Harold is a virus

Howdy y’all! Laura Cough, Internet Lizard’s Firstborn Daughter here, and welcome to your weekly-ish Automaton Lunch post, where I bring you random and obscure fun facts about Luke Vincent’s titles, from the Willful to Walk!

And after two posts regarding the Walk, we’re gonna be talking about the Willful today! For those who don’t know, Willful is Luke Vincent’s earliest (at least on Itch and Steam) publicly available game project, releasing in 2017. It’s a 2D platform-shooter about a rabbit fighting against a cult in an attempt to avoid being sacrificed! Unfortunately, finding the most interesting technical quirks are out of the question because Luke has lost the source code for the game and, as a result, isn’t able to open source it… But that hasn’t stopped me from popping open the game’s executable to find a bunch of juicy game resources.

Before we proceed, I would like to warn you that this post will contain spoilers for the game. If you’re one of the people who might somehow care enough about this game to avoid spoilers, click away and come back when you’ve 100% completed the game.

First and most notably, at least in my opinion, is the game’s music. The soundtrack for this game was never publicly released, and I’m probably one of the only ten people in the world who has played this game (my father is five of those ten people), so I might be the first person to extract these files from the game… Nevertheless, they certainly have some interesting names.
Most Luke Vincent games have a tendency to name their music files in a pretty normal manner. Harold’s in-game OST names typically follow a style similar to “challenge_stage_03.ogg”, or “binaryTheme.ogg”. Automaton Lung’s audio files are slightly less consistent, but are still pretty understandable – “FloorThemeC.ogg”, “BigArea.ogg”, or maybe “ElevatorTheme.ogg”. A roundabout way to say, all of these games name their soundtrack after their areas where they appear.
Willful, however, is different. Willful’s soundtrack, even in the files, has some very strange track names. Some highlights include;

* ballsdeep.ogg (Music found in The End of It area)
* actualtrash.ogg (Music found in the Garbage Land area)
* bosstheme2.ogg (This one would seem pretty normal, but this file is duplicated and also appears as thebigone.ogg)
* slowcrawl.ogg (Another one that may be considered normal, until you realize that it’s used in one of the more painful parts of the game… Luke was self-aware when he made this one.)

All things considered, I actually quite like the Willful OST… Maybe I should upload soundtrack videos to YouTube one day.

There’s also no shortage of unused content in here. There exists an unused LevelStart.ogg file (volume warning, it’s kind of loud) in the game, which might’ve at one point been used for – get this – starting a level. In the final game, however, the Golden Carrot pickup sound is used when starting a level instead. There also exists an image file that simply says… “kek”. This one may or may not be used in-game, but I have no memory of it appearing anywhere, so I’m just going to assume that it’s not used.

There are also some interesting sprite artifacts in this game, though these are really just some odd file optimization choices that make little difference to the end user.
For starters, the Carrot Counter in any given level is actually pulled from a sprite sheet, rather than being rendered individually and updating in real-time.

Also, despite there being three different Ending Screen photos for the game to use, there are only two of them present in the file named “finalphoto-sheet0″…

…This is because the 100% photo is stored separately in the file “finalphoto-sheet1”.

Lastly, the Snake boss that appears in the game has her sprite sheet labelled very appropriately…

That, of course, being “snek-sheet0”. Seeing as how goofy and lighthearted some of the dialogue in this game already was, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but it’s still something worth pointing out in my eyes.

There are a few other interesting artifacts in here, but for a game this obscure, this post has already gone on long enough. I need to go water my fish, anyhow.
Join me next week as we take a journey through Luke’s A Game By Its Cover Jam title, Order of the Third Hand.
Cough Out!