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The Hat Chooses the Wizard
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About the game
The Hat Chooses the Wizard is a platformer in which the hat does most of the work. A wizard has lost his staff, and the only thing he has left is his magic hat. Throw it, and it flies off in the direction you aim; press the button again, and the hat pulls the wizard through the air towards it.
That one trick is how you get anywhere. Throw the hat across a gap and zip over to it, throw it straight up to reach a ledge you could never jump to, or chain a throw and a pull in mid-air to cover a long stretch of spikes. The pull is also your only attack: touching a slime or a snail on foot is fatal, but flying into one while the hat drags you along knocks it out. Thrown at a snail, the hat just bounces off its shell.
There are 12 short levels, and each one is a small puzzle about where to throw the hat and when to follow it.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Advance: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It was made for the GMTK Game Jam 2021, whose theme was "joined together", and improved after the jam. It runs here in the mGBA emulator. Click Play and press any button on the title screen.
The game has no save of its own, but F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | GBA button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | walk; hold a direction to aim the hat |
| X | A | throw the hat; press again to fly to it |
| Z | B | jump |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Aim before you throw. With no direction held, the hat flies the way the wizard is facing. Hold up, down or a diagonal to send it anywhere else.
You only get two pulls in the air. The pull recharges when you land, so plan long crossings as a sequence of throws with a safe place to touch down.
Never walk into an enemy. Slimes and snails are only safe to touch while you are flying towards the hat, so line up a throw that carries you through them.
Pressing again stops the pull. If the hat is about to drag you into trouble, press X once more while flying to let go early.
Credits and licence
The Hat Chooses the Wizard was made by Corwin Kuiper and Gwilym Inzani (LostImmortal and setsquare), who wrote the code and drew the graphics; the music is "Sylvan Waltz" by Otto Halmén, released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. It is one of the example games of agb, the authors' Rust library for the Game Boy Advance: the code is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and the graphics under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The source code of the build served here is hosted alongside the game, and the licence texts are linked from this page.