Manual

poly.play
About
Welcome to  Deathflood–Dungeon of Doom. In this game you will
find yourself trapped deep in a dark dungeon full of evil creatures, traps
and an ever-rising flood. Your main goal is simple: Get out of this hostile
place … alive.

At second glance, your quest may not be as simple as you thought. There
are additional objectives, hidden secrets, some nasty traps and several
decisions to be made.

This guide should give you all the information you need to master the
game’s challenges. And whenever you feel the game is unfair, think twice
before trying to open a door by banging your head against it. There might
be a key under the doormat.

Prolog
In a dark tavern, a drunken merchant told you about the legend of a
nameless necromancer once terrorizing the land. Decades ago the
necromaner died during a dark ritual that went horribly wrong. His lair
was a stronghold hidden in the high mountains and people say that it is
still full of riches, ready to be taken by anyone brave enough to enter. You
became curious and decided to search for the stronghold …

T he Prophecy
… and the old fortune teller predicted to you …

I can see six fates awaiting you in the cold darkness.
Four from poor to rich,
one full of haste
and one for the merciless.
Your deeds and gains will change your destiny.
C ontrols
The game supports a controller in port #2 or #1. There is special support
for extra buttons on the Protovision Protopad. The Protovision
Protopad is detected once when the game menu is displayed for the
first time.

In the following, controls are referred to as [Fire] for any fire button,
[Left]/[Right]/[Up] and [Down] for pressing the controller in those
directions, [B] for the Protopad B button, and [M] for the Protopad
menu button.

Walk Push [Left] or [Right].
Walk
Pick up Item
Pick up Item Walk over an item to pick it up.

Run Push [Left] or [Right] for several seconds.
Run

Jump Push [Left]/[Right] and [Up] or [Left]/
Jump
[Right] and [B] on Protopad.

Long Jump
Long Jump Jump while running.

Attack Press [Fire]
Attack .
Use ladders
Use ladders While standing in front of a ladder, push
[Up]  to start climbing.

Leave Level
Leave Level While standing before a staircase, push [Down] .
Use Doorways
Use Doorways While standing before a doorway, press [Down] .
Use Switch
Use Switch Standing before a switch and press [Down] .
Use Stairs
Use Stairs Walk towards the stairs to start climbing
them. Sometimes stairs can passed by,
then you have to jump onto the first step.

Pause Menu Press the [Fire] for 3 seconds or [M] on
or Skip Intro Protopad. The game pauses as long as the
menu is active. Move [Left]/[Right] to choose
and [Fire] to confirm an option.
T he Heroes
The A fierce warrior wielding a deadly sword capable of
Barbarian
Barbarian inflicting great damage at long range. Due to his heavy
musculature, his movements are rather sluggish.

The barbarian prefers to kick down doors and attack
hordes of enemies head-on. Gravity is not his friend,
so he is most efficient with both boots on the ground.

The A swift fighter, she carries two sharp daggers. Her light
Amazon
Amazon weapons allow her to jump high and run fast. The short
attack distance makes her more vulnerable to attacks.

The Amazon tends to avoid direct confrontation and
outmaneuver her opponents. Her agility allows her to
reach inaccessible places.

Menus
The Main Menu is visualised as a book with several pages. Your
control options are displayed on the left. Use [Up] and [Down] to scroll
through the pages.

Start Press [Fire] to start a new game.

Hero Press [Left] to change your hero and [Right] for skin
color.

Audio-Settings Press [Left] to turn music on/off and [Right] to turn
sound effects on/off.

Manual Press [Fire] to view and [Fire] to leave the manual.

In the Pause Menu you can quit or continue the current game. The
third option is to restart the current level, which is useful if you are
stuck somewhere. The level restarts with the number of hit points and
coins you entered it. But there is a penalthy of reducing your hitpoints
by one. This might result in a game over when you have only one hit
point left. See »Controls« how to enter this menu.
Statusbar
The status bar is displayed at the top of the game screen and has two
modes: displaying the hero’s health and inventory, or an in-game menu
in pause mode.

(A) (B) (C) (D)

(A)  You have four hit points, which you can lose for
Hit Points  various reasons. When your last hit point is gone, the
game ends—unless you have enough gold to pay for a
continue. You can restore your hit points by collecting
magical potions. Each potion restores one hit point.
When your hit points are full, you won’t be able to
collect more potions, so you’ll have to collect them again
later.

(B)  On most levels, the flood is constantly rising. Whenever
Oxygen  your head is below the water level, your oxygen reserve
will decrease. When you run out of oxygen, you lose one
hit point and regain some oxygen. If you run out of
lifes, you will die instantly. Whenever your head is
above the water, your lungs fill with fresh air and your
oxygen reserves increase until they reach their
maximum.

(C)  The number of door keys you have collected so far. 
Door Keys  Whenever you touch a door while holding at least
one key, the key will be used to open that door and
will disappear from your inventory. Keys can’t be
carried over to the next level.

(D) Each time you collect a coin, it’s added to your coin
Golden Coins  balance. You can also collect jewels, which are worth
three coins each.
D ungeon Creatures
Acolyte The servants of the necromancer. Very fast
but weak. Dangerous when they appear in
large groups.

Beholder You can’t hide before their countless eyes. They
can even see you through walls and floors.

Death Knight Undead warriors resurrected by black magic.
Death knights are very tough fighters and
cannot be doged.

Mummy When corpes are embalmed, the brain is
removed. Mummies are slow and easily
outwitted.

Skeleton The foot soldier of evil. They are aggressive 
and pretty smart, but can’t take much damage.

Slime Creatures created from poisonous sewerage
and dark magic. Very weak and no match for
a real hero.

Stone Face Ancient faces carved in stone that can spit
reballs. They are indestructible.

Stone Golem Giant creatures with a thick stone skin.
Luckyly they aren’t very smart, but they are
so huge that they can’t be doged.

Rats The children of the rat god. They populate
dungeons in large numbers but are harmless.
D ungeon Survival Guide
Switches A switch opens/closes at least one gate. However, a
switch can also be connected to several gates and vice
versa.

Secret Passage A secret passage connects two doorways in a level and
Secret Passage
can be used in both directions.

Falling When you fall from a certain height, you lose one hit
point, unless you fall into water of a certain depth.
Falling into the void will reset you to the beginning of
the level.

Rescue Jump When falling you have a very small window of time in
which you can still trigger a jump.

Traps There are different traps like spikes or acid pits. Falling
into a pit or moving inside will damage your hero.
Shallow acid traps are neutralized once they have been
flooded.

Invincibility Whenever you take damage, your hero is invincible for
a short amount of time.

Water Beeing underwater for too long will kill your hero, but
also your foes.

The Flood There are mechanisms that are activated by passing
by a hidden switch. Activation causes the dungeon to
tremble and changes the rate at which the flood
rises. This does not necessarily have to be to your
disadvantage.
D isk Version
 
To load the game type LOAD“*“,8,1  and press enter. The first
file on disk is an autoloader that automatically starts and loads the
other parts of the game.

When running the disk version of the game on the Vice-Emulator,
ensure that »True Drive Emulation« is enabled or the game might get
stuck during the loading screen.

C artridge Version
A Magic Desk cartridge build, wich is supported by the Vice-Emulator
from at least version 2.4 upwards (File\Attach cartridge image\Crt
image). In this version the loader is skipped and the games starts with
a choice where you can choose to see the intro first or go straight to the
game menu.

T echnical Issues
The game was developed for PAL
machines. A compatibility mode
is activated on NTSC machines,
but the experience will be slightly
different on NTSC: Music sounds
a little different, timings are not
exactly the same and in some
situations there is some flickering.
C redits
Friedrich Volmering Concept, Code, Game Art and Manual Text

Carsten Przyluczky Music and Sound Effects 

Jan Böhm Testing

Sebastian Bach Cover Art, Box and Manual Design

A game by Published in 2023 by