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Total Replay is a launcher for Apple II games that includes the ability to dislay a page of help text for each game. After searching for a game title, the user can press "?" to see the help page for that title. There are lots of titles that do not currently have help text and currently display "TODO".
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Game help is designed for someone who's never played the game (or hasn't played for decades) to get enough information about the game and its controls to have a first-run experience that's less frustrating than "mashing keys until you die."
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The Total Replay tab contains a list of games that do not currently have any game help. The purpose of this list is to track what titles still need help text, to provide a link to a manual if possible, to record a volunteer's name against a title to prevent doubling up on effort, capture a way for the TR team to contact that volunteer, and to capture that the resource has been created in the TR repository (Tick mark)
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Please refer to existing Game help files to get a feel for the style that 4am has created, and please use them as a template so that new entries are consistent.
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https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade/tree/master/res/GAMEHELP
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Do you have a manual for a game that needs help? If so, please scan the manual, upload it to archive.org and add the URL to the sheet.
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Ideally, contributors of help text should refer to a manual, test the keys to confirm how the game responds, play the game to get a feel for any further information that could be useful to a new player, and check how the help text page looks in Total Replay by adding the game help page to their local build and testing it.
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Warning, some characters are used for non-text glyphs in the HGR character set. These include:
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$ = Open Apple symbol, % = Closed Apple symbol, < = Left arrow, > = Right arrow
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Up arrow and Down arrow are also mapped from control characters. See Bejeweled as an example.
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Provide your game help submission with a pull request to the a2_4am/4cade project or by email to one of the contributors, e.g. andrew.roughan@writeme.com
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Sometimes a user will need to read the manual to really understand how to play the game. In these cases, please refer the user to a manual. See Ankh & Raster Blaster for examples of how to do this. a2.click URL shortenings are allowed for archive.org URLs but not for asimov FTP site URLs.
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https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade/blob/master/res/GAMEHELP/ANKH
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https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade/blob/master/res/GAMEHELP/RASTER.BLASTER
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Thank you for your time to do this. If everyone who reads this creates 1 game help, then it will be finished quickly. Many hands make light work.The less time 4am spends on this himself, the more time he can spend on something else!
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If you want to pass this onto others, you can use the URL https://a2.click/trgamehelp
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