You play as a 9 year old boy in a game about his absolute dream: a world made of candies! Your role is to guide Nikwi through all the 30 levels, eat all the candies in each level and avoid the monsters and the hazards that each level has. Nikwi has a talent on jumping high - although his falls are not as good as he would like - and this is his only armor against the monsters which try to turn his dream into a nightmare.

Every six levels, the theme changes (with five total themes) and the gameplay is altered a bit. Every two levels or so, new monsters appear - monsters which require different approaches to be taken in order to avoid them.

Nikwi requires at least a Pentium 3 or later CPU to work (it may work with older CPUs, but the use of older CPUs than Pentium 3 is not recommended and definitelly not supported) running at least at 600MHz. It also requires a graphics card that can support 640x480 with 16bits of color (most cards that are available for Pentium 3 support this mode). Lastly, it requires at least 32MB of system RAM memory.

For smooth gameplay, a CPU running at 2GHz and a video card with 2D acceleration and 16MB of video ram is recommended. In order to take advantage of the 2D acceleration, Nikwi must be run in fullscreen mode.

Nikwi requires Windows 2000, Windows XP or newer or Linux with kernel 2.6 or newer. It may work on other operating systems, but we cannot provide support for them.

For Linux users: Nikwi requires the latest version of SDL (has been tested and compiled with SDL 1.2.9). Most Linux distributions include SDL, but if yours doesn't -or if the version included is very old - visit http://www.libsdl.org/ to obtain it.

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Note: the game may or may not run in order and weaker systems than those mentioned above. In any case, the use in such systems is discouraged and not supported. We will not be able to

The game contains two main screens, the menu and the game:

1. The menu
   The menu is the screen in which you enter when the game starts. It contains three options, New Game, Credits and Quit. You can use the arrows keys up and down to select a menu option (two bobbing candies appear at the left and at the right of the selected option) and the Enter key to activate the selected option. The options act as follows:
   
   
• New game - This option begins a new game. If you already have a game in the process and you went to the menu by pressing ESC (see the Controls part of this manual below), the current game is ended and a new game begins from the first level.
• Credits - It shows a screen with information about the game's developers.
• Quit - It immediatelly quits the game. The shareware version will show some teaser  screenshots of the full version before quitting.
  
  
2. The game
   This is where all the fun takes place. In the game screen you see your character, Nikwi, the monsters, the hazards, the candies and the setting itself. For information about controlling Nikwi, see the Controls section below.

Some screens -like the Credits screen- wait from the user to press a key in order to dissappear and others -like the logo screen at the beginning on the game- to wait for a few seconds.

You control Nikwi using the keyboard. The keys are presented in the table below:

Arrow left/right	Make Nikwi walk to the left or the right direction. If Nikwi is in the air, he turn to that direction.
Arrow up	Make Nikwi jump. Nikwi needs to be on ground in order to jump, but he can also air-jump: if he leaves the ground without jumping (by falling), he can jump in the middle air. Mastering air jumping will help the player to complete the game faster.
F6	Restart level. If you get stuck in a level or you think you can't go back, use F6 to restart the level. There are unlimited times you can play a level, so don't feel bad if you restart a level.
F10	Quick quit. If, for any reason, you want to exit the game as quickly as possible, press F10 and your wish will become true: the game will exit instantly, like if nothing has happened. Note that the shareware version will pop a message reminding you to obtain the full version.
ESC	Pauses the game and goes back to the menu.

Windows
Q: The installer says a message like "Drive or path not found" (or similar).
A: Please be sure that you run the installer from a drive where you have full priviledges. Drive C: is  the ideal place to run the installer from.

Q: I have installed the game, but no icons were made in my desktop or the Start menu.
A: Something went wrong during the installation. Try to reinstall the game.

Q: Where is the game installed?
A: The game installs itself at C:\Slashstone\Games\Nikwi.

Q: Can i move the game to a different location?
A: Yes, but the desktop and Start menu shortcuts will not work and if you want to remove it from your system, you will have to manually delete the shortcuts and the game files.

Q: When the game starts, it says that the SDL.DLL is not available and exits.
A: Your installation is corrupted. Try to reinstall the game.

Q: The game is slow!
A: Check if your system meets the minimum system requirements. If it does, try to update your video card drivers. If you run the game in a window, try to run it in fullscreen to take advantage of hardware acceleration.

Linux
Q: The binary says that a .so file is missing.
A: Check if your system is missing any shared library and if it includes SDL. Try to use the ldd command to see which shared objects the binary wants and try to locate them.

Q: The game is slow!
A: Check your video card drivers. Running the game in fullscreen may solve the problem, but SDL doesn't seem to take advantage of hardware acceleration under Linux.

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