THE STORY UNFOLDS (OR POSSIBLY UNRAVELS)
Oh no! A group of evil, slimy and repulsive creatures from beyond space have ransacked the Earth, plundering all of our most precious resources… and every piece of Battenberg cake going! Mister Kipling is absolutely beside himself. As intergalactic space hero Max Thrust, it’s your mission to blast off into the inky blackness and give those slimy, confectionary-pilfering beasts the kicking they so rightly deserve; to that end, your craft is armed with a bolt laser for knocking the stuffing out of alien shielding and, should things get really desperate, each craft comes from the factory fitted with three “smart bombs” that will atomise anything in visual range and render the player’s craft immune to the remaining bullets for a limited time.

Good luck Commander Thrust!

[View with PicLens]

TAKING THE FIGHT TO THE ALIENS’ DOOR
Controlling the action is simple. For players using a keyboard, the cursor keys handle movement of the craft, the Z key fires the main weapon and X triggers a smart bomb. Those players with a joystick or control pad, the craft is moved with the stick or D pad, buttons 1 or 3 fire the lasers and button 2 sets us up the bomb. After that, the only other things you’ll need to remember are that the space bar or button 4 on the joystick or pad will pause the game (press it again to carry on where you left off) and the Escape key or close button (if the game is running windowed) will terminate the simulation at just about any time.

TIPS FOR HIGH SCORING IN QUANTIZER
To the right of the score (which is at the top left of the screen) is the chain multiplier, to increase it the player must destroy groups of nasties of the same type; please note that chipping away at an attacker’s shield doesn’t have any bearing on the multiplier, it’s only affected when they go boom. Pieces of Battenberg dropped by vanquished aliens will also increase the multiplier and, because it’s such a tasty treat, this doesn’t affect any chains being constructed; chains are only broken if a different nasty is destroyed, the smart bomb is fired or on the destruction of the player’s craft.

Absolutely everything goes through the chain multiplier; the points for damaging or destroying a nasty, earnt from grabbing falling items, the various bonuses awarded for finishing a level, the works basically. And there’s no upper multiplier limit, so the longer a chain is kept alive the better the scoring is. An extra life is awarded every two million points, by the way.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why the Battenberg fixation then? That one is pretty simple really, the bonus object was added to the game but there was no graphic for it; I spent a while trying to draw something appropriate but failed miserably, with what ended up in the game being a moment of "inspiration". And since it looks a bit like a slice of Battenberg cake, that’s what I’ve decided it’ll actually be. So there.

What tools were used to make Quantizer? The game programming was produced with BlitzMax and the PHP code for server-side highscore management was handled with Crimson Editor. Sprites were rendered using Doga L1 and processed with Photoshop (which was also used to produce the bullets, explosion and bonus Battenberg). The soundtrack was converted from a MIDI file to WAV using WinAMP through a rather battle scarred SoundBlaster Live! card whilst the sound effects were produced with SFXR (no, that’s not a sampled Gameboy when a bonus is collected!) and speech generated by a demo of FL Studio, all of which were edited, processed and generally mucked around with in Audacity.

Music by Gustav Holst…? Well, he composed "Mars" as part of his orchestral suite "The Planets" and that’s what the music is; the arrangement is from a general MIDI file, sadly uncredited since it was found squirreled away on the web a while ago before being left to hibernate in a quiet corner of a hard drive.

IMPORTANT FINAL NOTES
When Quantizer is played on an internet-enabled computer, it will attempt to send and receive high scores from the Illogistix website. The data being sent is merely the player’s name, the score they achieved and the level reached whilst earning that score. The web server will store IP addresses, times and dates of connections (but web servers do that anyway). If your firewall pops up to ask what it should do, please either allow Quantizer access at all times to play with the online leader board or disallow it for local scores; local scores are not saved between sessions.

During the first execution of the game, a small configuration file will be created on your hard drive called "Player.dat" and this merely contains the name you give the game when it starts up, meaning that the game can remember you between sessions.