Hatogate

[davidn]

xaq's human-parser mini-adventure game captured all of our attentions this week to the tune of 144 comments, and in return for him giving us that experience, I voiced the notion of turning it into an actual Flash game. So after the Livejournal version was over, he sent me a wonderfully programmatic layout of the possible commands and conditions for each one - and it's only through reading the whole thing that I realize just how hilarious it is, really doing justice to the weird tone that Hatoful is written in while putting it in a Shadowgate-like setup. Well done!

Therefore:


http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/games/hatogate/

This is something of a test release, as I'm the only one who's played with it so far - eventually I'd like to put a title screen and maybe some music on to it, then hopefully see what Moa thinks! It is possible that I've translated the entire thing without any bugs - stranger things have happened, but only about six ever, and they were all in Hatoful Boyfriend. So if you do encounter anything odd happening (that is, anything identifiably odder than normal) let me know. The most likely thing is text running off the bottom of the screen, as I haven't checked all the branches yet.

This was an interesting quick thing to work on, and I'll write up a technical post about it soon - thank you, xaq, for providing it!

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Okay, first off, this is infinitely better than I could have imagined, even in beta testing!

That being said, it does look like I overlooked something: Using the "Coo at Self" command after the lizard is gone will still get you killed by it.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Another thing I spotted: If you use the pudding mix on yourself after the lizard's gone, it still says "No sense trying to deal with this creature on an empty stomach!"


...So basically all the errors I've spotted in this so far are due to things I overlooked.

Also, the "slightly singed Okosan" image? Priceless.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Yet another: It seems I've uncovered some sort of glitch that renders the "Lighten the Load" achievement unachievable; using the Leave command on an item apparently still counts towards the number of commands you can use before Oko shows up, even though it shouldn't.

*scratches head* This is especially curious considering I unlocked all of them on this my first time through. o_O

[davidn]

I'm not sure! Okosan turns up once you've used five different commands (increased from four in the LJ version as it's easier to do more commands 'live' like this), though they can be the same verb - LOOK PUDDING, LOOK KEY2... I could leave LEAVE off the list of things that get added to the move count.

Let me know if you want to provide alternative lines for any of the above, or I can just leave off the out-of-place phrases - I'm quite proud of how flexible the scripting I put together for this turned out :)

[kjorteo]

It'd probably be easier to just disable Okosan coming after you deal with the komodo dragon. Once he's gone, you're already well on your way to either the normal or lame endings, and the other three either don't care one way or the other or require that he's not gone. If you've dealt with him and you're still messing around and not going to the shrine or entrance, you might be doing something like going for the Lighten the Load achievement, at which point the game may as well not interrupt you!

[xaq.livejournal.com]

That's actually a good idea. Leaving the LEAVE command off was originally the idea (if nothing else, I figure it shouldn't take as long to throw away a bag of millet as it does to pop it open and eat the contents), but that works just as well.

[kjorteo]

Actually, I'm running into the problem of Okosan showing up and ending the game, like the game is now on a strict five-turn time limit, when all I want to do is mess around with stuff and see what happens (are there any interesting responses for cooing at every item in my inventory, etc.) It might be less obnoxious to have some sort of opt-in event and disable Okosan coming altogether unless you perform the action that starts his timer. Maybe instead of opening the pudding mix doing basically nothing right now (it disappears from your inventory, and then Okosan shows up right on schedule anyway,) change that so you can actually have an open box of pudding mix (or give it to the lizard after you open it,) and opening it is the only way to make it so he does appear? Like, opening it starts the turn timer? You could then shorten the timer again, as I don't see a need for prolonging the state between when you summon him and when he arrives.

[davidn]

quadralien said as well that Okosan just got in the way once you'd found his ending... I could remove the possibility of him appearing entirely once you've got the endings that he triggers, but if you've got one ending but not the other, that might make it more unclear what triggers his appearance. Opening it to summon him (1 turn later, so you get the chance to throw it) might be a good idea...

[kjorteo]

Commands that I think should have a response (and I don't mean they have to do something meaningful--a single one-liner failure remark or something is fine--it'd just be nice for the game to acknowledge it as a command at all, as opposed to its current state of doing nothing at all like you didn't even click):

* Look anything at all on the visualization of the shrine except the lizard (the shrine, sky, mailbox-looking things on the ground, rocks, I don't know, just some description for something somewhere!)
** (Though admittedly this would probably lead to making everything else on the screen a ... thing, which would lead to quite a few more responses, even if they're all just non-productive "you can't use Key2 on the sidewalk, what are you even trying to do" failure messages or deaths)
* Take Self
* Move Lizard
* Move Self

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Yeah, apparently there were a lot of potential moves I didn't even consider when I came up with this idea...*shrugs* Still, stuff like this is why the concept of beta testing exists, I imagine.

[davidn]

I've added those now, apart from the lizard being the only actual object you can interact with. You can tell the flavour text that I came up with because it's the ones that are slightly less funny. And Okosan now appears on a one-turn delay after you open the pudding, giving you the chance to throw it at the lizard.

And I also added something that necessitated me adding a #PLAY command :)

[kjorteo]

Bug: Pecking Saekro'm goes through the response for that and then immediately goes into the response (complete with death) for pecking Key2.

[davidn]

Ah, that would be a missing #END - that's an easy one to fix, at least.

[kjorteo]

A missing #END? What, did you make this in ZZT?

[davidn]

Pretty much, yes. What other language could possibly be mad enough to contain it?

:USE PAINTBRUSH SELF
You take a moment to look yourself over, and decide that the current color of your plumage could use a little work.
With that in mind, you spend a few minutes touching your feathers up with the paintbrush.
In no time at all, you've turned yourself from drab to a rather regal shade of purple!
#SET PAINTEDSELF
#IFNOT PREENED
It looks like you could improve on things a little more, though...
#IF PREENED
#ACHIEVE 11
#TAKE PAINTBRUSH
#END

[kjorteo]

@TurnMenu
:okosan
:okosan
:okosan
:okosan
#ZAP okosan
#END
'(player selection stuff goes here)
#RESTART
:okosan
Before you can decide what to
do next, you see a fantail
dove run into the shrine
grounds.

[premchaia_pre4]

I'd use an invisible counter object that could be triggered to move east and then check whether it had run into a suitably-placed invisible wall yet.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Given what winds up happening if you still have the pudding mix, I think "#ZAP okosan" may be an understatement.

[premchaia_pre4]

Engage Nitpicking Mode! That's being rather wasteful of a global flag—I might prefer something like—

@Paintbrush
:SEL
#zap SX
#X
:USELF
#send SX
You take a moment to look yourself over,
and decide that the current color of your
plumage could use a little work.  With
that in mind, you spend a few minutes
touching your feathers up with the
paintbrush.  In no time at all, you've
turned yourself from drab to a rather
regal shade of purple!
#PREEN
:PREEN
It looks like you could improve on things
a little more, though...
#zap Peck:PAINT
#D
:PREEN
#restore Achievements:XI
:D
#die
:DSEL
#restore SX
:SX
:X

@Peck
:SEL
#zap SX
#X
:USELF
#send SX
#zap USELF
You look your plumage over for a moment,
and realize it's looking a little
ratty. You take a moment to preen
yourself. No sense coming to the shrine
without looking your best, after all!
#PAINT
:PAINT
You still look a bit plain, though...
#zap Paintbrush:PREEN
#D
:PAINT
#restore Achievements:XI
#D
:USELF
No sense overdoing it, now.
#D
:D
#restore SX
:SX
:X

and now you realize that if someone decides to send me the Full Plan I will have to actually do this, right? c.c

[davidn]

I debated on whether to implement #ZAP and #RESTORE, and eventually chose not to do so in the interest of sanity, especially as I had not imposed a global flag limit on myself (I was actually going to support counters originally, but stopped a bit short and did a couple of special cases for the couple of places where I needed to keep count of things).

[premchaia_pre4]

You were being more serious than I thought then? Hah! Though it's a fairly variant language, presumably for the obvious and completely justified reasons, if so.

I seem to have inherited some incomplete ZZT emulation code from my predecessor that converts the program text into 32-bit instruction words first so it can run rather fast. I would be tempted to complete this if there weren't so many other things in the way. Hmm. I think he lost his motivation when someone else started posting facts based on disassembling the ZZT executable, which completely ruined the charm of it.

(Append: and yes, it supports #zap and #restore, including remote, even though the original text is mostly gone—they're implementable by search-and-replace on 32-bit arrays as a result, and on save I think the original text is reconstructed with an offset table (I don't remember whether that bit was fully implemented).)

[kjorteo]

Also, this is a Hatogate!! It is a Shadowgate-alike based on Hatoful Boyfriend!! Given the source material, ending sentences with a single exclamation point is completely inexcusable!!

[davidn]

You know, quadralien said that as well and I ignored it because nobody would possibly notice. Thank you!!

[kjorteo]

And it just had to be the sword message I found when I was looking for any random example screenshot to illustrate my point ... complete with the little caption about it being hilarious on the bottom. To me, the hilarious thing was always the fact that you got literally the exact same message if you use the hammer on yourself (except for "sword" being replaced with "hammer.")

Is your protagonist a complete idiot who will gleefully kill himself every time he has even a tiny fraction of a chance? Yes. But the man stabbed himself to death with a hammer. If I was the clearly-overworked grim reaper in that game, I'd honestly have been taken aback when I saw his case file on that one. "It's a sad thing your adv-- ... wait, really? ... Really? ... Wow. Well done!!"

(Edited for accuracy)

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

You know what my favourite touch about this game is? Aside from the fact that, you know, it exists and everything, and the insanity is now leaking back out into the internet in strange directions? Beyond even the fact that you took this craziness and faithfully represented it and lovingly converted it in ZZT-OOP?

It's that if you use the paintbrush on the lizard, it actually turns purple before it kills you! The details are everything, and that was awesome. :D

D.F.

[davidn]

It's nice to know that the little things are noticed :) There's a story behind that - it was the last thing that I did before putting this post up, and it actually uncovered a bug in my parser that means the entire thing freezes if you use a #SPRITE command twice in a row. With the attention to detail that you value, I chose not to fix and just to hide it by pasting the new sprite over the top of the old one ;)

[xaq.livejournal.com]

*on a whim, tries "TAKE SELF"*

...Oh god. XD I haven't laughed that hard in...I don't know how long!

[xaq.livejournal.com]

*tries it again* ...Okay, we need to add that to the achievement list. *resumes laughing*

[davidn]

Then we will see just how flexible my system is :)

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It seems the efforts to ease up on Oko showing up may have gone overboard, because now I can't get him to show up at all! D:

[davidn]

Open the pudding! He'll turn up one turn after that.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Okay, but that still leaves him MII* if I throw the pudding at the lizard.


*Missing in Insanity.

[davidn]

There should be three things to do with the pudding -

- Leave it closed and throw it to the lizard (you get it back after using the unicycle on it)
- Open it and then waste a turn (Pudding ending)
- Open it and then throw it at the lizard (Good ending)

Let me know if there's a way to make him never appear... (Flash games are tricky to update once your browser has grabbed hold of the original version - clear the cache to make sure you're using the latest one).

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Oh, so you changed what happens when you open it. Didn't think of that.

*tries it* Okay, there we go. Much better! :D

[miz servi (from livejournal.com)]

Dang, this is fun! Only criticism I have is that the text can run a bit slow at times, but I suppose that's a coding limitation?

You may or may not be aware, Moa's been playing the game too. Shall translate w/ Google-fu~:

シャドウゲイト的アンヘルくんゲーム、素晴らしい完成度です！: Hatogate - http://bit.ly/W33K0b
([An] Angel- kun [for a] Shadowgate game is perfection [of a] great degree! : Hatogate)
‏@moa810 [source (https://twitter.com/moa810/status/291157043379843072)]

しかし本家同様に死にエンドばかり踏んでしまって未だ見つからないベストエンド
(I still cannot find the Best End! I just stepped on the upstream end in the same way but dead)
@moa810 [source (https://twitter.com/moa810/status/291157159612395521)]


Congratulations! I think you may have killed Moa in a game more times than she has killed you.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

...

... ... ...

*flashes a huge, dorky grin* Heeeee. *faints*

[miz servi (from livejournal.com)]

Ha haaa! XD <3

[davidn]

I saw this morning - it's fantastic that she broadcast it to her Twitter followers (who appear confused that it's in English - now they know how we felt about Holidaystar!) Now that we've given something back to the architect of this lunacy, perhaps the circle of madness is complete?

I've been wrong about that so many times before.

[miz servi (from livejournal.com)]

Circling and circling and circling and...

[miz servi (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, and please disregard my earlier complaint about the text. Clicking twice reveals the full text anyways.... The more you know?

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Every time I see something from you and your pigeon friends, I continue to shake my head in amazement.

I coommend you and xaq on the madness you've unleashed upon the world! Considering the amount of work that must have gone into this one "room", I can only imagine the actual Shadowgate-type games must have been quite the challenge to put together. Bravo!

(I've only unlocked a few endings and achievements, some of which I wouldn't have achieved had it not been for the comments here.)

[davidn]

Being describable as "me and my pigeon friends" really wasn't something that I had had in my general life plan, but I am glad that it has led to such a fountain of creativity for all of us :) It's certainly led to an explosion of followers on my Youtube account, almost entirely comprised of teenage girls.

And it's very easy to forget just how much more of a challenge writing Shadowgate for the NES hardware would have been, with a memory limit many times lower than the space of even the base runtime of this game before adding in any graphics or logic.