I'm glad to see that the preview of "Hire Hare" is well received here.
Dlfrsilver is right: the main character is
sorceress Hecatia, hired to locate and banish the dreaded and mighty
warlock Lycurgus, who lurks in the darkest corners of the dangerous dungeon where the game is set. Thus the main goal is to find nine magical lanterns that will reveal Lycurgus' hideout and let Hecatia fight him. The secondary goal is to find and unlock the treasure chests that will be her payment for her quest.
Unfortunately, the RetroDev 2016 contestants are fierce, and "Hire Hare" itself was delivered with a series of flaws and mistakes caused by the extremely tight deadline (I had to make everything in the limited timespan of five weeks) and only now I'm beginning to patch and amend them. For example, the in-game song is a horrible cover of Tim Follin's "Black Lamp" in-game theme, and it needs many tweaks to sound like its model:
[youtube]KqjbCagHuqs[/youtube]
The memory was also a big problem. Unlike "Knight Lore" and "Batman", and like "Crafton & Xunk" and "Inside Outing", this game remembers the state of every object in each room, and this requires memory to keep both their original locations and their current status. This problem was worsened because I was so short of time that I simply copied the whole map data! As a result I ran out of memory and I had to simplify the rooms, remove items and graphics, kill all the sound effects... I ended up with 16 free bytes and a severely simplified 64-room map. Here you have the most complex room and the simplest one:

I tried writing a more clever data backup method yesterday: it only copied the items' locations, everything else (backgrounds, doors...) was skipped. The improvement was noteworthy: the backup ended at $AB00 rather than at $B3F0, thus extending the original 16 free bytes to ...
2304 bytes! Enough room for 288 more objects!
It's a pity that these improvements couldn't happen before the deadline, isn't it?