Hallowmoor - Official Announcement

A little bored this weekend? Got a Halloween itch and nothing to scratch it? Want something to try while you’re waiting for EctoComp? Look no further!

http://www.sidneymerk.com/hallowmoor/hallowmoor.html

Hallowmoor is playable in most modern browsers. It’s a text-based point-and-click adventure created with Twine, and it’s my first new release in over seven years. It’s a game that grew far too big for EctoComp, and it features a few tricks not commonly found in Twine-based games.

So come one, come all. Make your way down into the catacombs of Castle Hallowmoor and see if you’ve got the guts to make it out alive!

It seems I’m stuck.

I’ve just drunk the black potion and need to get away. There’s a boat in a cavern, but it’s held up by chains. There’s two buttons I apparently need to press, but I can’t push them both at once. What do I need to do here?

First off, did you thoroughly explore the witch’s bedroom? There’s something you can find there that will help with this puzzle, but it “gets away”…

Oh!

I did find the cat, if that’s what you’re talking about. I can’t seem to satisfactorily interact with it as either the witch or the skeleton, though. Is there something I’m not thinking of here?

You need something from the auditorium room… Which means getting in unseen…

Aha!

I didn’t realize you could pick up all the other potions as well. Are the blue and red ones completely useless?

Now I just need to find the last lousy point. I have a hunch about a certain room that I couldn’t find a use for, but I have no idea what, if anything, I need to do there.

The red one is completely useless…
The LLP was designed to be something most people wouldn’t figure out the first time. It isn’t clued very well , on purpose. It also requires multiple steps. But I think you’re on the right track.

I’ve only just barely started it, but already it seems very intriguing. I shall have a good time with it.

I do have a suggestion, though. :slight_smile: You see, I can download the file for the game… and if you could also supply the image files, I could, with zero fuss, play the game offline with images, including the compass rose. ::slight_smile: The downloaded file seems to look for the images in the same folder, so no hassle for you.

Pretty please. :wink:

I was planning to zip it up for downloading in a couple weeks, after any stray bugs get fixed. It seems pretty solid though, so I might do that soon. Might upload it to the IFArchive as well.

Cookies don’t work with local files in Chrome or Opera, so you wouldn’t be able to save/load in either of those. Should be okay in IE or FireFox though. Not sure about Safari.

The images are here:

sidneymerk.com/hallowmoor/clear.png
sidneymerk.com/hallowmoor/sprites.png
sidneymerk.com/hallowmoor/title.jpg

I have tested and can save/load in Mercury, the browser I use for playing Twine games in my iPod. :wink: And thanks!

If anyone’s interested –

I have now uploaded the game for offline play, both to the IF Archive (pending) and to my site here:
sidneymerk.com/hallowmoor/Hallowmoor_102.zip

It also includes the source code: .tws for Twine and the full Twee code in a .txt file.

Many, many thanks for including the source - I’ve had a quick glance and it looks massively helpful. I haven’t seen Twine pushed in this kind of ambitious direction before, and I’m hoping to learn (read leech) a lot from your hard work. However, I’m determined to finish the actual game before reading the source properly because I don’t want any spoilers!

Take whatever you need! I’ve seen Twine games doing more clever things than I attempted, but I think it’s a decent start for a hypertext game that approximates a more recognizable form of IF. I think it could be taken even farther, but I’m not sure I’m the one to try. After dipping back into Hugo for Ectocomp, I’m reminded of how awesome it is. So I’m not sure what my Twine future looks like.

A very decent start indeed. I have a few ideas that I think would be suited to Twine with the relevant tweaking, but I’ll probably be asking for a lot of help on the forum. Could you point me in the direction of any other ambitious titles?

I’ve seen several that play with CSS and make use of custom macros, but they were just things I came across. Maybe they weren’t as ambitious technical-wise as I’m thinking. The stuff from glorioustrainwrecks (Hulk Handsome?) seems the most likely place to start. I’ll see if I can re-find the ones that seemed to be doing stuff I thought was pretty unique.

I thought you might be being humble, this is seriously impressive stuff! The .tws spidermap alone makes my brain hurt… I wasn’t planning on attempting anything quite this technical for now, I’m still figuring out basic CSS, but if I can understand a tenth of what you’ve done it will be very helpful.

Twine has an option to turn down the detail. I ended up using it, because it was getting pretty slow with all the connections. I think all it does is cancel out the anti-aliasing of the connection lines, but for something like this, the connection lines are meaningless anyway. I treated it more like a collection of code snippets that interrelate rather than passage-to-passage as Twine was intended.

If you’re really interested in specifics, feel free to ask. Although by this time next year, if I haven’t done much more in Twine, it might hurt my brain trying to remember exactly what I did and why. I forget stuff easily. :slight_smile:

I really appreciate that. I think I’ll post not entirely specific questions in the development forum rather than needily expecting you to mentor me alone, though, because I really am pretty useless. If you have time to answer some stuff there that would be awesome.

It’s short by IF standards, but not at all short by Twine standards, and very complex. It’s amusing, it’s entertaining, it’s very solid, it even has a mini-game, and never since Colder Light have I seen parser-IF done this well without an actual parser.

You’ve made my Halloween (belatedly, but that’s my fault). Don’t sell yourself short. This is a very impressive game. In a parser-based language it would have been decent, fun, a good way to spend half an hour (short-and-sweet variety, with emphasis on the “sweet” - there’s quite a backstory here, quite a world fleshed out, I don’t want to belittle it). But in Twine? Seriously impressive.

Thanks!!! That makes my (belated) Halloween as well!