We've all seen this page on Neopets. The classic cave upload page, which we all use to upload our HATPC levels. But have you truly looked at the page? Because if you do look closely, you will see something interesting...

THIS. This little image that acts as a CaveMaker download link. That heart crate is SIXTY PIXELS WIDE AND SIXTY PIXELS TALL. Not 32x32 pixels tall like the one you find in game. This is a huge breakthrough, guys. If there is an HD image of a heart crate, maybe there is an HD image of all the others?  

or they redrew the crate because otherwise the link would be tiny or ugly

But the originals can look a bit awkward, like they are scaled-down versions of larger images

Jet fuel can't melt wooden crates.

I'm very interested to see if other larger files exist somewhere in the game. That would mean we could play the game at a higher resolution. Where would this be stored that we haven't already looked, though?

Well, unfortunately you can't get an index of http://images.neopets.com/images/ (the spot where that 60px heart crate is stored) by visiting it. Or http://images.neopets.com/ either, for that matter. Maybe there's some way to find an index of it, but IDK. I'm guessing that if high res versions of the other crates ever existed, they don't exist anymore, at least not in anywhere we could find them.

Plus 60x60px is an awkward number anyways. If there were high res crate textures it'd be a lot better for them to be 64x64 so you could just multiply all the game's numbers by 2 to scale it.

I'm guessing that the game's textures (or some of them at least) were originally created by some artist and sent to Ben Pitt in vector graphic form (or maybe high-res bitmap graphic) and were edited to fit the game. That would also explain this:



It looks like somewhere between the asset being created and it being put in the game a white background was deleted... along with the white part of Hannah's skirt.

There's also a white background on this JPG file pulled from the game code:



Which is why doors have a black rectangle around them (as this file is inverted when displayed in game).

according to ben pitt's cv he created all the environmental graphic assets and the neopets artists were only responsible for the hannah and enemy graphics. but yeah i always thought the hatpc graphics were a bit unconventional in that they seemed to be a mix of pixel and vector and they looked like no other neopets art. i think he drew the assets in flash (flash is rebranding itself as a vector graphics editor now that it's being retired from web applications) and rasterized them to a limited palette. (yes i have analyzed this in my spare time)

also, i'm fairly sure that hatic had absolutely zero input from robotduck, hence why its mechanics are not very good. also, idk if anyone noticed but the standing hannah sprite in hatic has no squirrel tail, which is why she looks so weird. all the other hannah sprites were drawn directly on top of the hatpc hannah sprites (apparently she had a spray tan and a dye job after getting all that $$$ from the pirate caves)

Good sleuthing, HB. I have the same opinion of HATIC's mechanics, and will do what I can to improve them in the remake. And maybe we can look into adding a tail to the standing sprite.

so i know the interguild used to trash the original HATPC campaign for being too easy, but a reexamination shows that they are actually the perfect difficulty for a game on a site targeted at children of ages 7-14. HATPC had a distinct atmosphere and a sense of cohesiveness that HATIC lacks (ben pitt knew his stuff). the HATIC levels, on the other hand, were obviously designed by neopets staff members with no experience in game design. it seems that they were more interested in propagating inside jokes and making references to the band weezer than testing their levels. it survived only on the merit of its gimmicks, including the slippery terrain and the family-friendly character of armin (as opposed to hannah who was apparently a hard-drinking barmaid in her original incarnation)

by the way: HATPC was probably created to capitalize on the success of the pirates of the caribbean franchise. curse of the black pearl was released in theatres in july 2003, neopets commissioned robotduck to code HATPC three months later c. october 2003 and it was released in november.

Noticed this super old topic for the first time.

Yeah very confident this is the case. Reading from the top I was like 95% sure there wouldn't be enlarged files in the game, and my guess was that they had proper assets for each tile that they used to create both the tiles and the heart icon used on the site. This whole topic was piqued my interest because I know that RCT essentially did the same thing, where despite everything being very pixelated in the game, everything was created from unexpectedly detailed models:




That was probably just when everyone was in the edgy "hard caves == good caves" mentality. We didn't discuss the main levels much, but I imagine the attitude changed around when Sefro drilled the "hard =/= good" mentality into us. I think the difficulty curve is probably a little too slow at the start, and perhaps some levels should be re-ordered, but even for a general internet game I think levels 10 through 20 are pretty solid, and it makes sense that some of the early levels would be very basic.

Interesting observations on HATIC; I don't remember much of it by now, but I could see that being the case. I'll have to replay it sometime soon. Perhaps HatPC, HatIC and HatKC show how the quality of Neopets in general dipped over time.

Wow, I've never seen this topic too, and it's super interesting. Also brilliant match of the pirates of the carribean with this game. Kewlz.

I think the 'hard=good' phase was basically brought on because CSD was the firstest of all, and his caves of old were incredibly difficult. When dando arrived (not sefro! dando!) we finally got "proof" that much easier caves were perfectly possible to enjoy much of. Of course there was the DDA phase and we've had some more miniphases afterwards. But it really all started with the actual neopets Guilds.

I don't think it was CSD or anyone in particular, it extended to before the interguild I'm pretty sure. I think it was just kid mentality. Probably some silly leaps in logic, like if you make something that someone else can beat then they "win" but if they can't beat it then you "win" or something, so everyone's trying to make caves that other people can't beat so they can lay claim to having a cave that is worthily hard.

Of course in reality if your cave is really hard then people will only see like 3% of it, and won't bother spending much time trying to play it, and all of that effort spent perfecting the timing is wasted unless you make a walkthrough video. But I guess a lot of us didn't realize that back then because of herd mentality and such.

As someone who was in this age range at the time I discovered the game, I agree with that. I got stuck at Level 11 for ages just cause I couldn't get out of the water in time, in hindsight now it wasn't a very difficult level. Other than the boulder puzzle in level 19, none of them really were (Except level 18 if you were like some people (me) and didn't know about the secret area to the gem and made the long dive to the door)

Okay it objectively may not be that hard, but it does take a really long time to beat, and thus it's usually where I give up when I do hatpc playthroughs because I lack the patience. I die once in the water and I'm just like, nah I don't wanna spend another 2 minutes crawling and pushing boulders to get back to where I was.