HylZee(tm)

Connected to Device

This is a puzzle game. Your goal is to reach the house .

The game can be started in 3 resolutions:

automatic size determination (recommended)
small(800x600) mode (shrink=0)
medium(1024x768) mode (shrink=0)
large(1280x1024) mode (shrink=0)

The first image loaded is a test level, then the first level is loaded. You can load serious levels using the green control area and restart if you get stuck or die. On some browsers, enlarging the window till the scrollbars disappear helps to avoid scrolling.

What's happening

The doors of the house open once all items on the maps that can be picked up have been picked up(that is, the balls ). There are several kinds of obstacles in your way. Some are fixed walls.

The "boxes" can be pushed. The red and green walls appear when you collect red or green balls , respectively. The pegs , and the red and green walls can be shot and removed by bullets , you get bullets from the blue balls .

There are two hazards: birds and sirens . Both attack horizontally or vertically. The sirens wake up when you collect the first ball: . The birds attack in the direction they look . The birds appear when the last item has been collected, in contrast to the sirens. The sirens attack in all directions.

Non obvious stuff:
While I changed the original rules in that you get bullets back that you wasted, you still can shoot and remove changing walls even while they are invisible. You cannot push boxes onto the places where a hidden wall is. You will not win if you trigger a hazard(bird or siren) at the same time you reach the house.

History

The game is based on "huelsi" by R.G. Hülsmann. It is from a time when games had a CGA graphics mode ..

The maps in set B by Peter Schäfer have been tested. They work, but they are not (yet) ordered by difficulty. Don't worry if you get stuck, this happens to the author too.

Controls

Maximize the browser window to avoid scrolling by keyboard input

Movement: Use the arrow keys to navigate. Also try "awds"-keys, especially for Opera. You might have to try a bit before you find keys that the browsers has not assigned a command to.

Actions: Q,F,1,(Keypad)0 or ^ shoots a bullet.

Pressing r restarts the last map, depending on your browser, also the return key [ENTER] and space bar.

Shrinking objects makes the game too slow to play

Add "&shrink=0" to the url in the location bar and reload.

Making maps

First, add the name of your map set to maps/list.html. Then, make a list of map names you want to use and add them to maps/NAMEOFYOURMAPSET/list.html. For making the actual maps, see file format and look into html source of example file. If you hold the mouse over a tile of an existing map, the tooltip will show you the character coding for that tile.
There also is a disabled load local file/load url feature, but I have disabled it, since for security reasons the browser will often not allow it to work.
HylZee is an unregistered trademark of peter schaefer, 2004. A web search turned up no prior matches.

About browsers

Among Firefox 1.0, Opera 7 and IE5, Firefox was the most reliable and debug friendly to code for. IE is the fasted, but seems to slow down a bit into the game, maybe there is a bug in the caching code. IE and Opera did not exhibit much flickering, probably because they use some form of double buffer, (extra double buffering was added quickly for Firefox). Opera 7 actually is faster, but appears to be the slowest of all (because of jitter) , and exhibits the most pecularities, though not serious ones, like assigning meaning to every keystroke, and always showing a scrollbar, and taking up estate by the banner. IE5 has problems with using many images generated by javascript; I started working on improving stuff by working with the DOM, but it turns out that IE then insists on reserving width for table borders, and that this causes even more flickering. I was able to use some DOM stuff for the animations, seems to be faster, and hopefully that cures IE5's cache problem.

It would be nice if someone made a DHTML version of the "Pyr" game (HylZee in the valley of kings), since I have some levels for it. Some antivirus program flagged my copy as infected, maybe wrongly because these are the only 3 files marked, so I need to get a really old vmware for win98 to be safe.