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Cuba Letra ReadMe
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(c) Charlie Dog Games 2009

This document provides information about "Cuba Letra". A game developed independantly by "Charlie Dog Games"

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Game Play Instructions and Hints
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Controls:  Mouse control (left button mainly but the right button can be used for shortcuts) and the "Escape key" to pause the game.

Left mouse button - for clicking to activate buttons and for selecting letters.

Right mouse button - for submitting a valid word.

The objective of Cuba Letra is to select letters from a "CHAIN" of bubble letters so that the selected letters spell a word.  Only English words of three letters or more which are not propper nouns are not allowed.

In "Hard" mode only words of four or more letters are valid

As letters are selected they get added to a working word which is shown on the left of the screen.  When the word is a valid word a submit buttons appears and the word can be submitted.  When the word is submitted the letters disappear from the chain but the spaces left by the letters remain (there is a way to get rid of these spaces which we'll discover later)

The chain of bubble letters starts from the head of the chain, marked with a button with the text "Pop A Letter" on it, and head towards the end of the chain and a marker with the words "Game Over" on it.  The game is over when a letter bubble touches the game over marker

The game is broken down into different levels and each requires a different number of words to be collected to be completed.  Generally as the game goes on more words are required for each level but there are exceptions when some levels are more speed orientated.

If a word is submitted which contains seven or more letters then a "GOLD" bubble appears over a letter in the chain somewhere.  Gold bubbles have two special functions:  (1) they multiply the scoring value of any word they are used in by the amount shown in the bubble; (2) When they are used in a word they cause the chain of bubble letters to contract and all spaces are removed. For this reason they are very useful and can be used strategically to keep the bubble chain short. 

In hard mode only words of eight or more letters produce a gold letters

Letters can be added into the chain at any time by clicking on the "Pop A Letter" button.  This can be useful if the player has just got a long word and not many letters are left or on levels with multiple chains if one chain is very long and the other short.  In this case popping letters into the short chain can improve the players chances of getting a longer word.

A good strategy is to either try to get words of seven or longer letters or take shorter words using letters from the head of the chain.  Taking shorter words from letters in the middle of the chain will make the chain fragmented and leave big gaps in it thus making it much harder to get more words

Scoring is dependant on a number of factors including:

Rarity of the letter
Length of the word - a word of 4 letters is worth twice as much as a word of 3 letters
Whether a gold letter is used and the value of the multiplier in the gold letter
The level the player is currently playing on
The value of the score multiplier

A score multiplier (shown in to the right of the score on the screen) increases each time a gold bubble letter is obtained.  If a word is made which is less than seven letters long the multiplier gets set back to zero.  So a good strategy for getting high scores is to keep getting words of seven letters or more.

As the game goes on a penalty is introduced for short words.  Initially this will be for submitting too many words of three letters but as the game goes on longer words are expected and so the player will penalised more frequently for words of four and even five letters.  The penalty takes the form of a letter "Spawner"  this appears randomly in the chain somewhere.  Once active the spawner will create a new letter evert ten seconds until it is used in a word or the level is over.  Letter spawners make the game much harder so as soon as one appears it's a good idea to try and use it in a word to get rid of it.

In later stages of the game special tokens appear which can be used in words to get the following effects:

Extra Life - adds one to the players lives
Freaze Trail - stops the letter trail from advancing for 60 seconds
Vowel Swap - swaps all vowels for consonants and visa versa- useful if you are short of vowels.
Letter Quake - removes alternate letters from the chains and collapses them (as if a golden letter bubble was used)  

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Credits
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Game Design, Game Code, Art and Sound Effect: Tony Oakden
Additional Game Art: Ed Orman
Music: The Groove Selection
Integration of Python into Popcap framework:  Jarrad (Farbs) Woods
GNU/Linux Port: Tweeler B.V.

See the file 'license' for license information

Game Play testers:
Jarrad Woods, Ed Orman, Victoria Oakden

"This product includes portions of the PopCap Games Framework (http://developer.popcap.com/)."
