Version 2.0 released for Windows and source

Stephen Branley — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 11:56:52 -0000

After several weeks of development, including much code refactoring, updating to SDL 2.0 and adding a new menu system and new features, Help Hannah's Horse version 2.0 is finally available.

When I did the initial release back in 2009, I never expected to pick this project up again 11 or so years later, but I started looking at the code, drawing some new sprites where they were needed and then got carried away adding new features!

Among those features new since 1.2:

A new menu system. It's no longer necessary to use particular key presses to bring up things like the credits or high score table or to turn the music off!
Three difficulty modes:
- Easy (more or less as the standard was, albeit with more powerpills on several levels)
- Hard (one ghost moves more quickly; a more limited number of powerpills
- Insane (all ghosts move faster; limited field of view thanks to fog-of-war
A new thief power-down. When collected, makes Hannah drop coins rather than picking them up.
A new animation for the "freeze time" powerup.
An icon for the Windows exe
Autotools-based build system, replacing my roll-your-own Makefile with something more portable

There are probably other things that I've forgotten. The main thing is, it's a decent improvement from 1.2 and the move to SDL 2.0 should mean improved performance.

Now using Autotools!

Stephen Branley — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 11:38:04 -0000

Soon-to-be-released Hannah version 2.0 now uses Autotools for its build process, meaning the ubiquitous:

./configure
make
make install

will compile and build Hannah. It also means that the --prefix configure parameter will correctly allow the game and its sources to be relocated for the install part of the process.

Hannah v2.0 Coming Soon!

Stephen Branley — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 13:16:04 -0000

Help Hannah's Horse version 2.0 is on its way, sporting some exciting (yeah, right...!) new features:

Now compiles against SDL 2.0 instead of 1.2 (Hannah 1.2 is the last SDL 1.2 version)
Joystick support! Can be disabled from the command line in the event it misbehaves.
New menu system! Options are now selected by scrolling up, down, left and right in a menu rather than being bound to key presses.
New powerdown! When Hannah collects the thief she drops coins on empty squares for a short while.
New difficulty levels: easy, hard and insane - each has a different boundary for extra lives (5000, 7500, 10000 points) and a varying number of powerpills per level.
Windows version is now 64 bit
Massive, MASSIVE code tidy-up.

Among the code changes that users won't care about, but that are interesting to me is that I've started using "argp" from the Gnu project to parse command line arguments. It takes the hassle out of having to hand short options, long options and option arguments in the various formats. It also gives you a nice --help message for free.

Finally! A new release! 1.2.0

Stephen Branley — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 22:09:03 -0000

Coming across the source code to Hannah recently, I decided it was time to get it into a much more finished state. To that end, version 1.2 fixes several bugs, improves the graphics and contains new music that is guaranteed to be free from anyone else's copyright (because I wrote it)!

New animations for Hannah who previously sort of slid around the maze, always facing forwards
New look for the pills (they are now coins)
Improved background graphics. The garish purple is gone to be replaced by pastel shades.
New music
Extra life awarded every 5000 points
Fixed bugs in the Windows Makefile
New Windows installer
New desktop icon, titlebar icon and project icon
MASSIVE code tidy up (and more to come)

The gameplay remains mostly the same, other than the addition of the extra lives every 5000 points: collect the coins and the carrots, eat the powerpills to kill the ghosts and make use of the bonuses.

The source code can be downloaded from Sourceforge or cloned from git at BitBucket: git clone https://retrojunkies @bitbucket.org/retrojunkies/hannah_trunk.git

Apologies to Windows users

Stephen Branley — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:30:59 -0000

Sorry to all windows users who have downloaded the game recently as there were inadvertently two copies of the game within the zip archive making the zip file twice the size it needs to be. This has now been corrected.

New Release (0.2.c)

Stephen Branley — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 23:53:50 -0000

There are both source (linux, BSD, AmigaOS(perhaps!)) and windows binary (.exe) versions of 0.2.c available. Users should upgrade to fix some minor problems, most notably on linux (etc) systems where the hiscore table would only have been created by root. This is now fixed and all users will have their own hiscore table on this system.

New release (0.2.b)

Stephen Branley — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:56:18 -0000

New bugfix release is out.
The main improvement are that there is now a make install option. However if you do not plan to use the make install option you will need to edit the makefile slightly to comment the original and uncomment the alternative DATA_INSTALL_DIR and SCORE_DIR variables. See INSTALL.