Help Hannah's Horse / News: Recent posts

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!... read more

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.

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.... read more

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)... read more

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.

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 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.