GATE 88 - Game Manual

Table of Contents

• Objective
• Controls
• In-Game Controls
• Replay Mode Controls
• Game Modes
• Game Interface
• Action Menu
• Radar System
• Making Buildings
• Researching
• Building Ships
• Commanding Your Ships
• Viewing Replays
• Setting Up a Multiplayer Game
• Server Commands
• Technical Details

The objective of the game is to protect your command post while destroying your enemy. You'll build various buildings and give command to fighters to help eliminate your opponent. Each building and research item requires resources. Your ship will automatically gain resources over time. As well, the shipyards that you build will automatically construct fighters up to its capacity. Use the action menu to launch these fighters.

Mode	Description
Tutorial	Learn the game and experiment. No enemies will spawn, and you will start with an abundance of resources.
Practice	Enemy bases spawn around your base at regular intervals. You must destroy them before they destroy you. A message will tell you when a new enemy base has spawned.
Multiplayer	Connect to a server and attempt to wipe out the other player's command post. If you destroy an enemy player's ship, you gain resources depending on how upgraded his/her ship is. If your command post gets destroyed, you will spawn with more resources to help you make a comeback. You will be cloaked when you have no command post.

Instead of an intrusive heads-up-display, Gate 88 embeds a lot of information within the graphics itself. Each destroyable game entity has a coloured circle in its center. The colour represents it's affinity towards you. Green entities are your ships and buildings. Red entities are your enemies. Gray entities are buildings that have lost power.

The intensity of the colour will tell you health status of an entity. The brighter the colour, the healthier it is.

Your ship also has a ring around the center circle. The intensity of the colour of this ring represents your battery power. Battery power automatically regenerates.

Finally, depending on the state of certain entities, they will animate accordingly.

Hold the action key to bring up the menu.

The bottom the screen will show you how many resources you have, your current research status, and information about your fighters.

Indicators on the edge of the screen will show the position of important entities that are off-screen. The following are descriptions of each indicator:

Additionally, you can press the 'radar' button (W) to open the fullscreen radar. This will show the positions of all friendly buildings and fighters (in green) as well as enemy command posts (in red). Their positions will be relative to your ship's position.

The fullscreen radar also differentiates between the three different fighter groups. Each friendly fighter appearing on radar will have a coloured circle to match its group colour.

Use the action menu to build buildings. When you open the action menu, you will see a blue circle around your command post and power generators. You can only build within these blue circles. Power generators enable you to build within a radius of it. Shipyards are self-powered and can be built anywhere.

In the central part of the screen is a keyboard driven pie-menu that allows you to build buildings, do research, and give orders to your fighters. This may seem daunting at first, but as you get to know the menus, you will be able to pull off actions very quickly. It is a good idea to first go into the tutorial mode to get to know the menus. Note: no menu is ever more than three levels deep.

To research, you must first build a research lab. Once the lab is built you will be able to choose one of the research options from the action menu.

You can only research one item at a time. However, building more research labs will speed up the research time.

First you must build a shipyard using the aciton menu. The shipyard will automatically build ships for you up to the maximum limit. The ships that you build will remain docked until you give them an order. If one of your ships gets destroyed, the shipyard will automatically start building a replacement (which will remain docked until orders are given).

All ship commands are issued from the "Ship Orders" menu in the action menu.

You have three groups ("Red", "Green,", "Blue") to which you can issue commands. Each new shipyard you build will default to the "Red" group. You can reassign shipyards by using the action menu.

There are three orders that you can give to any group. Below is a table describing the various orders.

So to attack a turret, for example, set the target near the turret and issue the attack command.

To view replays, choose the "Replay" menu option. Replay files are loaded from the "replays/" directory. At this time, it will only show the first 10 replays found in the directory (sorry! I'll fix that soon).

When the replay is running you can move the camera around, play it in slow-motion, fast-forward it, or initiate the "What if" feature. The "what if" feature allows you to take control of the ship and continue playing from that point on. You can use this feature if you've ever thought "if only I did this move instead of that move..."

Please see the Replay Mode Controls to learn how to control these features.

You can view other people's replay files by copying their .replay files into the "replays" directory.

To setup a multiplayer game, one player has to act as host. Any player (preferably the player with the fastest computer and internet connection) can be the host by choosing the "Host Network Game" from the "Multiplayer" menu. All other players can connect to the server by either finding it in the "Server Browser" menu or by entering the IP address of the hosting player via the "Known Address Connection" menu item within the "Multiplayer" menu.

The hosting player can choose a different port to host on via the multiplayer settings menu. To specify the port in the "Known Address Connection", suffix a colon (":") to the IP address followed by the port number. For instance, if the game was hosted at IP address 192.168.0.1 on port 1234 then connecting players should connect to:

192.168.0.1:1234

When the player chooses the "Host Network Game" option, an additional window will popup. This window is the actual interface for the server. The player will still be able to play the game by focusing on the main game window.

It is possible to run a dedicated server by running:

gate88 server

The server interface window will appear. To start the server type "init".

The following commands are available to the server. To run a command, type it into the "Gate88 Server" window that appears.

Note: all commands are case-sensitive.