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

[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).)