#hss art in 2024?! more likely than you think!!

[triciabeloved]

woah first post!! hi!!

[hsslilly-blog]

i know nothing about coding but if i did i'd rip the damn game apart and pull out all the dialogue for quests and put them in a. idk spreadsheet or google doc or something. i HATE how this high school story and hollywood u are so badly perserved and documented, partially through the fault of its creators. i get that these are niche games that a grand total of five people even remember them but if i think about how an ENTIRE HALF OF THE STORY IS GONE BECAUSE THERE'S A REQUIRED SERVER CHECK it makes my blood boil.

i am too passionate about this

hi! this is not a bad idea at all, especially since hwu is… very lost. i’ll get to work on something like this as soon as possible! i’ll also make my hss screenshots available.

i’ll use this ask to rant. i simpatize with you… way too much. i try not to speak about this very often because it just makes me angry and because, well, it’s a super niche game and we had around four years to organize and archive it but… it is a niche game. by 2022, who even was active in the fandom besides like… me and five other people? not to mention it was very out of the blue, with such a small window between the announcement and the shut down it was impossible to archive everything. i spent full days trying to screenshot as much of high school story as i could. and now i regret i didn’t spend this time archiving hollywood u instead. but what is done is done.

i think… i mean, as much as it sucks, high school story is still fully playable if you have the .apk (or if you have it in your ios). what really, really bothers me is how hollywood u is essentially… lost media? the game itself, yes, but over 20-30 quests are missing from the files because they were released after pixelberry (apparently) decided to store some of the assets on the online server and not locally anymore. even if i were to drop the quests in a word .doc, it still wouldn’t be fully available. and that makes me angry. hwu was last updated in 2018 with a “fix”. why couldn’t they have used the opportunity to make these files available locally? it was pretty obvious at that point the games were sunsetting one day. might have given the chance for the fans to preserve it in some way since hwu would be locked behind a server check forever.

i don’t know. i’m not a dev. but i’m pretty sure they had the tools and the means, they just didn’t see it as worthy of their time. and i get it a little. they were very busy with choices at that time. these games were very dead. pb was past them. but come on. hss and hwu were part of pixelberry’s history and i like to believe these games deserved more than what they got. ~30 days between the announcement and the shut down? please. a little bit more of respect for the art they themselves created!! i think it all just boils down to me feeling… angry, sad and… heartbroken that one of theses games is completely unplayable in 2024 and forever. just like that. to expunge and deprive people from the art you once delighted in creating and sharing is sad!

sorry for hijacking the ask. i just wanted to get this out. i’ll work on making the quests dialogues available.