Questions & Answers - dougmencken/HeadOverHeels GitHub Wiki

Q : Once the game has started, how to quit it and return to the menus?

A : Once the game begins, you can’t quit it. Ever. Wahaha! 😁

And really, the “pause” key is what you’re lookin’ for. By default it’s [ m ]† but can be redefined

† And if you’re wondering why I designated (M) for pause, you’ve never seen a ZX Spectrum keyboard 😏

When the game is paused, the “escape” [ esc ] key finishes the game and brings the player back to the menus

Q : How do I save my game progress?

A : To save the current in-game progress, you either eat the reincarnation fish found in some game rooms exactly like in the original Ritman and Drummond’s game

Reincarnation Fish
------------------
The strangest animal in the known universe! This fish likes to be eaten!
There have been cases of it jumping onto plates! But there is more: when you
eat one, its prodigious memory remembers everything about you. Its memory is
so good that if you die at some later date, you will be reincarnated at the
very place you ate the fish, and you will even have the taste still in your
mouth! How a fish can remember anything when its been eaten has never been
successfully explained. You must be very careful to check that the fish is
alive and wriggling as dead fish decompose very quickly and it rapidly
turns so poisonous that a single lick can kill.
WARNING: Even living reincarnation fish taste horrible!

or either cheat with [ alt ] & [ shift ] & [ s ]

In addition to that, for some testing-only (and no other! ;) purposes, the initial rooms can be set as the arguments to the game’s binary

--head-room=(value) — the room's file name where Head begins the game, =blacktooth1head.xml by default
--heels-room=(value) — the room's file name where Heels begins the game, =blacktooth23heels.xml by default

implying that you know which room is described by which file somewhere deep in gamedata/map