THE LOST ONE - Instructions
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(c) Juan-Antonio Fernández-Madrigal, 2025
https://jafma.net


1) STORY
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Your tribesmen departed a long time ago to the Twenty Cursed Caves in their quest for the Sacred Cliff, where all the evil ends and a new generation can thrive.

But you were the dumbest, slowest of all, and your body does not always obey your mind. So they left you behind.

Only a few pitied you and laid down their tools along the path after use, instead of keeping them for the Cliff.

Will you be able to use them wisely, in the correct moments and sequence, to make your way through the Caves and reach your mates at the end?


2) HOW TO PLAY
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The game is on the tape file "TheLostOne.tap". You just need to load it completely to be ready to play!

If you have the Nutria-reboot emulator (http://jafma.net/software/nutria-reboot) you can also load the source file instead, which is a "procedural tape" (.tab), that is, a plain text file that contains pure BASIC code plus some structure that allows the emulator to recreate the tape. Actually, this game has been programmed as an evaluation of procedural tapes for better and more efficient development of pure BASIC programs; they also allow for automatic optimizations, like the ones of the ZXBasicus tool (http://jafma.net/software/zxbasicus), on the fly, while loading the .tab. More information about procedural tapes can be found here: https://jafma.net/software/tabformat/

"The Lost One" is a puzzle/platform game where your PATIENCE, INGENUITY and DETERMINATION are crucial, since you do not control the main character motion: it moves constantly (with a strong trend towards going to the right) and picks up automatically any tool object it finds in its way, up to a maximum of 9 for each kind of tool. There are 7 kinds: vertical dig, right excavation, left excavation, pave to the right, pave to the left, column build and parachute.

With those tools and a wise use of the keyboard you have to make the character to cross every Cursed Cave to reach its mates. For that purpose use the numeric keys (1 to 7). But care! You must activate the tools at the right time, not before, not after... and hope for the character, so dumb and distracted, complies.

It is likely that you reach unescapable situations, where you cannot do anything. In that case you can use key 8 (self-destruction) and try again. People of your tribe only dies for good at the Sacred Cliff; if they are destroyed before, they come back to life in the same place.

Any successfully crossed cave will provide the password to enter the next one, so write that down if you want to retry later!

When you cross a cave, if you did it with less failures (deaths) and motion steps than the last record in the Ancient Scrolls, you will be annotated there. You can save into a tape those records and also load them afterwards to go on, or to try to do better than other players.

You can try any cave as many times as you wish in order to improve the record, if possible. There are caves that can be crossed in different ways, with different efficiencies.

In the set of caves included in the game, after you cross the twentieth one you arrive at the Sacred Cliff and thus complete your quest! You can also load other sets of caves (see the next section); in that case, crossing the last one successfully will lead you to the same ending.


3) THE CAVE DESIGNER
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The game comes with another tape, "TheLostOne_CaveDesigner.tap", that contains a Cave designer program. Actually, it is the one used by the author to build the Twenty Cursed Caves. That program has also been developed with procedural tapes and pure BASIC. You can use it to build your own cave set and explore the gaming possibilities of the game engine (the author estimates that he does not know all of them with a 10% of probability). However, take into account the following limitations of that engine, due to the need for simplicity and reasonable fast computation:

-Do not allow the character to reach the right, left or bottom limits of the cave area on the screen: the game will not work well if that happens.
-There are cases when the character cannot pick up some tools if they are below it.
-If the character falls for more than 3 steps, it will die unless it is using a parachute.
-If, while the character falls, it picks up some tool that is in its way (before dying), the fall count will not be reset: it will go on accumulating falling distance, and thus increasing the probability of dying at the end.
-The exit point of a cave will be successfully reached from any of its sides.

The Cave Designer has only two screens:

The first one shows the index of caves already designed, plus an empty one at the end that can be added. You can move through that index using OPQA, and enter a cave for edition with E. You can also change their passwords (8 characters, no digits or symbols or capital letters) and change their ordering. This screen also shows info about the memory size of each cave and the maximum allowed size.

From the first screen you can also save and load sets of caves. These files can be used in the game by inserting these tape files when the game shows on screen the text "now loading caves". Remember to re-insert the previous tape when it calls for the records.

The second screen of the Cave Designer is for editing a cave. You can move through the design and place whatever elements you wish, which can be selected pressing S (all the available actions and keys are shown on screen). You can also enter a name for the cave, although this text editor is quite unresponsive; that name will be automatically centered below the cave.

When you finish the edition you have to code it for the game engine to use it. That process is quite slow; you can change at that moment the CPU speed if you use some emulator. Once the coding has ended, and if there is no error or excess of size, you will be given the opportunity of shifting vertically and/or horizontally the content of the cave in case you need a better visual placement.



