This is my first time doing something like this. The .SWF you see before you is a demonstration of my progress on my "Where is Backpack?" game reconstruction/restoration project thus far (actually, about two weeks ago :p).

The main issue that prompted this: the jungle background has been missing from the original game for years. There was one attempt I saw that tried to replicate the game in its original state, but I'm trying for a more *authentic* approach. Thanks to this last remaining evidence of the original game in its completeness, I was able to view and capture (in VLC), then mend the background without the watermark as best I could in GIMP. After I got the background to what I'd say is 96% of its original lush jungle glory, I went and downloaded the original game via the Wayback Machine and shoved it into the JPEXS Flash Decompiler (shout-out to jindrapetrik at GitHub, I couldn't have executed this without you, thanks for your program!). From there, I reverted the .SWF to a .FLA, specifically for Flash 8.

The decompiler had additionally gave me every single asset included, every shape for every frame, mainly Backpack's. Inside the .FLA itself, however, I had to unpack many things. There were over 30 layers, I saw all these symbols on the Timeline I'd never seen before, there were all these things in the Library, I had to publish to Flash Player 5, otherwise the code wouldn't work properly, I had quite a bit cut out for myself, doubly so because I have no experience making Flash games.

Now, I dunno if it was because I was using a later version of Flash, something past when the game was released back in 2000, but whenever I tried to interact with a Backpack on a given frame, the vector shape would lose all colour data, except a dark purple, and become a "Shadow Backpack", unable to be recovered without a entire project reversion, not even a CTRL+Z. You can see one in the above picture. My solution, at the time, was to convert every Backpack from the decompiler to a .PNG and just put those over every mistake. It was an effective, but messy solution and you can see that for yourself that some Backpacks will look nice and smooth, but other frames will appear crusty and jagged. This game is the result of all of what I just explained to you.

That debug message in box seems to be the clue to the reason why the original jungle background went missing. It appears to be because the image file was hosted on an external website that must have been removed, Flash throws a warning and runs the game with a blank canvas since it has no web source to fill the background with. I fixed this by storing a reconstructed image locally.

After finalizing this game draft, I later realized that Backpack has a rather small animation pool, smaller than Swiper's game, and definitely smaller than Map's game. All 11 unique frames are flipped and/or scaled to suit the game's direction.

While a marginal percentage of all of Backpack's combined frames ended up going "corrupt", there remained others that retain their totally clean and vector graphic quality. I plan to make a final version that uses those grabbed from preserved frames, hopefully before 2025...I'll also have to fix the text. (-_-)

Addendum, Dec. 17, 2024. Nothing else about the game has been modified, but working on this project, I immediately saw a few things that I think to improve for a third version, something of a "Community's Cut". The finished second version will be the original game as it was released without any of my idealized changes-to-be. First, there's a layering issue involving the tree on the right. This is seen when Backpack stands on the bush in front of the tree. Second, there are two unused hiding positions near the end of the .SWF, both with their own action animations (I couldn't Swivel-rip those alone likely due to game scripting and flags). I'd like to fix and restore these, respectively, in this third version.

All that said, thanks for checking this out. I was, at first, doing this for myself, but then I realized by sharing this publicly, I'd be restoring part of Dora's earliest digital history. Potentially, maybe some group of people may applaud my contribution, and it would bring me great pleasure to give back to something that brought into my life so much joy and memory. (*w *)

Dora the Explorer is property of Nickelodeon.