Four Games Revealed!

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 4 entire games with an installer that randomly picks 1 and deletes the others. People have been having wildly different experiences. I've just updated it to remove the installer and instead just give you all four games in separate folders in one big zip file.

All 4 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: museumofzzt.com/article/view... Technically all all of them are written using WeaveZZT, a heavily hacked modified modern version of ZZT. ZZT is text-based.

Let's go over each of the games and why I did what I did. First let's talk about A Dink in the Grass, which is a demake and parody of the first of a certain Japanese company's long-running action RPG series. When I say this is a heavily modified version of ZZT, I mean it. Dink is still using text-mode graphics but I have per screen custom fonts so I actually did A LOT of original sprite graphics, just limited to the resolution of DOS fonts and EGA colors. Which is a pretty narrow set of rules. Trust me when I tell you how impossible this is in standard ZZT. I am also loading custom palettes but I didn't do THAT much custom palette work, largely due to the fact that I made four entire games in a month.

I did a lot of stuff you can't normally do, including pressing a button and spawning a bomb that counts down and explodes, a magic wand weapon that spawns fireballs in the direction you're pointing, and a chicken that runs erratically around the screen and kills enemies if it happens to hit them. 

ZZT has very primitive sound, just PC speaker stuff, and while I have written lots of PC speaker music for ZZT games in the past, I didn't do it for any of these jam games because of the short timeline. But I might go add some back in later for fun after school ends this semester.

Now let's chat about Super Wall Puncher! This is graffiti on myself or let's call it collage work of stuff I made as a teenager. 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.

This game also gets surreal with multiple endings, including one you probably won't see coming. This game does not have extra sprite work through custom fonts, just the player character, which is the same sprite from my Oktrollberfest 2022 game, Get That Dollar.

The next game is the one streamed yesterday by Dr. Dos on Worlds of ZZT: www.twitch.tv/videos/19757... It's the one ACTUALLY called ZZTorture. I chose to name the overall project that because it was generic and unassuming and didn't suggest the 4 game troll scenario.

ZZTorture 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. It might trick people used to Baby's First ZZT game, but not people unfamiliar w ZZT.

In a meta-troll, ZZTorture is also reproducing the map of my significantly more sophisticated Unreal Engine 5 game project with my classmates at school called Bilt. Here's a trailer for Bilt: youtu.be/BMI7AnZHVQY We're trying to finish it up by the end of the semester in a few weeks.

Finally, in a perfect example of biting the hand that feeds you, is Fire 1000. It's a protest game where you play Swim Teeney, CEO of Epic Megagems (original name do not steal) on your quest to fire 1000 employees. Yeah, I'm pretty upset about so many people in the games industry being laid off by billionaires for the crime of making said billionaires even richer. So I made a game about it! Enjoy.