[Otto Germain]

The title screen looks awesome!

[Graham]

Thanks! And thanks for the acronym, it really helped shape the title screen, actually.

[Graham]

I'm looking for a way to temporarily mute sfx in my game. Since I load all sfx into the sfx table and then call them from there, I thought a solution would be to save a blank sfx table and load that with robotic when I needed them muted. Alas I don't see a command or counter to load a sfx table through robotic. Am I missing it?

This post has been edited by Graham: 14 May 2014 - 06:19 PM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Nope, there is no way to change the SFX table mid-game.

My suggestion is to have a robot that runs last in a cycle (generally this means 'bottom-right corner of the board') doing this:
: "l"
if "sfx_mute" = 0 "no_mute"
end sam
end play
: "no_mute"
wait for 1
goto "l"

[Graham]

Good solution! Thanks Lancer!

[Graham]

Hmm, interestingly, it's not working 100% of the time. I'd say 95%. Could it be because sfx get queued when there are more than one at a time?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Unfortunately, if that doesn't work there's no way to do it with the SFX system. You'll have to move eeeverything to sound effect code.

If you want my recommendation about how to take this step, it would be to search and replace 'sfx ' with 'set "$sfx.('$sfx.length')" ' in each robot. This means all those commands will now append the sfx # to the end of the $sfx string. You can then have a robot run at the end of each cycle and play all of the sfx, or just a limited # of sfx, depending on how much you want to spam the player's speakers, and then clear the string afterwards- you could also implement some level of queueing, if so desired. Of course, if sfx are muted, you play nothing. That search string with the space after it is also not likely to collide with other commands. The downside is that it will increase the size of the robots by 22 bytes per sfx command.

If you only want to be able to play one sfx per cycle, you can simplify this a bit. Search and replace 'sfx ' with 'set "sfx" '. That will only increase the robot mem by 5 bytes per sfx command. Then, since 0 is a valid sound effect, you want to set "sfx" to -1 at the start of the game, then have the sfx-playing robot set "sfx" to -1 again after it plays a sound effect, using -1 as a value to represent no sound effect. You can shrink that further by reducing the size of the counter name - if you use the smallest counter ("", the zero-length counter) you can reduce the cost to 2 bytes per sfx command. Of course this means you can't use the zero-length counter for anything else. In the same way, you can use the 1-length string ("$") to reduce the robot mem cost of the string solution to 16 bytes (search and replace 'sfx ' with 'set "$.('$.length')" ').

[Graham]

Woo Hoo!!! after two weeks of work the story (intro to the game) is nearly done. I may post up a video after I tie up some things but for now I'll share some pictures. the script program to handle story progression is somewhere around 800 lines long, but boy does it seem worth it now. I'm enjoying watching it so much.

[Graham]

I play tested the game for an hour or so after I got most of the bugs squashed that were related to the implementation of a story. It was really refreshing to play from the beginning, title screen forward and seeing how much has been done. with that said, I have a large list of bugs to fix that are fairly easy and I think I know the issue with most of them. Here's a bug report:

[ "6/5/14, #314"
[ "+fixing bugs in end of story & transition to gameplay"
[ "+made house level portal a unique robot to avoid problems"

[ "*TODO'S"
[ "*need to add check mark to ram needed section of level info pane"
[ "*move location of floppy disk collected info to upper left"
[ " corner of screen and make it smaller"
[ "*if no tablets have been encountered in a level, give option"
[ " to restart level from load option"

[ "-BUG REPORT"
[ "-portal sfx during demo"
[ "-levelportal2 message flashes"
[ "-music quiets when you enter level 1"
[ "-short pause when you collect floppy or ram and get info text"
[ "-house board on re-entry,black space where floppy disk robot was"
[ "-music restarts on area boards every time you re-enter"
[ "-waterfall char on oceanside area is incorrect"
[ "-anytablets should not multidownload if you are collecting an"
[ " ability for the first time; it should end so you can read"
[ " the ablity description"
[ "-on oceanside area, servo always starts back in front of house"
[ "-portals should not enter servo if up is already pressed when"
[ " he come upon them"
[ "-level 4; steel crate gets in the way"
[ "-make crate in basement with ram taller"

[RyanThunder]

In your June 4th post, the way you drew your characters in MegaZeux looks outstanding. What was your technique?

[Graham]

RyanThunder, on 06 June 2014 - 02:05 PM, said:

In your June 4th post, the way you drew your characters in MegaZeux looks outstanding. What was your technique?

Thanks!! =^) Not much technique. I guess you could say trial and error. This was my first attempt:

and I wasn't real happy with the outcome. So I studied it a little and realized what I didn't like; the head lacked the proper shape, no neck, helmet hair, a stupid look.

Then I looked at some cartoons that I thought were aesthetically pleasing. I mainly looked at "Calvin and Hobbes", because I like Watterson's artwork and style as much as the humor and story content. That's where I got the messy hair from. Also it helped me to shape the head a little better and realize the eye's and nose needed work. I tried to reduce blockiness where possible without giving up too many characters.

I've also come to realize that in MegaZeux art, less is more, and less is often better. I've tried to take a more minimal approach to artwork in general in this game. Trying to reduce the use of single pixels because they stand out too much. That sort of thing. Here's an example of what I mean:

Servo has very similar art to a reboot of Amnesia that I was attempting a few years back. If you look at the trees and the clouds and the background in general, I think you'll agree that Servo's looks better. It has a more simple approach, more like what you would find in an NES game. Less pixel focus, more focus on the object as a whole. For this game at least, which uses mostly large sprites using less detail actually looks better and I tried to maintain that approach though all its artwork.

BTW, The artwork from the Amnesia reboot was ripped from the original Servo game:

I guess I just keep recycling this art until if finally goes into a full game that I release and I'm happy with (which is Servo's Adventure)

Sorry that was such a long explanation.

This post has been edited by Graham: 07 June 2014 - 07:31 AM

[RyanThunder]

Graham, on 07 June 2014 - 02:47 AM, said:

Sorry that was such a long explanation.

Might have been long but it was thorough and informative! Thanks! I'll have to remember some of these techniques when I design my next game. At first, designing large objects in MegaZeux with jagged edges (i.e. pixel-y looking), may seem like a bad idea, but then you realize it's probably better in some cases. Not the best way to put it, but the human brain is designed to finish incomplete shapes that the eyes see, such as telling the eyes that the jagged round thing in front of them is supposed to be a circle, even though it isn't.

[Graham]

I'm glad I could help.

[Graham]

All this talk of ZZT has got me really nostalgic tonight. As I sit here waiting for my copy of the book ZZT by Anna Anthropy to arrive, I feel compelled to share my ZZT story. I'm hoping others might do the same. I'm creating this like a Blog so I can share it with others outside the community. I hope no one minds.

My parents bought a used IBM 286 with dos in 1993-ish. I think the hard drive was 12mb? I know it wasn't more than 20mb. It had a dozen games, commander keen 1& 2 were two I remember being drawn to right away. I checked out all the games. ZZT was one of them. I didn't even play past the first screen because it looked so primitive.


It was my brother who discovered it had a game editor. I was blown away, I had never imagined that was possible. I set to work creating my first game, a nine board square world of city blocks laid out neatly. A little like Town of ZZT but with less flair. I saved it as City.zzt and with that promptly erased the copy of City that the computer came with. I bought all the ZZT disks a year later and they came with a copy of the mysterious City i'd never seen.


I don't have that first world any more, no loss. My next one was a side scroller called Jinx and the Journey:

In it, A witch had cast a spell that had turned the sky black. You play a boy who has the unique ability to fly and so it is decided by the town council that you will go and fight the witch. Every NPC is ground ridden, except enemies, because the witch has obviously cast a spell that grants them the ability to fly too. All this was a way to explain the black screen and the fact that you can move around it at will, despite me intending you to look at it as though it were a side view, even though ZZT technically didn't do that. I thought I was being very clever.

I added lots of iconic (to me) imagery like a floating palace, ala Sonic the Hedgehog's Angel Island.

an underground city in a dome

a machine the witch created to spew enemies into the world

A subterranean cave full of moss and a few insects. That's a magic candle on the center pillar

And this is the Wolf Tree. I'm not sure what that means, but I was in love with the idea of it anyway.


My next game, I believe, was Gemhunt:

Another Side scroller, only this time you are restricted to moving along the ground, except in specific instances like climbing ropes or jumping off a cliff. I achieved this by using the black space of text two blocks above the ground. It's a solid block that is black so it looks like the background. I thought I was being very clever.

The overworld map for Gemhunt. You could play the levels in any order

The information screen that explains how to play the game


I think next I made this RPG called Traseel.

It's about a boy in a village tasked with saving the land by going on a quest for the King. Pretty stereotypical stuff there. It was fashioned after a Sega Genesis game that I had fallen in love with called The Fairy Tale Adventure. I think this is the most ZZT like game that I made. Here is the Boy's Village

The village interior:

some of the enemy riddled landscape


I made a test game just to test random ideas in. I tried to recreate a loop-de-loop from Sonic the Hedgehog:

At this point, I'm sure it's obvious to you that I had an obsession with side scrolling games, especially Sonic. It was the 90's and I was essentially a console gamer, 'nuff said.
I made some artwork in the test game

When my parents got dial up internet, I got my hands on the ZZT Super Tool Kit (STK) Did Janson make that? I had heard a rumor.
any way, I had more colors at my disposal now and made my first mountain background. This background would go on to appear in some form in every game I would make since. I'm pretty sure it's a combination of my reaction to seeing Green Hills Zone for the first time after only having ever experienced Mario Bros. games, and the beautiful backpacking trips that my father had taken me on in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.


There was also this experiment to see if the player could control the movement of an object that was programmed to try and move south all the time, thereby mimicking gravity. Pressing up would make it move north a few spaces (jumping). Left and right to move

Viola! there it is. A true 2-d side-scrolling platform game. I thought I was very clever.
I set to work making a new game. I thought about what I could do within the confines of ZZT. ZZT didn't have scrolling levels, only individual screens linked to each other. It was feasible to have levels use more than one screen, but I couldn't find a neat way to do it. I decided that they would be single screen levels. As such, there needed to be puzzles on them to make them not able to be sped through too quickly. I had played Lemming's, a game that also came on that 286 computer. I decided to model the game after that a little.

The player has some abilities at their disposal to help them navigate the terrain. they were valuable as they were limited to only enough uses to get you through a level. Every time you had to switch to a new ability, you would have one less. The menu on the left is accessed by pressing up or down, which pauses the robot player as long as it's on the ground. Pressing left or right, causes the player to begin using the selected ability in that direction.
I created thirty-ish levels to the game. Some more iconic imagery:

This fossil serves no purpose, it just looked cool. It would go on to cameo in the game I'm making now, Servo's Adventure, which is a direct descendant of this game.

Well that pretty much sums it up. I was never a part of the community. I was too antisocial or whatever to bother to try and reach out to others who shared my interest. My loss I guess. I discovered MegaZeux not long after that and was so in love with the extra level of control you had over everything that I hardly looked back. Well, maybe I look back every once in a while, for nostalgia's sake.

P.S. I'll attach the files to the game's that I've made in case you are interested in checking them out. If you need a copy of ZZT, let me know. And of course, you have to run it though DOS box, or a similar DOS emulator.
 JOURNEY.zip (70.02K)
Number of downloads: 61
 GEMHUNT.zip (84.32K)
Number of downloads: 58
 TRASEEL.zip (75.62K)
Number of downloads: 60
 SONIC.zip (11.77K)
Number of downloads: 61
 Servo.zip (22.38K)
Number of downloads: 55

This post has been edited by Graham: 10 June 2014 - 05:50 AM

[asgromo]

I dunno, i think that's pretty clever stuff!

[Graham]

asgromo, on 10 June 2014 - 04:05 AM, said:

I dunno, i think that's pretty clever stuff!

Haha, thanks :-)

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

I tried JOURNEY, but I couldn't get past the first few boards. Castle, then wizard, then huts? But I can't find any way at all into the huts.

[Graham]

Huge apologies, I made the game at like 16 years old knowing nothing about game design. They really aren't good games at all. But if you would like to play it, I can provide a guide to assist you. I'll look into it when I get home.

[Graham]

I actually see a few people have downloaded it and Gemhunt as well. I added those zips as an afterthought not even considering if they were playable. Since a few people have actually downloaded them, I will play them and see that they don't have any game ending bugs and release patched zips if need be. I can give some hints too or maybe make some things more obvious since I liked to hide stuff.

[Hoof]

That was a great story and made me oh-so-very nostalgic. Now that I'm into my 30s, I've *finally* learned to appreciate nostalgia rather than try and repress it. Thanks for sharing!

[Graham]

I'm happy to share my love of nostalgia. I hope other MegaZeuxer's share their ZZT origin story as well.

Oh heck, just your origin story in general. No matter where you started. I love learning about the origins of things and people.

This post has been edited by Graham: 12 June 2014 - 06:07 PM

[Graham]

ZZT the book has rekindled my love for ZZT. I keep opening it up and reliving certain experiences I haven't had in more than 15 years.

I can't switch gears mentally very easy so it would be hard for me to focus on more than one game at a time. But after Servo is completed I would really like to go back and finish my ZZT and MegaZeux games that have some potential and aren't completed.

It would be a really nice change of pace to focus on something less demanding. Since I didn't know a lot about those systems back then, it would be simpler to work on those games.

[Graham]

Well I haven't posted any progress in some time. I've actually been quite productive lately. I've made 3.5 new levels in the last three weeks, along with fixing a lot of bugs and implementing a lot of new code. Here is a tech demo showing some new gameplay elements including, pushing groups of crates, spreading fire, aiming and firing the laser, detonating TNT crates, and throwing objects. It's running rather slowly in the video because it was recorded on my dinky laptop.

[Graham]

Just a quick progress report; I've added a system to the tablets you download abilities from that alerts you to which abilities you should keep for the next section you are headed into. it's just a small green check below the ability.

which matches the level info pane you get as you are entering a level, there are green checks there to indicate which abilities you need to begin the level.

A deceptively small addition. it actually takes quite a bit of work to implement, but it's totally worth it. gameplay will be a lot less muddled when you have more RAM cards to hold more abilities. It was getting to the point where I wasn't even sure I could keep track of what abilities servo would be using in a section I was designing. Also, I was having to add lots of tablets that had redundant abilities on them, in case that was the one you decided to overwrite, but you actually needed it.

Yeah, this will make for a better experience overall. You can still ignore the check and overwrite the needed ability if you want to, for instance you may have discovered a faster method through the level or you are trying to reach a secret you've discovered.

[Graham]

Ok I haven't been good about updates lately, but I'm still being productive in the game and that's what counts. As I take stock of progress I feel invigorated by what I've accomplished so far.

I've got 28 levels done. 15 of those are main levels (required to finish the game) with 10 main levels to go. The other 13 are hidden or secret levels which are optional, unless you want to 100% the game. There are 12 more hidden levels planned. These are not as difficult to create as they are not tied into the main game so they don't have to follow the ability progression as closely.

Level design-56% done

Gameplay mechanics are something I'm introducing more and more of later in the game. It keeps the game play fresh. I project this will be a 3-5 hour game and gameplay will shift somewhat from pure puzzle to puzzle/action. This is because as you collect more abilities, puzzles become easier to solve, so I'm taking emphasis off that and focusing on action more. I think it's interesting to make a game that slowly morphs styles, I'm not sure a game has done that before.

Gameplay mechanics-75% done

The rest of these are guesstimates

User interface-70%

Engine-95%

Player assets/mechanics/animation-99%

Enemy assets/mechanics/animation-55%

Music-100% (thanks CJA)

Bosses- n/a (I decided to have no bosses in this game)

Items design/assets-80%

Level art/design/assets-50%

Optimization-30%

Testing-20%

Of all of these things, I'm focusing on level design the most right now. I believe once that's in place, the rest will follow.

[Graham]

Somebody on Twitter shared this interesting little guide to making platform games. I found it interesting/inspirational so I thought I'd share it with the community.

 Platform Games.pdf (3.6MB)
Number of downloads: 69

Some of it is a little obvious, but there are definitely some good tips in there I can use.

[CJA]

This guide's cool, but targetting half an hour per level of gameplay in a platformer seems sort of excessive. I think by "level" they might mean something akin to a whole world in Mario or Rayman, or maybe a "zone"

[Graham]

CJA, on 25 August 2014 - 03:29 PM, said:

This guide's cool, but targetting half an hour per level of gameplay in a platformer seems sort of excessive. I think by "level" they might mean something akin to a whole world in Mario or Rayman, or maybe a "zone"

Yeah, I think you are right about that actually. I think 10 minutes might be a good average time these days to spend in a level. Whereas in the good old days that would have been the high end of how long it took to traverse a level, with 5 min. being more average.

[Graham]

Holy Cow! I haven't posted here since last summer! I've been working on level design, though I'll admit, it hasn't been easy. I reached a block about a month back (kind of like writers block) where I can't seem to create any new ideas of note. I've been a little cool on progress since then but I feel it starting to pick back up. I'm not sure why that happens, it's as if my brain needs to reset sometimes.

I added two parallax scrolling layers a few months back as well as a minor overhaul to the sprite generation system. It was pretty major and involved redoing some code. It was really for the better though because I implemented a feature to save a group of robots to text files, shortening the time it takes to implement fixes to preexisting code. I also took some one-off robots and standardized them, making it much easier to use their programs elsewhere in the game. That is something I should have done in the first place.

here is what Area 3 looks like


Here is a slider puzzle that I worked on recently


I've done some neat things lately, I included an homage the the Town of ZZT's bank vault into one of the later levels of my game. You already knew the combination, right?


I'm also trying to squeeze in time to finish a large tutorial I've been working on that explains sprite implementation, as well as taking an online story writing course that my wife gave to me for Christmas. Whew!

[Old-Sckool]

hopefully you'll reach a point where you'll stop adding things soon. can't wait to play it