I spent many hours on researching this:
- For me, 7zip (I am using Linux, but usually this problem is reported by Windows users; other users don't have this problem with 7zip at all) reported a header problem both for the PC build and for the MacOS build. It refuses to unpack. 7zip is known to be intentionally pedantic where most similar programs are lenient and just unpack archives that implement the standard incorrectly, so long as it's clear what is intended.
- I downloaded a special archive tool implemented in Ada that has exceptionally good diagnostics. It refuses to unpack these archives and specifies what the problem is: "ZIP.ARCHIVE_CORRUPTED : Bad (or no) end-of-central-directory". That means that the problem is something trivial and easy to ignore (and ignored by most programs), comparable to a missing period at the end of the last sentence of a chapter in a book.
- Someone contacted the developer or whoever is doing support for The Headmaster on Discord. It appears that the ZIP files in question were created directly by the Ren'Py development environment.
- While the problem is rare, apparently it has been reported for other games by other developers as well. (Though nobody has mentioned a specific game. Likely this happens only for specific versions, probably triggered by something like the exact number of files in the archive, or the length of the filename of the last file, being divisible by some number.)
- There is nothing nefarious going on. No infected downloads. No danger for anyone's computer.
- It's no use downloading the same files again from the same server or from another server.
- It's no use complaining to the developer or wherever you got your download from.
- The two practical solutions are 1) use a different archiving tool to extract the problematic ZIP file, or 2) just download and use the compressed version of the game instead.
- We are not going to get any further by discussing the problem further. This needs to be addressed by a very experienced software developer who happens to be able to reproduce the problem.
- Someone could theoretically fix the problem on a case-by-case basis by unpacking the problematic ZIP files with a tool that is not pedantic, then zipping them again and uploading the result. To retain full functionality this should be done on a Linux or MacOS computer (as the executable bits required by these two operating systems will get lost if you do this on Windows). But the whole situation is so murky that addressing developers about this is unlikely to be successful.
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