Peasant's Quest for the Apple II:
Taking a 2000s Flash Game Back to the 1980s

Peasant's Quest is a Flash-based adventure game designed by
the creators of the Homestar Runner website and released in 2004.
The game has a retro-feel, designed to look like Sierra adventure games
from the 1980s such as King's Quest.  In this talk I'll describe
taking the game and de-making it to an actual system from the 1980s:
an Apple II with 64k of RAM.  I'll describe the various challenges
I encountered along the way, mostly the Apple II's horrible high-res
graphics mode as well as trying to cram all of the content into 64k of
RAM while maintaining a low amount of floppy-disk swapping during gameplay.



Demakes

HGr-MIST

HGR
	(horrible hgr)

Backgrounds
	AGI-like?  They abandoned it.  Would save space

HGR Graphics
	pink line on left of screen (picture)

Priority backgrounds, like AGI
	+ load at $400, lo-res
	+ Can't use screen holes tricky (original Apple II 4k of RAM
		so need to put slot info in first 4k)

Sprites
	easier in blocks 0f 7
	still have to rotate 1 pixel for odd columns
	transparency a pain with color clash

Animations
	too big?

Mini-games?

Text
	HGR drawing lib (no built in on 2)
	How to fit?  Lookup for common word distribution?

	Using high-bit terminated strings rather than nul in some cases

	think original auto-wraps text, do it manually

	VERB/NOUN parsing is more or less good enough
		could use object "PUT BABY IN WELL"
		a few places.  cheat?
		PUT PEBBLES IN WELL vs
		PUT PEBBLES IN BUCKET vs
		PUT BABY IN WELL
	Have to distinguish LOOK AT WELL/LOOK IN WELL
	
	how many verbs/nouns?

Ram-map

keyboard: (picture)
	no up/down arrows

Music
	Mockingboard, pt3 player
	no mockingboard, electric duet, but can't do more than
		page flip (missing flame).  Worth it?

Speech
	Can we do SAM?  9k?
	SSI-263 but unobtanium

Disks:
	Fitting on disk.
	swappign fun for nostalgia, not so much when actually playing