Heart Quest

HeartQuest 1.1 Programming and sounds by Ingemar Ragnemalm. Graphics by Susanne and Ingemar Ragnemalm. HeartQuest is a simple, fairly non-violent color arcade game for the Mac that I made as a gift to my wife. If your wife doesn't like it, perhaps your kids will. The first version, b/w only, was made on Valentine's Day 1992. A week before Valentine's 1993, I released the colorized version, which was verison 0.7. Now, Valentine's Day 1997, it is the 5 year anniversary, so now it is about time for a somewhat improved version. It is still good old HeartQuest, but with revised graphics and some other changes for a world with higher expectations and hardware capabilities. Improvements from 0.7: • The game doesn't get harder as fast. Level 5 was close to impossible before. Now things get harder in a nicer rate. Fewer hearts per level also means less slowdown on slower Macs (e.g. MacPlus). • A clicking sound warns you that you are getting low on bonus. • Bonus object should not appear too low any more. • Flypapers are used up after catching the player. • Faster "safe" graphics. • The mouse control is modified. Better? Well, that's up to you. • Some improvements in the graphics. • The underlying sprite library (Sprite Animation Toolkit) is safer than before, less likely to crash. From 0.8 to 0.8.1: • Smaller size. (Removed 30k caused by a stupid drawing program.) • Strings in the high scores are truncated so that the score won't be overwritten. From 0.8.1 to 0.8.2: • Preference file handling (making it CD-ROM-friendly). • Clicking in the game window starts or resumes the game. • No strings are hard-coded, so the program can be localized for other languages only by editing resources. To 0.9: • Bonus levels. • Fixed the "click to start level" box, which was too small. To 0.9.1: • In "normal mode", when a bonus object is running, the bonus does not decrease and the level does not end even if all hearts are taken. (My little nephew wants a chance to catch bonus objects even if he collects all heart first.) Macho mode is still the "hard" way. To 0.9.2: • Fixed a bug in the preference file handling. (It was never created.) To 1.0: • Fat binary (as if it needed it…). • Bug fix in the fading routines to eliminate a slowdown in animation that they introduced. • Another bug fix in fading routines (which previously had problems with more than 256 colors). • Displays a message while loading. To 1.1 (the five year anniversary!): • Prettier graphics, most of it drawn or retouched by Susanne Ragnemalm. • Fixed a bug in the menu bar hiding routines. • Switches to 256 colors if possible. • 640x480 is now the preferred size - but smaller screens still work! • The bonus sprites are slightly modified. HeartQuest is *not*: ================== Violent. Slow. Expensive. Hard to learn. Big. (≈240k as fat binary) How do I play HeartQuest? ======================= In HeartQuest, you control a butterfly with the mouse, collecting hearts w…