Analyzing Eastern Mind: What’s the Deal with the Furoshiki?

Some Eastern Mind players have noticed that the game’s Furoshiki displays weird and seemingly inconsistent behavior when clicked. Watch the clip below to see what I mean:

How do you open this thing?

Luckily, the Mac version of Eastern Mind was distributed with editable Macromedia Director files, meaning I could take a peek at how the code works. First, I found the “hitbox” of the Furoshiki sprite:

A rectangle represents the Furoshiki’s “hitbox”

Next, I found the associated scripts. This script is attached to the Furoshiki sprite:

on mouseUp
    if doubleClick() then
        ClickBag
    end if
end mouseUp

And this is the clickBag handler called by that code (handler is Director’s name for a function)

on clickBag
  if gFlag <> 1  then
    --    when Bag is close
    OpenBag
  else
    --    when Bag is Open
    closeBag
  end if
end clickBag

As we can see, the clickBag handler simply toggles whether the bag is open or closed. But when exactly is the clickBag handler called? Looking at the first script, on mouseUp means that something happens whenever the bag’s sprite is clicked. But what happens? The condition doubleClick is checked, and if it’s true then the clickBag handler runs.

That brings us to the heart of the matter: what exactly satisfies the doubleClick condition? This is not up to the game; it’s decided by Director Player. And Director Player defines a double-click as 2 clicks on the same sprite within a very short period of time. This has weird implications: a triple-click counts as 2 double-clicks, a quadruple-click counts as 3 double-clicks, etc. Strangely enough, one triple-click will actually open the bag and close it again. That’s because both the 2nd and the 3rd click occur soon after another click on the same sprite, thus satisfying the definition of a double-click.

So there you have it, a very minor quirk of Eastern Mind explained in great detail. Kudos to you if you actually read the whole thing :)