About
Head over Heels is a game created by Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond. This is a free, open-source isometric remake of Head over Heels, built on Ignacio Pérez Gil's Isomot engine. It was started in the early 2000s by Jorge Rodríguez Santos and substantially reworked from 2016 onward to add macOS (including PowerPC) support and new features: animated menu characters, UI transitions, a new black-and-white 'Spectrum-style' room coloring scheme, room-entry music, room miniatures, camera-follow, accelerated falling, multiple screen sizes, and support for both the Allegro 4 and Allegro 5 libraries. The current maintainer describes it as still 'raw' and in need of further work.
How it differs from the original
Compared to the original, this remake adds features not part of the base game: animated menu characters, UI transitions, camera-follow, accelerated falling, configurable screen sizes, a new black-and-white visual style, and numerous easily-enabled cheat codes.
Getting started
On Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux, install the listed build dependencies via apt, then use one of the two included build scripts to compile against either the Allegro 4 or the newer (currently slower) Allegro 5 library, and run the resulting binary from the install directory. If there's no sound, installing a few additional audio libraries before building resolves it.
History
The remake began as helmantika's (Jorge Rodríguez Santos's) project, with a first beta published in 2003 on top of Ignacio Pérez Gil's Isomot isometric engine; after a multi-year hiatus, a new maintainer picked it up in 2016 to add macOS/PowerPC support, and renewed interest in late 2023 eventually brought the original author back into contact with the project.