Guckets Documentation

Introduction
Main menu
The game
Records
Reset all
Level manager
About

Introduction

Guckets is a simple puzzle game for TI83+ and 84+ series written in BASIC. You have to fill buckets with as much water as the level demands. There are 8 levels included, but you can create new levels with the full-featured level editor. You can even export levels to exchange them with others! Hopefully controlling the game is easy and fast.
To run it, you should have at least 2kb of free RAM.
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Main menu

This is the main menu of Guckets, in other words the first you'll see when running the program. Although I think the entries are self-explaining, I explain them here:
When you select the Level-entry, you can start the game with selected level by pressing the 2ND key. Press the left and right arrows to change the level. Please note that you have to solve the first level to be able to access the second etc.
By entering Records you can see your best time and your best move count. By default, these values are really high. The lower the values, the better you are.
The entry Manage levels turns to the level manager. You can easily organize your levels there.
Reset all is useful when the game crashed while editing the level data list. This is the only way to get the game working properly again.
You can quit the game by selecting the Quit-entry. It will move two lists into the archive so that this process may take a few seconds.
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The game

Water moves from one bucket into the other

You must fill buckets with water. Imagine those buckets are transparent with marks for each liter. And imagine that the water is black. On the right you see the first level. It shows two buckets, one with the size of two liters and one which can contain up to three liters. The second bucket has got an arrow. These arrows tell you how much water you must have in the bucket. If there's no mark, it doesn't matter how much water the bucket finally contains.
You have three operations to choose from: Fill a bucket completely, empty a bucket and put water from one bucket into another until the destination is completely full. With that you can solve every level. But how to do so?
The first level is quite easy. Just fill the second bucket and move its content into the first bucket. Well, I guess you do not know how to affect the buckets yet. But tha's so easy! Just press the button under the bucket you want to select. In this case, you want to select bucket two, so press the WINDOW key. An arrow will appear under the selected bucket (look at the picture on the left). Just press window again to fill the bucket. It will turn black (look at the second picture on the right). If you want to empty it again, just do the same again! Note that the bucket will only be filled when it is empty. Otherwise it will get empty.
To move water from bucket two into bucket one, just select the second and then the first by pressing Y=. You'll see two arrows and an animation that shows the water moving from bucket two into bucket one, just as you wanted to. After that, you should see what the last picture on the right shows, but only for half of a second or so because you solved the level. The goal was to hold one liter of water in the second bucket and you did so. No matter what bucket 1 contains. You will quickly return to main menu and be permitted to play level 2.
In case you want to return to main menu at any time, just press MODE. Jump to the top

Records

After having solved a level, the game checks if you were faster or just needed less moves than ever before. For each level, the time you needed to solve and the moves you have done are stored. You can see these values for seven levels at the same time so you have to jump to the next page if you want to see the data for more levels. You can either use Y= and ZOOM to jump to the previous or next page or you press WINDOW to get a menu where you can select all pages directly.
Note: Except for the last one, you can solve every of the 8 standard levels with less than 10 moves. Just try to get better values.
Please note that the values for newly created and imported levels are random. They are really bad so that you should be able to beat them in most cases.
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Reset all

When you press ON, the calculator turns off or any bug causes the game to crash while it's writing to the level list, the game will be unplayable. Levels will be strange, the record list will be too long or too short or - in the worst case - errors will appear. The only way to get it working again is to reset it. All levels and all highscore will be deleted and you will have the 8 levels you had when you just had installed the game.
Unfortunately, you will have to replay all the levels again unless you know how to hack this.
Note: In order to prevent data loss, please export your own levels and regard the resulting list as a backup you can import after a reset.
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Level manager

Create or edit a level
Delete level
Export levels
Import levels

With this tool (which takes up most space of the program) you can create and edit levels, delete levels, export them to a list and import them from an exported list. With the aid of the export and import functions you can exchange your levels with your friends to always get new challanges. And the level editor is very easy I think. You will see, it just behaves like it is supposed to.
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Create or edit a level

Just go to Create new level in case you want to create a new level or go to Edit level and select the one you want to modify. It looks just like the gameplay, doesn't it? When you create a new level, you'll see one bucket with the size of one liter and an arrow on the bottom left of the screen. Don't panic, that's correct. Just use the arrow keys again. If you move to the right, the arrow appears under the bucket itself. When you move up, the bucket grows. If you move down, it shrinks again. If the arrow isn't under a bucket and you move up, you can change the amount of water the bucket must contain when playing the game. The more you turn to the right, the more buckets appear. If you want to delete a bucket, just move under it and press DEL. It may look a bit strange because it's slow, but that's a major problem of BASIC.
Just press 2ND to attach the level to the level list or press MODE to exit the editor without saving.
Please note that you can only access new levels if you replay the last level again because new levels are only attached to the level list. Please also note that you can only have up to 5 buckets and that every bucket may have a size of up to 10 liters. Note that it doesn't make sense to use the same numbers for the size of a bucket and the amount of water a bucket should contain when playing.
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Delete a level

If you dislike a level or if you played around with the level creator and are unhappy about the result you can just delete it. This process always takes a while, so don't interrupt the calculator. Otherwise you'll have to reset the game.
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Export levels

You can export your levels to share them with others. On the left you can see a list of available levels. I think you'll wonder why there's neither 9 nor 10. Sure they exist. But to select them, you have to scroll down. Just press the down arrow until you see what you wanted. If you have more than 40 levels installed, you must also do horizontal scrolling. Unfortunately, scrolling is very slow.
To mark or unmark a level for export, press 2ND or ZOOM. If you press Y=, the program starts exporting. After that, you should see something like the screenshot on the right.
Please note that this will override earlier exported levels without prompting. So please rename the list GEXLV after exporting.
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Import levels

You can also import previously exported levels. They will be attached to your level list like newly created levels.
To import levels, you must know the name of the list which contains the levels. Just start to type the letters of the name. If you want to type a number, press ALPHA to change the input mode from alpha (A) to numeric (1) (see picture on the right). Press Y= to import. If you entered a list that doesn't exist, the programm will flush a syntax error. If you haven't got enough free RAM, the game will flush a memory error.
Don't stop importing. Although it may take a long time, it's important to let the program write the level list to prevent data damage.
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About

©2008, Philip Rebohle <philip.rebohle@ewetel.net>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
A copy of the GNU General Public License is available here.

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