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Submission to the 2024 Pico-8 Advent Calendar.

Cart #dredds_lasthouse-9 | 2024-11-28 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
5

Christmas-themed interactive fiction.

Help Santa deliver the last presents of the night before Christmas. Make sure all the children in the house have their wishes fulfilled. Follow Christmas tradition for extra satisfaction.

There are four endings: two story endings, depending on whether you fulfilled the childrens' wishes, with two variations depending on whether you followed the Christmas tradition.

Controls

  • Up/Down: Scroll text, or move the pointer between options
  • 🅾️ button:
    • In non-interactive screens, press 🅾️ to continue. If the text is longer than one screen, you'll have to scroll to the end before being able to continue.
    • In reading mode, press 🅾️ to start exploring.
    • Otherwise press 🅾️ to select an item or action.
  • ❎ button: Abandon current menu and return to previous.

Via pause menu:

  • Restart game

Credits

Game by @dredds.

Music by @Gruber.

Modding

The source code is uncompressed so that the game is easy to mod. You can make your own adventures by changing the game world database (tab 6), action and event rules (tab 7), and the pointer, borders and title image in the sprite sheet. You can make more extensive changes to the user interface by changing the functions in tab 1 and the game mode objects defined in tab 3.

5

If you’re stuck on any puzzles, this is the place to ask for hints.
1

Nice game.

I didn't get a great ending. I knew the puppy wanted the sausage, but I never could figure out how to simply unwrap it to give it to him. Went all over the house and tried everything I could think of, but I eventually gave up.

It also appears that we're supposed to unbolt the front door. I'd discovered that you could in the game, and picked up on the fact that mother was missing someone, but figured Santa wouldn't just unbolt someone's door and then leave, so maybe I missed some cues that I was supposed to unbolt it.

Also never figured out what to do with the fish or the mince pie. Delivered gifts to the mice and the two kids, which I think I got right, but I'm not sure (see below).

Some suggestions for improvement:

  • It would be nice if pressing up to select words doesn't stop when it hits the top of the visible screen, but continues up further into the text. Having to manually scroll up and then enter selection mode felt kinda cumbersome, especially when the word you wanted was only mentioned at the very top of the text.

  • Alternatively, end each paragraph with a prompt that includes the word "look" that you can select to have it reset the room with the starting description.

  • Alternatively, maybe you're ALWAYS in selection mode and can just go up and down, and the second button resets the page to your current location. I think it would be okay for the selectable words to be visible as you read through the response the first time.

  • Some indication of whether you got the gifts delivered correctly would be nice, either with a magical glimmer or something when you get the right gift delivered, or at the end with an accounting of who got which gift and whether it was correct.

  • Using white, blue, and purple for the selection colors instead of a green and red theme seems like a missed opportunity for a Christmas game (but the colors chosen work fine).

Anyway, great little IF game! Loved the setup and mechanism for playing. Felt very cozy and engaging despite the minor frustrations mentioned above. Great job!



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