Yoda Stories is a real find for fans of gaming archeology. The originally English-language baby game translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and probably Korean and Chinese, apart from unofficial translations into Russian and several reissues.
Due to the moderate popularity, it is difficult to find all the versions, and some are known only from cover photos so far. In the collectors community, Windows games aren't as hot as, say, DOS games.
This is a real white crow in the line of Star Wars games. The game created to fill the niche with "office games", like Solitaire or Minesweeper. Therefore, despite the abundance of favorite characters and unique adventures in the plot, the game will not interest hardcore gamers, and among office workers, not everyone is a fan of the franchise.
The game has a huge advantage - fully generated worlds. There are only 15 quests and three types of planets in Yoda Stories, but the young Jedi spends a lot of time wandering, solving puzzles and helping the locals, and these wanderings each time will not be like the previous ones. Depending on the settings and experience of the player one adventure can take from 15 minutes to an hour, that is, it fits perfectly into a lunch break.
The implementation suffers due to not the most successful controls, including because of tile animation and moving strictly in cells. The game window has a fixed size, and on modern monitors is claustrophobic.
As part of this project, we set a goal to collect all existing versions of the game. Each of them has been carefully studied under a microscope and accurately documented.
The idea of the project arose during the translation of Yoda Stories into Russian. All the necessary material accumulated in the process of creating a utility for editing the game.
Special thanks to Christoph Leimbrock for his project webfun.io. He was able to collect and structure information about the internal implementation of the game, embodying it in an online game engine. Yodesk.ksy file describes the structure of a DTA file and allows generating code to work with it.