What the heck is a 'piratenijamonkeyrobot'??
Q: So what is and/or what's the story behind: the PirateNinjaMonkeyRobot
A: Early in ZoodDangle's development, placeholder graphics were used until I had the code fleshed out. Since I cannot draw, the placeholder graphics were basically hastily drawn stick figures in black and white. Eventually, we started doing work on the real character graphics, and when people who had seen the stick figures saw some of the new characters, their immediate reaction was to blurt out: "you need an X", where X was equal to one of three things:
1) Something pornographic
2) Something we would have to pay money to license
3) Something we wish we could have done, but lacked the memory space for.
The PNMR is a single character consisting of elements from all the suggestions in group 3. We figured, why choose when we could just do them all?
Q: Why not a pirateMONKEYninjarobot instead of a pirateNINJAmonkeyrobot?
A: because PNMR wins in GoogleFight
Q: Is Zoodangle's source code available?
A: not yet, but I plan to eventually release it under the terms of the BSD or Artistic License. It's a pile of crap though, I wouldn't assume you could learn anything from it.
Q: Where do the words come from?
A: There are two dictionaries, Easy, and Hard. Both come from publicly available lists of words. The easy dictionary is a subset of a list of the most commonly used words in the english language. The Hard dictionary comes from several different publicly available lists of SAT words. There are 815 words in each dictionary.
Q: What do the difficulty settings mean?
A: On Easy Mode you guess at words in the easy dictionary, and two bad guesses earns you an appendage. On Normal mode you guess at words in the easy dictionary and one bad guess earns you an appendage. On Hard mode you guess at words in the Hard dictionary, and one bad guess earns you an appendage.
Q: "non-lethal" hangman game? What's that mean?
A: It refers to the fact that there are no nooses involved. The characters are hanging from a clothespin.
Q: Why are they hanging from a clothespin? (or it's gay that your characters are hanging from a clothespin.)
A: They're hanging from a clothespin for several very good reasons:
-It's cuter that way.
-My artistic director told me to.
-the screen is too short for a noose.
-Killing piratemonkeyninjarobots is like quadriple the normal amount of bad karma you'd get for killing cartoon characters, and we don't want you to risk it. (your karma is already pretty questionable, or so we've been told)
-Dead characters don't move their eyes
-Really, I'm sure you have enough to worry about without life or death hanging in the balance in ZooDangle. If you need the motivation, or are a sadist, imagine that the characters are late for lunch, and they can't go until you solve the word and let them off the clothespin.
Q: What's up with their eyes/what am I doing to make their eyes move?
A: Currently, each character has a 30% chance to move their eyeballs in a random direction every 500milliseconds or so, so it's not you.