Caseohs March to a Billion
Ten-world native Windows fan-game alpha | Version 0.5

PLAY
1. Extract Caseohs-March-to-a-Billion.zip into a folder on your computer.
2. Open Caseohs-March-to-a-Billion.exe. Keep assets beside the executable.
3. Choose New journey or Choose a level. All ten worlds are available.
The executable, assets, source and instructions sit directly at the ZIP root.

Windows 10/11, 64-bit. Native C++ / Direct2D; no browser, account, runtime
installer, Internet connection, or actual IP-address collection is required.

UPGRADING / EXISTING SAVES
Extract the new ZIP into a fresh folder, then launch the new executable.
Saves and settings reuse the existing location:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\WiredWest\CaseOhRoadToAMillion\save.ini
A completed five-world legacy journey can continue into the five new worlds.
Version 0.4 saves retain progress: existing object order is preserved and
new objects are appended. Older pre-0.4 item/enemy masks are not applied to
expanded layouts. Saves also preserve permanent health capacity upgrades.
Keep each release's executable and assets together.

CONTROLS
Action                  Keyboard                      Xbox-style controller
Move                    A / D or Left / Right         Left stick / D-pad
Fart jump               Space / W / Up                A
Fire (hold)             J / X                         X
Read sign               E                             B
Cycle weapons           Q                             Y / LB / RB
Select weapon           1 through 9, then 0           Cycle weapons
Dash                    Shift / Tab                   Back / View
Pause                   Esc                           Start
Confirm menu            Enter                         A
Back                    Esc                           B / Start
Restart checkpoint      R                             Pause menu
Borderless fullscreen   F11                           Settings
Mute all audio          M                             Keyboard / effects setting
Performance overlay     F3                            Keyboard

MOUSE GAMEPLAY
Left click / hold: aim and fire at the cursor.
Right click: fart jump; click again in the air for the next jump.
Hold middle mouse: run toward the cursor (release to stop).
Wheel: cycle unlocked weapons.
Bottom-screen buttons: move left/right, jump, fire, dash, read and pause.
Click a nearby sign or its READ prompt to open it.
Click an open dialog or completion screen to continue.
Menus highlight under the pointer and support mouse clicks.
Pickup and checkpoint notices appear in the footer instead of covering play.

Controllers can connect during play. XInput controllers support rumble.
Generic Windows joystick support uses common button mappings; unusual
controllers may need an XInput-compatible mapping. Physical controller
behavior has not yet been checked on Windows.

TEN WORLDS / TEN BOSSES
01 Neon Woodland          Root of All Lag
02 Dead Signal City       The Buffering Brute
03 Slender Static Forest  The Tall Viewer
04 Splash Zone            Captain Splash
05 Alphabet Citadel       Tile King
06 Pixel Peak             The Peak Drone
07 Retro Reactor          The Overclocked Core
08 Snackworks Factory     Snackzilla
09 Midnight Arcade        The Cabinet Mimic
10 Subscriber Summit      The Raid Sovereign

Every world ends at a locked broadcast gate. Defeat its boss to open the
gate, then cross it to continue. Each boss has three phases and distinct
attacks with visible windups. The final boss and gold gate trigger a
fictional raid that brings the journey to one billion in-game subscribers.

Collect subscriber tokens and explore upper routes. Moving platforms carry
you; crumbling ledges fall and rebuild. Spikes, flame jets, laser gates,
crushers and geysers reward timing. New spitters, armored zombies, drones,
turrets and mimics join zombies, Slenderman, black cats and letter enemies.

Pixel Peak adds moving ice ledges. Retro Reactor uses phased laser gates.
Snackworks has conveyor belts and crusher chains. Midnight Arcade mixes
crumbling platforms with mimic ambushes. Subscriber Summit combines moving
ledges and timed hazards in the final gauntlet.

Four new chapters reinterpret familiar CaseOh stream themes in original art
and mechanics. Dead Signal City has a grocery shelf route and rushing carts.
Slender Static Forest adds Granny After Dark with original noise-reactive
caretakers and flashlight counterplay. Retro Reactor has a bunker supply run
with soup and a recovery checkpoint. Midnight Arcade adds trading-card shop
scenery and Card-Shop After Dark, where bouncing bricks meet new enemies. Read
RESEARCH_v05.md for the creator-source research, community-meme context and
the distinction between proposed ideas and mechanics actually implemented.

Jumps visibly release a green fart cloud and play a short recorded sound.
You get two jumps by default; release and press again for the air boost.
Release jump early for a smaller hop. Dash gives a short burst through
danger, followed by a cooldown. Unlimited checkpoint retries keep collected
items and weapon unlocks; boss damage survives a retry within the session.

TEN WEAPONS
1 Gifted Subs: gift boxes deal 2 damage and fly up to 2,240 world pixels
  before expiring when their path is unobstructed.
2 IP Addresses: fast data bolts with fictional address labels.
3 Water Slides: heavy splash shots.
4 Fidget Spinners: rapid spinning projectiles.
5 Ban Hammer: a large, powerful close-range strike.
6 Raid Rocket: explosive damage across a surrounding area.
7 Snack Shotgun: five pellets spread across the aim direction.
8 RGB Laser: a fast beam that can pierce three targets.
9 Receipt Cannon: three spreading receipts damage and briefly slow enemies.
0 One by One: an arcing brick bounces along floors and hits multiple enemies.
Weapon pickups unlock the weapon but only auto-equip an upgrade according
to its power rank. A repeated or weaker pickup keeps your selected stronger
weapon equipped. Cycle or use 1–9/0 to choose any unlock. Ammo is unlimited.

PICKUPS / POWER-UPS
There are 22 collectible types: subscriber tokens, ten weapon unlocks
and eleven food/power-up types. Soup and flashlight are new in version 0.5.
Hot dog: +20 health.
Hamburger: +35 health.
Burrito: +15 health and a temporary third jump.
Creatine drink: temporary faster running (cartoon game behavior).
Shield: absorbs incoming damage.
Energy drink: temporary speed boost and an immediate dash-cooldown reset.
Protein shake: raises maximum health to 125, heals and boosts damage.
Magnet: temporarily pulls nearby subscriber tokens toward you.
Nachos: +45 health and a temporary damage boost.
Soup can: +25 health and a brief three-second safe window.
Flashlight: a fifteen-second forward beam that stuns nearby caretakers.
Healing stops at your current maximum health.

SAVE / RESUME
Transmitter flags activate checkpoints. The save slot remembers your level,
last checkpoint, subscribers, weapon unlocks, collected items, defeated foes
and maximum health. Continue journey resumes from the saved checkpoint;
quitting mid-level also saves. New journey or choosing a level replaces the
single journey slot. A background worker coalesces pending save snapshots
and commits complete UTF-16 files atomically. Continue reads the latest
cached snapshot even while a write is pending. Pending saves finish at exit.

DISPLAY / SETTINGS
Choose 1280x720, 1920x1080, 2560x1440 or 3440x1440 windows. F11 fills the
current monitor in borderless fullscreen; ultrawide shows more of the world.
Narrow or tall windows preserve the layout with letterboxing. Sharp pixel
sprites and detailed backgrounds retain the original retro presentation.
The playfield now exposes the drop below standing feet instead of hiding
pits behind the footer. Clear rim highlights and forward gap warnings make
upcoming jumps easier to read. Mouse aiming follows the same world mapping.

The startup fullscreen checkbox saves whether the next launch starts
fullscreen. Turning it on also enters fullscreen now. The VSYNC settings
row is an explicitly labeled placebo: it changes nothing. The game keeps
its 60 FPS timer; this row does not enable display synchronization.

An optional flashing fake-IP joke appears occasionally during play. Each
number is between 300 and 999, so it cannot be a valid IPv4 address. The game
never reads, looks up, sends or displays your actual IP address. Switch the
joke off in Settings. Weapon address labels are also fictional.

AUDIO
Twenty-three original stereo chiptune loops cover the menu, ten worlds,
five paired-level bosses, three elite threats and four new chapters. The
nineteen previous music contexts have rebuilt arrangements. Level scores
now develop across sixteen bars with A/B/C/bridge sections and changing
grooves, instruments and stereo echoes. Level files use band-limited
22.05 kHz PCM16; the native player upsamples to 44.1 kHz. Smooth encounter
crossfades return to the previous music position instead of restarting it.
Spatial effects pan with their on-screen source. Volumes remain adjustable.

Fart jumps retain the three 160, 185 and 145 ms Breviceps recordings (CC0);
original masters remain in source assets. Thirty-five short community
recordings attributed to CaseOh include twenty new excerpts. During normal
play, voices are reserved for significant moments such as named chapters,
rare weapons, critical danger, deaths and boss/world victories. Accepted
reactions have a 14–20-second minimum quiet gap; an individual clip cannot
repeat for 120 seconds, and the last four played clips are avoided. Ordinary
subscriber tokens, jumps, held fire and enemy kills do not trigger speech.
Effects from repeated small events are coalesced. Voice ducking and the
separate Settings toggle remain available.

Public community attribution identifies the clips; original-creator
redistribution permission and endorsement have not been verified. Public
availability does not establish a copyright license. No voice cloning or
speech synthesis is used. Sources and edits are in assets/audio/VOICE_CREDITS.txt,
FART_CREDITS.txt and the audio manifests.

PERFORMANCE / DIAGNOSTICS
The v0.3 background audio, controller/rumble and save workers remain in use.
Keyboard input polls only bound game keys. Rendering reuses terrain/text
resources and skips off-screen objects. All 130 atlas sprites share one
cached bitmap, including corrected running poses and new chapter art.
A high-resolution timer targets
60 FPS with immediate Direct2D presentation; this is not a measured hardware
result. Normal background/minimized redraws stop except requested exposure
refreshes. Resize requests coalesce. Dragging/resizing pauses active play
and resumes it when the drag ends with the game focused. Audio is independent.

F3 shows FPS, mean Input/Simulation/Render milliseconds, maximum combined
work in the recent sampling window, and graphics-target creation count/last
creation time. The work measurements exclude intentional timer idle waits.

BUILD / REBUILD ASSETS
With Visual Studio C++ tools and CMake, open Developer PowerShell here and
run Build-Windows.ps1. It builds the renamed executable and runs all six
test suites. Visual Studio output is build\Release\Caseohs-March-to-a-Billion.exe,
with assets copied alongside it. The C++ runtime is linked statically.

Audio rebuild order (Python 3 + NumPy, run from this folder):
1. python tools/generate_audio.py
2. python tools/compose_soundtrack.py
3. python tools/shorten_farts.py
4. python tools/compose_expansion_audio.py
This restores the current original effects/music and the short recorded
farts in the correct order. Public voice excerpts are preserved separately;
tools/import_caseoh_clips.py verifies them. Regeneration additionally needs
FFmpeg and the documented source/cache files. Rebuild artwork with
python tools/generate_assets.py (Pillow and NumPy).

VERIFICATION
Portable suites cover all ten bosses, campaign completion, ten weapons,
new enemies/chapters, platforms, hazards, dash, pickups, mouse/save handling,
visible pit geometry, aiming conversion and selective audio presentation.
See VERIFICATION.txt for final counts, compilation and sanitizer results.
Windows graphics/audio playback, physical controllers and hardware
performance still need testing on Windows; this environment cannot run
the Windows game.

Unofficial playful fan game. Journeys, subscriber totals and dialogue are
fictional. Scenery, pixel art and music are original; genre inspiration is
generic. Word-game letter enemies use original green/yellow tile designs.
