10Dec05 (Monthenor): I don't even know if there is such a thing as a green belt in ninjutsu...the Wikipedia page was surprisingly unhelpful in that respect.

Anyway, here is the first rough public release of Chemu. Remember that Manager game I showed you a few weeks back? How some of you found weird bugs where the game would just hang? Yeah, well there are even more bugs like that in Chemu. Still. *sigh*...sometimes when you enter a room the game will just get tired. No errors or anything, it just stops running all the threads. It's not even consistent on a single room or anything, if it was reproducible like that I could fix it. Anyway, if the game suddenly gets unresponsive you should be able to save your game, exit, and reload just fine.

There are also problems between the gravity and damage threads if you land on top of an enemy...try not to get hit. And the speed is not anything you could call "optimized".

Terry wasn't kidding when he said that none of you are going to make it to Atomi.

I'm still trying to decide how to create a decent in-game manual. If people besides me are going to play this thing I guess I should tell you how to do stuff:

• W: jump
• S: duck
• A: left
• D: right
• J: ionic sword
• K: covalent sword
• L: projectile (if any)
• I: open the inventory/information panel

The basic idea is that you collect elements as you move through the rooms and kill things. You could kill anything with just your swords, but if you manage to kill them with an elemental projectile you'll make your swords a little stronger. You do have to match your element's valence numbers to the outer electron shell of the enemy in order to damage them...the numbers should add up to 8.

Was that confusing enough? Dammit.