michi.nu: Instructions for To Hell with Johnny

Instructions
Contents

1. The basics
2. Scoring
   - Scoring for dummies
   - Advanced scoring
   - Online scores
   - Restrictions
   - Freestyle
   - Status lights
   - Network problems
3. Difficulty and extras
4. Accessibility
5. Appendix

## Scoring

Survival is recommended, of course, but to truly live you need a purpose and, as is well known, the one who dies with the most points wins.

### Scoring for dummies

If awesome scores aren't your immediate concern the following rule applies: the longer you last (preferably without hurting yourself) the higher the score. That's it. Now go play the game!

### Advanced scoring

The first thing to do once you have begun to master the game is to enable show points in the miscellaneous settings menu. This will give you immediate feedback on your play by means of floaters showing the points you earn.

The floaters remain tiny for small points but grow with increasing score up to a giant 50 000 which is also the maximum score given for a single action. Reaching this cap can be a challenge in itself.

You have three basic ways to score points: land on platforms, take items, or just survive.

#### Platforms and the platform bonus

Every time you land on a new platform you gain some points. The score depends on stage and platform. Higher stages score more than lower. Smaller platforms score more than bigger. Moving platforms score more than stationary.

When the bonus counter fills up, a new tooth grows in the demonic mouth to visualize the multiplier.

Additionally, each time you land on a platform with full health your bonus counter grows. Filling the counter adds to a bonus multiplier which applies to all new points scored by landing on platforms. The multiplier can reach 20x but for each increment you need to land safely on more platforms to reach the next. Take any damage for any reason and both counter and multiplier immediately revert to zero.

When playing the higher difficulties you won't lose your bonus until you drop below 50% of your health.

Should you manage to reach 20x by some miracle of skill and luck, the multiplier locks and you enter Super Bonus Mode™ for the rest of the game.

#### Survival and the score speed multiplier

The least involved way of racking up points is simply to survive. As long as you are alive your score continuously grows at a constant rate. The only way you can increase this rate is by boosting your score speed multiplier with green stars.

Completing an intermediate stage awards a chunk of points corresponding to 10 percent of your current score. Winning the game adds 25 percent. Neither of these bonuses can exceed the 50 000 cap.

#### Items

In addition to their other effects, all items affect your score. To make things more interesting, items score more the nastier they are. A bubble gives a meager 100 points while the deadly skull gives 2 000.

The exceptions to this rule are the score stars. The green star gives 500 points and adds to the score speed multiplier. The red star removes 500 points and subtracts from the multiplier.

This multiplier is represented by up to five open eyes above your score and to make things really interesting they persist across multiple games on the same difficulty. However, each time you die, one eye will close.

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### Online scores

High score lists are best when shared and this game makes sharing easy as pie. Just set online scores to on in the settings menu and your scores will automatically be submitted to our servers and shared with all other players with the feature enabled. You'll get an additional column in the high score screen with the top players worldwide, and the score summary at the end of a game will let you know how your score matches up.

Online scores become available when you buy the game.

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#### Restrictions

To counter the common problem with the best player hogging all the slots in all the lists there are some automatically enforced restrictions on submitted scores. From a single copy of the game a single name is only seen once in a list. If a newly submitted score is better than the current entry it replaces it. If not, it is discarded.

To accommodate a family sharing a copy of the game, up to five different names are allowed on each list. If a sixth name is submitted, the name with the lowest score is removed.

The family feature is not meant to be abused. Filling a list with "LeetGamer1" through "LeetGamer5" is not recommended.

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#### Freestyle

As the difficulty is extremely customizable under the accessibility settings, fair score comparisons over different combinations are nearly impossible to achieve. For this reason, and because chaos is fun, any games played with speed or mode settings outside the default are clumped together in a single online top scores list: Freestyle. To make this list more competitive, a score modifier is calculated for each combination of settings (shown in the upper right corner of the screen) which applies to all the points you score. This modifier ranges from ½ to 25 and it is up to you to find your sweet spot between big points and survivability.

To begin with the only modes and speeds available are those that make the game easier. Modes and speeds to increase the difficulty, and with that the score, are unlocked by completing some of the game's challenges.

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#### Status lights

The handling of the global scores is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, but sometimes it can be useful or fun to know what is going on behind. Enter the network skull whose glowing eyes are your window to the nitty-gritty.

| Status | Network | Cache
| Green | idle | yes
| Yellow | idle | no
| Dark blue | connecting | either
| Light blue | transfer | either
| Orange | error | yes
| Red | error | no
| Grey | disabled | no

On the title and cinema screens it shows only network status. While playing, the left eye is reserved for game integrity and will normally stay green. The game takes many measures to play evenly and fairly no matter what else is happening on your computer, but should it happen too long too often that it cannot compensate, this light will first warn yellow and then, unless the problem goes away, red - indicating that the score will not be eligible for submission. Top

#### Network problems

The global scores travel the Internet and on the Internet shit happens. The game handles this by remembering any failed score submissions and retrying them periodically until they succeed. If the network light flashes pink there are scores in the submission queue waiting to be sent.

If the game integrity status remains red across games and the network light indicates an error, it might be that the submission queue has filled up and no new scores can be accepted for that reason. This would normally take days but is a possibility if the link between your computer and our servers is broken long-term. Should this happen and the reason is known and external - such as network maintenance or nuclear war - just wait it out. The queue should flush itself out once the connection is back up again.

If you get a persistent (more than a day or two) network error in game with unknown cause and have no other Internet problems in general, first check that your firewall is not blocking the requests from the game and then contact us at bugs@michi.nu and we'll look into what might have gone wrong.

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