ChatChat

ChatChat
Also known as: KittyRpg Developer: Terry Cavanagh Platform: Adobe Flash Released internationally: January 28, 2012 This game has unused code. This game has unused objects. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused abilities. This game has unused music. This game has anti-piracy features.

ChatChat is a game about being a cat; remade from a scrapped Ludum Dare project called KittyRpg.

Unused Code

There is much unused code in ChatChat leftover from its KittyRpg elements.

Unused Interactions

A map of ChatChat's areas, where each pixel is a representation of the three digit block IDs.

There is code in the game referencing locked doors. The door on the house doesn't have any text when walked into; this code is not used for that purpose.

if(map.doorwaycollide > 0)
{
    localconsolemessage("??","This door is locked");
    map.doorwaycollide = 0;
}

The code also contains references to an Offline Mode, likely used for debugging the game.

Unused Commands

There are many commands that go unused in the final version. These actions are actually partly referenced in the code, and some are even fully fleshed out. This is the ActionScript referencing implementations of the actions, extracted from the SWF. Here's a basic breakdown of what the commands would have done:

• hair: Would have spat a hairball at an enemy for damage.
• kill: Would have killed an enemy on the map.
• nyan1 and nyan2: Would have healed Player 2 and Player 1 respectively. Player order seems wrong here, except for the possibility that nyan1 was called by Player 1 to heal Player 2 and vice versa. This provides evidence of KittyRpg being for 2 players.
• opendoor and closedoor: Would have opened and closed doors on the map. No door tiles exist in the game. It can however be used to increment and decrement values of groups of tiles by 20.
• damage1/hairdamage1 and damage2/hairdamage2: Would have damaged or killed an enemy as Player 1 and Player 2 respectively. More evidence of KittyRpg being for two players.

Testing of These Commands?

It is probable that these commands can be tested using a program like catcats. Catcats has already shown it is possible to control whether other players become cats or dogs.

Unused Images

Tiles

Used tiles in ChatChat's tile sheet.

The tilesheet has plenty of unused tiles. Most notable is the sewer/dungeon looking tiles in the bottom center. There aren't any unused area names, so this could have been a boss dungeon that got scrapped. Another interesting thing to note is the multitude of Help and Broadcast blocks. Looking at the map, you can see that where there are Broadcast and Help blocks they are all different colors. This lays clue to the fact that messages are controlled by the client and not the server.

This also holds true for the music blocks, but maybe at one time they were different for their note?

• 

  Unused tiles that were meant to represent doors. D_0 was meant for closed doors and B_ was meant for open ones.

• 

  Tiles for the mice in the game, as well as unused blood splatters. The blood splatters were most likely meant for when you killed an enemy in KittyRpg.

• 

  Tiles for what seems to be an unused sewer area. Maybe a remnant of an idea for dungeons?

• 

  The two tiles used for menus in the game. Pink on the title screen, and green on the server selection screen.

• 

  Numbered tiles after the menu tiles. This suggests there were to be many more menus (possibly RPG-related things like inventory management) as pink would be 0 and green would be 1.

• 

  A color reference in the corner of the sprite sheet. Most likely used to have easy access to common or shared colors. Also seems to hold many of the colors used for the player sprites.

Sprites

ChatChat's sprite sheet.

The sprite sheet mainly consists of animations for the different player characters. Players will take on a color in accordance to their player slot:

Player Slot	Color
0	Green
1	Orange
2	Blue
3	Cream
4	Gray
5	Velvet
6	White
7	Pink
8	Brown
9	Sky

This is why there is a limit of 10 players on a server. Additionally, players can either be a cat or a dog. Horizontally, there are two animation frames for the following animations:

• Facing Up
• Facing Down
• Facing Left
• Facing Right
• Meowing/Barking
• Purring/Panting
• Napping
• Screeching/Howling

• 

  There is a set of mouse sprites. It is unclear whether ChatChat uses the sprites or the tiles to represent a mouse.

• 

  ChatChat has a sprite for a Broadcast block. As all the mechanics for broadcasting use the tiles, this is unused as a sprite.

• 

  There is a sprite for a ball of yarn. This sprite might have been found in the world, used as an item in KittyRpg, or simply could have been a scrapped idea even before then. The game's code does not seem to reference this sprite.

Unused Music

ChatChat has one unused music track.

According to an email Terry sent to Aly, the music is left over from one of his other games.

Copy/Piracy Protection

The SWF has a URL check built into Main.as and Preloader.as. With this check, the SWF when run on a path without "distractionware.com", "kongregate.com", "ungrounded.net", or "jayisgames.com" in it, will display an error message. This check can be removed with JPEXS by opening the SWF, navigating to Main.as, selecting the sitelock function, and changing the bytes 27 48 near the end to another 26 48 in the hex view on the right.