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Humanity's Helper
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About the game
You have decided to make the world a better place, and you have the sense to begin close to home: with the people in your own building and your own street. There is only one problem. Helping someone is harder than it sounds, because the thing a person needs is almost never the thing you happen to be holding. Hand a dog a fish and she is delighted; hand the same fish to a man at a tap, a frog or an old lady knitting at the ticket counter and you get a very different answer.
Humanity's Helper is a text adventure with a graphical front end instead of a typed parser. Along the bottom of the screen is a row of small icons: walk in a direction, take, drop, use, open, push, talk, examine, look around, wait, check what you are carrying. Click a verb and, when more than one thing could fit, click the thing you mean. The story scrolls above, in colour-coded text, over a small pixel-art picture of the scene.
The goal is simple to state. Help the neighbours you can, collect the money, the ticket and the courage you need, and take the train that will carry your mission out of town. Your ending counts how many people you helped and how many turns it took you. A run is short, around fifteen minutes the first time, and a second pass is fun for working out which odd combinations of objects pay off and which only earn a dry remark from the narrator.
Playing it here
Humanity's Helper was written for TIC-80, a fantasy console: an imaginary 1980s-style computer with a 240 by 136 screen and 16 colours, for which independent developers write new games. ronynn made it for the GitHub Game Off 2023 jam, whose theme was "scale". It runs here in the official TIC-80 web player.
Click Play, wait for "Click to start" and click. The title screen then asks you to press Z or X. The game is meant for a mouse and works with a touch screen; the arrow keys are only a shortcut for walking. Nothing is saved: a game takes under half an hour, and the ending screen offers a fresh start. Esc opens the TIC-80 menu. The game has no sound, and its text is in English.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click or tap a bottom icon | choose a verb (go north, take, use, examine, talk, look...) |
| Click or tap a name in the list | choose which object the verb applies to |
| Arrow keys | walk north (up), south (down), west (left) and east (right) |
| Z or X | start the game; restart after the ending |
| Esc | TIC-80 menu |
A few things worth knowing
Look before you leave a room. The "describe room" icon repeats what you see and the exits, and "examine" on a person or object often tells you who might want it.
Try things on everybody. Many items have a surprising use on the right person, and the wrong person usually gets a joke instead of a penalty, so experimenting costs you only a few turns.
The train is the finish line. You need a ticket, and the old lady who sells it has an opinion about what you are carrying.
Credits and licence
Humanity's Helper was created by ronynn (rohan), who wrote the code and drew the graphics. It is free software under the MIT licence, which the author published with the game's source in the project's repository. It runs here in the TIC-80 web player (MIT licence). The licence text is linked from this page.