A Dink in the Grass, Fire 1000, Super Wall Puncher, and ZZTorture

CONTENT WARNING:

Swearing and text character on text character violence, possibly some anti-capitalist stuff!

Made in Epic's first project, the 1991 text-based game engine ZZT!

It was made for Oktrollberfest 2023. It's a troll game. What's that? "a troll game is a game that sets up and subverts expectations.  The best troll games are ones where the player can follow the logic of the game, but that doesn't stop them from walking into the game's traps."

As streaming has happened and some people figured it out, time to let the cat out of the bag: My Oktrollberfest game jam game is actually four entire games with an installer that randomly picks one and deletes the others. People have been having wildly different experiences, but now I've updated it with a new file that removes the installer and no longer obscures the four games. Play them all at your leisure!

All four games are written in ZZT, the first game engine by Epic, sort of Unreal Engine 0. You can read all about it on the Museum of ZZT here: About ZZT Technically all all of them are written using WeaveZZT, a heavily hacked modified modern version of ZZT. ZZT is text-based.

The games are:

A Dink in the Grass - A demake and parody of the first of a certain Japanese company's long-running action RPG series.

Super Wall Puncher - Basically I took a bunch of screens from old games I did, fixed up the graphics a bit, and added a new mechanism where you punch enough walls on a building and then it collapses, leaving ash behind. Three unique endings!

Fire 1000 - A protest game where you play Swim Teeney, CEO of Epic Megagems (original name do not steal) on your quest to fire 1000 employees.

ZZTorture - This might be a little inside baseball. It's designed to seem like the first game made by a teenager in 199X just figuring out ZZT, but it's also subtly playing on the expectations of people familiar with ZZT. Bad on purpose...?

Credits:

Writing, Art, Music, Coding: Jeremy W. Kaufmann

Dink Win Screen Art: Laura Randolph

Dink Pig Sprite: Emily Kaufmann

Tools: Zeta, Zima, OpenZoo by Asie, Zedit2 by Lancer-X, Weave by WiL, ZZT by Tim Sweeney.

-What's it run on?-

Minimum specs: This will run on basically any modern Windows computer. This is using the Weave 3.2f fork of ZZT.

November 5th, 2023

-Jeremy W. Kaufmann