Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo
Developer: Humongous Entertainment Publisher: Humongous Entertainment Platforms: Windows, Mac OS Classic Released in US: 1995 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused cinematics. This game has unused music. This game has unused sounds. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material. This game has revisional differences. This game has a prototype article

In his third outing, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo (spoiler alert!). He also gets caught up in some bizarre developer in-jokes, has his driver's license revoked, and hurls from eating too much cotton candy. And as if that wasn't enough, there's a demo version with even weirder stuff. Aah, the glory days of the multimedia era …

Debug Mode

To do: Get I�Porkdude=71595 to work

Debug options

Like most Humongous games, this one has a debug mode, activated by adding the line SuperCool=71595 to the hegames.ini configuration file. This adds two buttons to the front of Baldini's Grocery Store: "CLICK HERE TO PICK UP EVERYTHING!", which puts all plot-necessary items in the inventory, and "CLICK FOR ENDGAME", which triggers the ending sequence.

Hidden Scenes

A guide for aspiring managers to why you should keep a tight leash on your devteam.

HolyMoley

Add HolyMoley=71595 to the INI and click on the gopher hole in the Grasslands (it's the tuft of grass in front of the lions). Presumably excised for religious content, as mild as it is.

IAmTheMoose

Add IAmTheMoose=71595 to the INI, click on either of the joke-telling toucans in Jungle Land, and prepare for the most thrilling two minutes of your life.

MoveInHerds

Add MoveInHerds=71595 to the INI and click on the observation point in the grasslands. Note that this is a reference to a line from Jurassic Park. The second half of the line is present, but unused.

UpChuck

Add UpChuck=71595 to the INI and get cotton candy from Chuck Wagon ten times to see the logical—and quite disgusting—outcome.

Graphics

This game has a large number of unused graphics, mostly uncolored lineart and pencil sketches.

Demo Leftovers

These graphics are left over from the demo version, which is mostly present in the game data.

Zoo Entrance

This room's background has a copy of two of the dancing flowers hidden behind the dashboard.

Rough draft for part of the "Welcome to the Zoo" sequence. The numbers in the first frame indicate the internal frame order needed to produce the animation, with the "cycle" label marking the loop point for the first part of the sequence.

Rough animation of the topiary creatures gyratin'.

Outback Al

Uncolored animation of Outback Al pulling out the list of missing animals …

… blinking …

… and putting it back.

Chuck Wagon

Sketches of Putt-Putt's Cheese Squigglies-eating animation.

Little Skeeter

This storyboard sequence depicts the polar bear snowball fight clickpoint.

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  Near bear throws a snowball
  

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  

  
  

  
  

  Far bear ducks
  

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  

  
  

  
  

  Far bear throws his own snowball!
  

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  

  
  

  
  

  Near bear ducks
  

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  

  
  

  
  

  Near bear blows a raspberry …
  

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  

  
  

  
  

  … and gets smacked in the face!
  

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  

  
  

  
  

  Far bear laughs
  

  
  

  
  

Pencil sketch of Little Skeeter.

Sketch of Putt-Putt talking to Little Skeeter.

Penguins

Here's an interesting one: the penguins were originally supposed to have their own fact-blabbering info kiosk! It's present in the room background, as shown, but the game covers it up by placing another graphic on top of the associated object. Only the kiosk itself is hidden, leaving behind an out-of-place shadow.

It has a complete animation set and a soundbyte for Putt-Putt to say when it's clicked (see Unused Sounds), but sadly no facts about penguins—just the placeholder subtitle "Blah blah blah...". What's there can be made to work by running local script 204, which is most easily accomplished using ScummVM's debugger.

The kiosk is actually visible in the room's save/load pictures, indicating it was removed fairly late in development.

Baby Jambo

Sketches of the giant scary mousey terrorizing Baby Jambo.

Full-size sketches of the Baby Jambo close-ups.

Uncolored lineart of Putt-Putt seeing what you did there blinking.

Jungle Land Entrance

Storyboard sketches of what seems to be an unrealized clickpoint involving the monkey that sits on a vine getting knocked off his perch by another monkey, then narrowly escaping from the alligator below.

Raft

More uncolored lineart of Putt-Putt.

What seems to be a sketch of a frog, probably for the lilypad clickpoint.

Mr. Hippo

Still more sketches of Putt-Putt.

Thwack and Quack

A couple of work-in-progress versions of the "SCENIC VIEW" sign are hidden behind the dashboard. Note that the hidden text is slightly rougher than what's on the sign.

A sketch from a storyboard sequence for an old version of the Thwack and Quack clickpoint. This is the only frame left in the final, but the full thing made it into the demo version.

Scenic View

Partially-colored animation of Putt-Putt tossing the rope to Kenya …

… and Kenya catching it.

Leftover telescope pictures from the demo, which kept the dashboard visible at all times. The used images lack the placeholder at the bottom of the screen.

What would a Humongous Entertainment game be without some wild developer jokes? Obviously this was meant to be shown through the telescope, though it's probably a fairly old leftover due to using a different image format from the real telescope pictures.

For whatever reason, this frame is duplicated and stored separately.

Miscellaneous

Placeholder save/load image for unknown rooms. Similar images exist in most Humongous games.

Although all the necessary graphics are present, it's impossible to take a picture of Mr. Baldini in the initial release of the game; he's always in his store unless being talked to, and using the camera on the store door does nothing. The 1999 re-release fixes this.

Putt-Putt's primary animations (moving, talking, etc.) from Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon are also present in this game, probably for testing purposes. The color remap chunks used to color them correctly in the older games are no longer present, so their palette is broken. The basic logic for assembling and displaying the animations is still present, and the game will default to them if the Putt-Putt actor is spawned in a room with no costumes defined for it (for example, by forcing a warp to room 21, the Animal Tag room).

Adding ICanDrive=71595 to the INI causes this image of Putt-Putt's "driver's license" to appear as the second-to-last picture in the credits.

Unused Music

Background Music

The Rhymin' Gibbons

The gibbons in Jungle Land normally pick from a selection of twenty-seven rhymes, but five more (somehow even sillier than the rest) can be enabled by adding Gibbon=71595 to the INI.

Dialogue

Demo Leftovers

Some self-explanatory dialogue from the demo.

Jokes

Other

Text

Subtitles

From this game onwards, Humongous titles removed the in-game option to turn on subtitles. The subtitles themselves are still present, though, and can be enabled by adding TextOn=1 to the INI file. This also works in most future games.

Since most people would never see the subtitles, the developers apparently stopped bothering to proofread them or keep them updated with the latest revisions to the script, resulting in frequent typos and occasional disparities between subtitles and dialogue.

Error Handlers and Unused Text

AAAAAAAAAA! Help! No Room!

Displayed when the game doesn't have a way to handle a particular room transition. Specifically, many rooms are configured based on the last room the player was in. If the old room isn't internally "connected" to the new room, the game doesn't know what to do and gives this error.

Don't use to-the-void on selected-actor!!

camera actor to the void

thinks there's already a zebra-actor

putting zebra actor in room

didn't repair the raft

killed actor, drawing gone raft

root position

no-sinking override

Molasses machine.

Street legal machine.

Trans-warp drive machine.

script turn-pp-smoothly called.

script wait-3-seconds-then-look-front called.

script putt-looks-at called.

Take this out.

What to do about this?

Song array overflow!!!

Tried to restart ambient when there was none.

Tried to play song

Restarting ambient sound

Restarting music

Starting ambient sound

Starting music

Song finished

Pausing before wind...

Playing wind sound

playing perferred song

playing standard song

Auto-play clicked object:

Auto-play clicked actor:

no standard pool...quitting jump-start-music

Help File

The PUTTZOO.HLP help file contains several unlisted pages containing information on the secret hegames.ini entries. The pages are unindexed and unreferenced, meaning the only way to see them is to specifically look them up with the "Find" function.

"Cool INI entries"

Try adding the following entries to HEGAMES.INI for some fun!



IAmTheMoose

Set this to 71595, then go see the Joke Birds in Jungleland.



ICanDrive

Set this to 71595, then check out the scrapbook at the end of the game.



Gibbon

Set this to 71595, then go see the Rhymin' Monkeys.



MoveInHerds

Set this to 71595, then go to the Observation Point for an inside joke.

"Cool INI Entries Part 2"

UpChuck

Set this to 71595, then have Putt-Putt eat more cotton candy than he should.



HolyMoley

Set this to 71595, then go see the mole?



AutoPlay=<number>

the number is the number of frames to wait before activating autoplay, in tenths of seconds (600 = 1 minute...

I have mine set to 6000, ten minutes)



AutoPlayTouchDoors=<number>

This is the percentage chance that Putt will touch a door... 0 will keep him in the room forever,

100 will move him around quite a bit. 25 may be a realistic real-user average.

Other

Blah, blah, blah...

Placeholder text for the penguin info kiosk. No recorded equivalent exists.

Demo Version

The demo version of the game is present almost in its entirety in the initial CD release, and can be played by force-running script 54 (scr 54 run in ScummVM's debugger). Aside from constant "No Room" errors due to the difference in room numbering between the demo and final versions, everything is fully functional.

The 1999 re-release lacks the demo title graphics, so the game crashes at the point when they should appear.

Revisional Differences

1999 Version

The 1999 re-issue of this game is actually a rather sloppy re-conversion of the Dutch dub, which upgraded the game to a newer revision of the SPUTM/SCUMM engine. Though this brought a few improvements, it also introduced some nasty bugs.

Graphics

1995	1999

The original releases use an older Humongous logo. The 1999 version updates it to the then-current logo and adds the trademark drum roll found in most other games.

The 1999 version retroactively adds the game to the "Junior Adventure" product line. Peculiarly, the logo used is a red-on-yellow variant not seen in any previous Humongous game. It also puts the recommended age group on the exclamation mark, which wouldn't happen again until Pajama Sam 3.

1995	1999

The copyright dates on the title screen were updated.

1995	1999

The 1995 version uses a Windows 3.1-style pause menu, while the 1999 version uses a Windows 95-style pause menu.

1995	1999

All the item cursors were colorized for the 1999 version, though the monochrome versions are still used in the Windows 3.1 interpreter.

Music

Several tracks containing English lyrics were changed in the Dutch release and carried over to the 1999 version.

Played when Sammy is rescued. The newer version cuts off strangely.

Played when Little Skeeter is rescued. The 1999 version recycles the music used when talking to Mrs. Boa.

Played when talking to Masai or her mother for the first time.

Other

• It's possible to take Mr. Baldini's picture. This can't be done in the original version, though the graphics and dialog for it are present.


• The game runs in fullscreen instead of letterboxing at resolutions above 640×480.


• The solid cursor graphic is completely out of alignment with the outlined cursor graphic, causing the pointer to jump down and to the right every time it's hovered over a clickable object.


• When Putt-Putt reads the list of missing animals while talking to Outback Al, the animal names are supposed to be highlighted in red as they're spoken. For some reason, this only happens when Sammy's name is read, and the text actually changes color after it's supposed to be highlighted.


• When clicking "You are here" on the map of the zoo, both the arrow and the text are supposed to highlight at once; in this version, the arrow highlights first when Putt-Putt talks, and once he finishes the arrow stops highlighting just as the text highlights for a brief moment.


• The most severe bug in the rerelease occurs when getting off the raft at the far end of the Jungle Land swamp for the first time. If Putt-Putt is moved onto land but not specifically to another screen, he'll comment about having made it to the other side. Skipping this dialogue with ESC causes the raft to disappear, leaving no way to proceed. This bug was (partly) fixed in the 2011 iOS release by making the dialogue unskippable.