but load times will be longer and you will have to swap disks more.

Assuming you meet the above requirements, carry out the following:

  1. Insert disk 1 into drive A of your STE and boot it up as normal. Assuming that
     you have set drive A as your boot drive, the game will boot. If it does not,
     you should navigate on the desktop to A:\AUTO\WOLBOOT.PRG and run that.

  2. The game will show a very nice splash image while it works out whether or not
     you have a hard drive. If you do, it will give you the option to press F1 to
     install to the hard drive or F2 to just carry on as normal. If not, it will
     crack straight on with loading the rest of the game.

  3. If you choose to install to a hard drive, it will run the installation program.
     Enter into it the drive and directory to install into. Once it is done, it will
     return you to the desktop. From there you can run WOL.TOS from the folder in
     which you installed the game.

The disks have no copy protection on them so it is completely fine if you make a
backup copy of them. In fact we encourage you to do so and store your originals in
a safe place. If you have a Gotek or other floppy emulator we encourage you to use
that rather than floppies. Nor will you be required to enter word n of line x in 
this instruction file at arbitrary places throughout the game. DRM is for cucks.


MAIN MENU


Once you load the game and have enjoyed enough of the lovely intro music that Jon
put together in Quartet while drunk one evening after having seen The Macc Lads, a
number of options should spring to your attention. They are:

  BEGIN - begins the game. You will be asked if you want to load a previous game
  here. If you do, you should select Yes or No and if yes, insert your save disk or
  declare which drive contains your saved games. If not, you will start a new game.

  INTRO - Shows the very nice animated intro which we've put together just for you.

  SETTINGS - Allows you to reconfigure the keyboard controls and decide how much or
  how little in terms of mouse controls you want to be visible. 

  CREDITS - Shows a scroller telling you all about the cavalcade of aged autists who
  are nuts enough to scratch-build a full Atari STE game thirty years after the de-
  mise of said system.

  EXIT - Unceremoniously deposits you back on to the desktop.


CREATING YOUR CHARACTER


If you start a new game you will find yourself looking at a screen entitled "HERO"
which invites you to choose your name (up to 13 characters), gender (male, female,
or attack helicopter), your portrait (of a selection of 6 of each gender), and, of
course, your stats. You start with 50 in each of Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence,
Stamina, and Resolve. You can also spread up to 44 additional points however you 
think fit between them, and even take points off of one stat to add on to another.
However you cannot have less than 20 in any stat or more than 80. There are, though
magical items through the game which CAN bring your stats in excess of these limits
so keep your eyes open.

Name, gender, and portrait are purely aesthetic. No -4 STR here.

Once you have done you will hit PLAY at the bottom to commence the game.


HOW TO PLAY


Eventually you should find yourself in game one way or another.

The interface is fairly self explanatory. We've kept it as uncluttered as possible
because we want you to feel part of the game world rather than a pawn in some sort
of third rate role playing game. However here is a guide as some parts are more in-
tuitive than others.

  Arrow icons or W, A, S, D, Q, E - Move around.

  Left click on the dungeon view - Pick something up, read a sign, fiddle with a
  switch or a chest or a door. If you click on an object, the mouse pointer will be-
  come an icon showing that object. From here you can click the floor to put it down
  or the middle of the view to throw it. 

  Left click on portrait or space - Opens the inventory. Does NOT pause the game.

  Left click on the green box in top left - Opens the pause menu.

  Right click on view - Attack whatever's ahead with the weapon in your right hand.

  Right click on portrait or enter - Opens the spell menu. Does NOT pause the game.

  1-9 on keyboard - Cast the spell assigned to that key assuming enough mana.

  Right click with object in hand - If the object can be used, this uses it. A prom-
  pt saying "Right click to [action]" should appear when it is in hand.

  R, F - Uses the items in those quick slots. Make use of these. Attempting to rumm-
  age in your pack while a fire-breathing Petrox is coming for you is a fairly good
  recipe for adventurer flambé.

At the bottom of the screen is a text bar. This usually shows what is in hand but it
also can show messages such as damage taken or dealt, warnings about poison or other
status effects, and the text of signs or similar. 

That's about everything really. If you have played Dungeon Master you should be able
to get the hang of this fairly quickly.


STAYING ALIVE


The red bar next to the portrait is your hit points as a proportion of your maximum.
The blue bar is the same for your mana. The exact figures of HP and MP can be found
in your inventory. MP will regenerate over time. HP will regenerate over time also,
but more slowly.

Also in the inventory screen can be found your current percentage of your fullness
of food. You can find a variety of foods in the dungeon, some of which are more sat-
iating than others. So long as you keep this above zero, you should be fine, though
the game will warn you in the text bar at the bottom once you get to 25% fullness.

If you reach 0% food you will not be able to regenerate HP or MP. Also all healing
of a magical nature will only be 50% effective. Starvation is such an ugly way to go.

If you reach 0% HP, you will die. Once this happens you can either restart, restore,
or quit. This should be self explanatory. 


SOME HINTS ON PLAY


We believe that the proof of the pudding is in the eating and it is far more fun for
you to discover things as you go along. However, here are some pointers.

  - Enemies have different strengths and weaknesses. Learn them.

  - Not all objects are treasure, or even useful. Some are downright dangerous. It 
    is a really bad idea to hurl the Chakram of Dysnomia in a confined space.

  - Some enemies will respawn but often there is a way of preventing or mitigating 
    respawns. Have a look around carefully.

  - It's not always bad to fall down a pit. 

  - Always keep moving. Some enemies will actively try to surround or corner you.

  - Keep your ears open. Some enemies love to attack from behind.

  - Scrolls and books can often contain useful clues and hints but they may not be
    entirely obvious from the outset.

  - Generally speaking, larger enemies more more slowly, but not always. The Baelon
    is a notable exception to this.

  - Save early, save often. You might think yourself indestructible having walloped
    your way through six levels this session, only to die horribly when you least
    expect it. Once you get into Haephaestia's pyramid, every step spells danger.


WHO MADE THIS ANYWAY?


Warriors of Light started life in 2018 when Jon S. Stock was schlepping aroung in his
STE emulator and drew a single vertical line about two thirds of the way down the
screen. This then became the interface to the game. With this in mind, he opened up
his faithful STOS disk and began to code feverishly. The plot came together out of
a number of heavy metal fuelled dreams. Having shown his work to the STOS Coders 
group on Facebook, he met a very good Kiwi artist called Michael Keenleyside who did
most of the graphics over the next couple of years. He also met a Yorkshire Tyke named
Tom Walker who had autodidacted himself 68000 assembler and written a prize-winning
demo called I've Quit. These three superannuated nerds then proceeded to generate the,
well, acceptable, game you see before you. 

Some credit also goes to one Neil Halliday who produced the sound and music system
primarily for his own game (Monster Manor, a roguelike based on the old Universal 
Horror franchise) but which he was kind enough to let us loose on for this. Neil also
hosts the STOS Coders forum at stoscoders.com where you might be able to find us on
a good day. Or even a bad day.

Thanks also to Chris Swinson for the Exxos store and for helping us all keep our STs
going many years out of warranty. 

In terms of stylistic influences, Warriors of Light was predominantly influenced by
classic ST dungeon crawlers such as Eye of the Beholder and Captive and of course,
the mighty Dungeon Master. The idea of a single-character setup with both weapons and
magic as well as the "late to the party" conceit of battling through a set of dungeons
while the big bad taunts you came from both Anvil of Dawn and System Shock on the PC.
In fact, Haephaestia looks more than a little bit like SHODAN, wouldn't you say? Ahem.

One of the things we really wanted to avoid in making this game was allowing the player
an overreliance on the "combat waltz" or "circle dance" and so the idea of multiple 
types of enemy behaviour was born. Hopefully you might be surprised at some of the 
various ways that monsters will engage you. We also wanted to avoid having things like
monster closets and other overdone things like that. There are some, though. After all
a crawler isn't a crawler until you've grabbed an obvious key and released something
horrific into your immediate vicinity. 

If you liked Warriors of Light, you are encouraged to send copies to all and sundry.
There isn't as much of a homebrew scene for the ST as there is for the Speccy or some
other home computers and we really want to remedy that. Just make sure that you don't
try to claim credit for it. If you do, we might just have to slip a manticore into 
your bedroom late at night. After having starved it for a few weeks, that is. 

(We did mention that Carole Baskin was our manticore tamer, right? Well then.)

If you really liked it, then please "Toss A Coin To Your Developers" as follows:

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