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The Spirit of Megazeux
May. 25th, 2007 08:52 amBefore I finally settled on the Click community as my main focus as far as game making is concerned, I used to experiment with a few other game creation systems. One of the earliest of these was ZZT, which if you haven't been listening when I mentioned it before, was an ASCII-based action-adventure type thing written by what was eventually to become Epic Games. Shortly afterwards, I also discovered Megazeux, the spiritual successor to the program - and it allowed such advanced technologies as modifiable ANSI character sets and four-directional scrolling.
Megazeux was the system that I've been least productive in, having at least finished and released one game in all the others that I've tried. I think the major sticking point for me was that it was basically the same keyboard-based creation process as ZZT, but required a whole lot more effort to get something acceptable-looking out of it thanks to other people's talent at tricking the engine into doing a huge amount of things that weren't obvious at first. What resulted was that a large directory of MZX files was left languishing on one of our old computers' hard drives. (I honestly cannot remember most of the home computer inventory now, having pulled them all to pieces and reassembled them into various other computers during my summers away from university). But these have been rescued at last, thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quadralien sending me a 16MB RAR file of a pile of MZX games that we created together and never actually finished.
After looking through them, enthusing over the old ideas, I decided I wanted at least some other people to see them, so this is a 7.2MB selection of things from that file. I've trimmed it down quite a lot because not everything in the RAR was actually ours, but it's often difficult to tell just what files you can delete from an MZX folder and which ones will cause catastrophic results if removed, so sorry for the size of it - still, you've all got broadband connections by now, haven't you? Think of it as a collection of abandoned games with a library of quite possibly illegaly distributed MOD files included.
The ZIP includes Megazeux 2.80h (for Windows) so you can actually run them - I'm not certain if this is the latest version, but I'm confident that I downloaded it fairly recently. The highlights I've included are:
Crusade
This one deserves to be remade. How or when, I don't know, but it has the makings of something fantastic - a story spanning multiple dimensions in the same space, told from the perspective of three different characters. This was a joint effort by me and my two brothers, with each of us taking a character and writing their storyline, converging at different points along the way. It spawned from a piece of ZZT daftness by Richard, which was then remade in Megazeux and had a plot tacked on to the end, but somehow it works. Well, I say "works" - some of it is atrociously put together and the dialogue is mostly terrible, but I can see myself redoing this. The idea of randomly switching dimensions is a way to effortlessly go between styles as disjointedly as is needed, which made it great fun to write. Actually, mine is the least developed of the three characters, as I kept taking over the others' storylines.
Ground
Uniquely amongst the collection, this is finished. It was written byquadralien, and contains what in hindsight is actually a really good RPG battle system. It's based on Scissors, Paper, Stone-style random chance, but it's more involved than anything that I ever wrote in it. And after the RPG section, it switches suddenly to one of the most frustrating platform sections I have ever experienced, including a generous non-working save point halfway through. I'll get you for that.
Space Assassin and Scorpion Swamp
When in school about six years ago (and do I feel old saying that), Jamie and I hit on an inspired way to motivate each other to actually complete something - rivalry. We would make sure to start on incredibly similar projects at the same time, which created the sense that we had to beat each other by producing a better game than the other. It did wonders for my final year Computing class, where someone would announce smugly that their calculator program handled cubic roots, and we'd all respond by annoyedly writing in support for arbitrary roots, formula memory and an instant messenger service. (I should add that under this plan we never actually completed anything, but it seemed like a good idea.) I've gone on about that for far too long. The point is, these are both adaptations of the Fighting Fantasy books with the same titles written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and despite having similar source material they turned out very different.
Scorpion Swamp,quadralien's effort, is a very RPG-styled game in which only the introduction is really done, but it has a battle system set up and accurate recreations of the story branches. It also has the fantastic feature that allows you to sell out at the beginning of the game!
Space Assassin is a little more loosely based, focusing more on exploration and getting the elements of the book to work in a more typical MZX action game. I rather like the feature that makes your character visibly deteriorate when low on health (an idea copied from Doomguy, whose name completely escapes me at the moment. Flynn Taggart! That's it). The game is more complete than Scorpion Swamp, but still just ends abruptly - there are a couple of early endings to the book there, though.
Traps
This is another clever idea byquadralien, or Jamie, or whatever name I'm meant to use here. In a demonstration of how Megazeux can be used for game types that weren't originally intended by the authors, this is a puzzle game along the lines of Lemmings. Except (because he is dangerously insane) the object isn't to help the bear-like creatures get to the exit - instead, the idea is to prevent as many of them as possible from excaping, by dropping large rocks on them, getting them to wander into lava, or other traps of varying nastiness. Only a couple of levels were ever done, but this was a decent concept and could probably be done quite a lot better under MMF.
WRISE
I'm sure that title stood for something, but I've no idea what it might have been. This is another of Jamie's efforts, being an action game based around several cramped rooms. The objective of the only mission so far is to get some data on to your pendrive, while getting around the building's incredibly dodgy disks.
Dark Side
This one's pretty interesting. It's another action game by me, with a title stolen from an old 3D PC game, in which only the tutorial and first level are complete. It was an attempt to make an almost Doom-like shooter from a top-down 2D perspective, with the added complications of experience, level-ups, and collecting orbs, gems and keys (prize items of increasing difficulty to collect) to unlock more levels. Games like this are simple to make in MZX, but it was the progression system that I was very proud of, and you may have recognized the layout of it - indeed, I liked the idea so much that I wanted to revive it for Crystal Towers 2. Dark Side also features the first hints of the style of music that I revived in the first CT game (with the water stage music being directly converted).
It's also worth mentioning that the reason this game was scrapped was because I decided I wanted to try to cram it into ZZT instead, because it was a game that was pretty standard in MZX but technically impressive in such a limited environment. After struggling to get it into ZZT's memory limits and running out of room in the end, it eventually worked and became my magnificent octopus, The Mercenary.
And now, the technical bit
Megazeux is a very different way of programming from Click - allowing each object to have its own individually running program allows things like artificial intelligence to be coded far more easily, and everything is kept globally over an entire game rather than expecting you to keep track of your variables over frames and deciding which need to be saved and restored. To remake most of these, I'd probably have to write my own interpreter in MMF2 - but I put together an experimental editor not so long ago, and a full interpreter might not be such a huge jump after that...
Megazeux was the system that I've been least productive in, having at least finished and released one game in all the others that I've tried. I think the major sticking point for me was that it was basically the same keyboard-based creation process as ZZT, but required a whole lot more effort to get something acceptable-looking out of it thanks to other people's talent at tricking the engine into doing a huge amount of things that weren't obvious at first. What resulted was that a large directory of MZX files was left languishing on one of our old computers' hard drives. (I honestly cannot remember most of the home computer inventory now, having pulled them all to pieces and reassembled them into various other computers during my summers away from university). But these have been rescued at last, thanks to
quadralien sending me a 16MB RAR file of a pile of MZX games that we created together and never actually finished.After looking through them, enthusing over the old ideas, I decided I wanted at least some other people to see them, so this is a 7.2MB selection of things from that file. I've trimmed it down quite a lot because not everything in the RAR was actually ours, but it's often difficult to tell just what files you can delete from an MZX folder and which ones will cause catastrophic results if removed, so sorry for the size of it - still, you've all got broadband connections by now, haven't you? Think of it as a collection of abandoned games with a library of quite possibly illegaly distributed MOD files included.
The ZIP includes Megazeux 2.80h (for Windows) so you can actually run them - I'm not certain if this is the latest version, but I'm confident that I downloaded it fairly recently. The highlights I've included are:
Crusade
This one deserves to be remade. How or when, I don't know, but it has the makings of something fantastic - a story spanning multiple dimensions in the same space, told from the perspective of three different characters. This was a joint effort by me and my two brothers, with each of us taking a character and writing their storyline, converging at different points along the way. It spawned from a piece of ZZT daftness by Richard, which was then remade in Megazeux and had a plot tacked on to the end, but somehow it works. Well, I say "works" - some of it is atrociously put together and the dialogue is mostly terrible, but I can see myself redoing this. The idea of randomly switching dimensions is a way to effortlessly go between styles as disjointedly as is needed, which made it great fun to write. Actually, mine is the least developed of the three characters, as I kept taking over the others' storylines.
Ground
Uniquely amongst the collection, this is finished. It was written by
quadralien, and contains what in hindsight is actually a really good RPG battle system. It's based on Scissors, Paper, Stone-style random chance, but it's more involved than anything that I ever wrote in it. And after the RPG section, it switches suddenly to one of the most frustrating platform sections I have ever experienced, including a generous non-working save point halfway through. I'll get you for that.Space Assassin and Scorpion Swamp
When in school about six years ago (and do I feel old saying that), Jamie and I hit on an inspired way to motivate each other to actually complete something - rivalry. We would make sure to start on incredibly similar projects at the same time, which created the sense that we had to beat each other by producing a better game than the other. It did wonders for my final year Computing class, where someone would announce smugly that their calculator program handled cubic roots, and we'd all respond by annoyedly writing in support for arbitrary roots, formula memory and an instant messenger service. (I should add that under this plan we never actually completed anything, but it seemed like a good idea.) I've gone on about that for far too long. The point is, these are both adaptations of the Fighting Fantasy books with the same titles written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and despite having similar source material they turned out very different.
Scorpion Swamp,
quadralien's effort, is a very RPG-styled game in which only the introduction is really done, but it has a battle system set up and accurate recreations of the story branches. It also has the fantastic feature that allows you to sell out at the beginning of the game!Space Assassin is a little more loosely based, focusing more on exploration and getting the elements of the book to work in a more typical MZX action game. I rather like the feature that makes your character visibly deteriorate when low on health (an idea copied from Doomguy, whose name completely escapes me at the moment. Flynn Taggart! That's it). The game is more complete than Scorpion Swamp, but still just ends abruptly - there are a couple of early endings to the book there, though.
Traps
This is another clever idea by
quadralien, or Jamie, or whatever name I'm meant to use here. In a demonstration of how Megazeux can be used for game types that weren't originally intended by the authors, this is a puzzle game along the lines of Lemmings. Except (because he is dangerously insane) the object isn't to help the bear-like creatures get to the exit - instead, the idea is to prevent as many of them as possible from excaping, by dropping large rocks on them, getting them to wander into lava, or other traps of varying nastiness. Only a couple of levels were ever done, but this was a decent concept and could probably be done quite a lot better under MMF.WRISE
I'm sure that title stood for something, but I've no idea what it might have been. This is another of Jamie's efforts, being an action game based around several cramped rooms. The objective of the only mission so far is to get some data on to your pendrive, while getting around the building's incredibly dodgy disks.
Dark Side
This one's pretty interesting. It's another action game by me, with a title stolen from an old 3D PC game, in which only the tutorial and first level are complete. It was an attempt to make an almost Doom-like shooter from a top-down 2D perspective, with the added complications of experience, level-ups, and collecting orbs, gems and keys (prize items of increasing difficulty to collect) to unlock more levels. Games like this are simple to make in MZX, but it was the progression system that I was very proud of, and you may have recognized the layout of it - indeed, I liked the idea so much that I wanted to revive it for Crystal Towers 2. Dark Side also features the first hints of the style of music that I revived in the first CT game (with the water stage music being directly converted).
It's also worth mentioning that the reason this game was scrapped was because I decided I wanted to try to cram it into ZZT instead, because it was a game that was pretty standard in MZX but technically impressive in such a limited environment. After struggling to get it into ZZT's memory limits and running out of room in the end, it eventually worked and became my magnificent octopus, The Mercenary.
And now, the technical bit
Megazeux is a very different way of programming from Click - allowing each object to have its own individually running program allows things like artificial intelligence to be coded far more easily, and everything is kept globally over an entire game rather than expecting you to keep track of your variables over frames and deciding which need to be saved and restored. To remake most of these, I'd probably have to write my own interpreter in MMF2 - but I put together an experimental editor not so long ago, and a full interpreter might not be such a huge jump after that...
