S P O O P Y !
The 10 Haunted Treasures of Halloween
It's midnight on Halloween, and there's a chill in the air. Choose your own adventure in this text game, navigating 4 areas to find the 10 haunted treasures of Halloween! But ... are you brave enough?
Code compression and a few big features were handled by Enargy. He's fantastic! Follow him on Twitter [ @enargy] and check out his games!
Wow! Congrats (to you both) on a thoroughly entertaining game.
I've only got 3 treasures so far (doesn't help that I keep picking exactly the WRONG options!), but I definitely plan to stick with it to completion.
I'm particularly blown away with the music - is this your own "score"?
Either way, it's brilliant. Especially the title music - quite possibly one of the best tunes I've heard on PICO-8
(Shhh... don't tell Gruber!)
Nice one! ;o)
:D Thanks so much, Paul!
If it helps, you can warp back to previous parts of the story by navigating to them in the map section (accessible through the main menu)! That feature was one of Enargy's great additions!
And oh my goodness, thank you for the compliment on the music! Yes, I composed the tunes myself. ;) Glad you're enjoying it so much! :)
I was completely sucked in by this, enough to follow every choice and fill the map. I love the writing!
:)
Thanks ToyCrab! I'm so glad that you took the time to read all of the different paths! I think Enargy was right about adding the map - it gives you a clear reason to go through the whole thing and discover every last treasure.
Thanks for playing! :D
Awesome game and great music! Got all the treasures. Not sure if every path follows a certain logic but I think I got the gist of it. I was really impressed by the map as well, should be a mandatory feature for other games with branching paths.
Thanks ghostneedle! There isn't a 100% set logic for each path, but each path does tend to reward a specific sort of approach. For instance, the chalice and pendant reward a brave approach, while the diamond and golem heart reward more cautious play.
As for the map, that was 100% Enargy's doing. It definitely makes sense to include a map like this in a CYOA game, as the data is already being logged, and just needs to be visualized! It was definitely a great addition, thanks to Enargy's hard work. :) Thanks for playing!
I absolutely love this game. I spent a few trips pretty much seeing the entirety of it. But in newer versions of PICO-8, the treasure screen seems to have some graphical glitches. Any possibility of a fix?
@greenadder ,
Nice digging into old spooky pico8 games.
Tried to go deeper into the code to fix the glitch. The cart itself is spooky :
except for a few rectangles used for layout and title, the map is full garbled data.
In the code that handles the treasure page, there's an eldrich call to map() at line 614.
It is missing one parameter, and displays data from the corrupted map area. I have no idea what it's purpose was (probably prettifying the treasure screen ?). I just commented out the line and the screen is now readable. @eggnog, could you please shed some spooky light on the subject ?
Anyway, here's the cart with the incriminated line commented out :
@greenadder Pushed a fix, and replied to your email too. There have been a few small bugs cropping up on old games (missing audio / framerate issues), and when you've got a dozen or so games out there, it's extremely helpful to have issues reported like this. So thanks very much for this :)
@RealShadowCaster In my own bug hunt, I found that same map call to be the culprit. Not sure what its original purpose was at this point, since the game came out over 6 years ago. My guess is that it was mistakenly left in the codebase and only started causing issues after a recent update. The code is bananas and tough to read, so you've got some incredible patience sorting through that mess! The garbled data in the map area was thanks to @enargy's work on the project; there was too much text in the game for the cart to store it all, so he built a compression function that stores some of the text in the map. Again, that's if I remember correctly, since it's been a very long time since this was released!
@Cat12036478 Glad you're enjoying it! :)
@eggnog, that makes a lot of sense. I hadn't read the part of the code that handled text since it wasn't what I was after, but the map does indeed contain a lot of text in the form of sequences of indexes into a global dictionary. I couldn't make sense of it by just looking at the map. As for the glitch, I agree with your analysis, the missing height of the leftover map() call was probably defaulting to 0 before, resulting in no display, and was changed to max possible height in pico-8 later (makes more sense), resulting to the display of word indexes as map data.
@RealShadowCaster Yep, all makes sense to me. Thanks for doing some bug hunting, it helped make the fix much easier to take care of. :)
If you want a guide to all treasures, here they are:
Black diamond: movie, island, stay inside, stay put, tell, treasure, truth, and run!
Crimson ring: graveyard, city, flashlight, speak, offer, take it, bury, and step aside.
Cursed pendant: graveyard, country, stay quiet, dig, save it, approach, swallow it, and magic.
Golden pillar: graveyard, city, tall shadow, dance, accept, close eyes, and open eyes.
Golem heart: movie, hotel, door, garden, approach, leave, move, and search.
Hotel key: movie, hotel, elevator, floor 31, window, pretend, accept, and tear it.
Haunted chalice: graveyard, country, call out, apologize, argue, grab 'n run, jump, and keep it.
Mysterious crystal: movie, island, go outside, lighthouse, go in, no thanks, jump, and walk away.
Plague elixir: movie, hotel, elevator, floor 13, run, run, run, and burn it.
Salt hourglass: movie, hotel, door, cellar, ignore, enter, investigate, and salt.
Now that I'm looking at these, they look funny without context.
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