I think I have a story start-to-end that will work. I'm feeling tired, but good!

I'm not sure if big "engine" boards will be appropriate for the tone I'm going for. I need smaller chunks of game that are easier to manage, can be blended together, can be understood without long explanations, and are less prone to elusive ZZT-OOP bugs.

In one case, I had a board that I was pretty proud of that implemented something I wanted to do for a while: direct objects to build components of a small village. You win the board when it contains a certain number of unique structures (house, tower, mill -- really just abstract shapes), a river, a lake, at least one forest tile, etc, and they all fit within an enclosed space. But it was about 19700 bytes in size. If a ZZT board goes over 20000 bytes, things go bad. And if there was a major bug lurking in there that needed more scripting to resolve, it would be almost impossible to fix without cutting things. And what if I needed to add additional game-wide management scripts to every board? It's just not worth it.

I'm also dropping art boards where the player would be put into a box in the corner (see attachments). This is against my nature, as I enjoy losing myself in drawing things, but that's not what I want for this particular project.

Back down to about 75KB now.

Working title: Faux Amis

Early plot drafts involved something absurd happening to the sun. The idea was to have the player fetch six macguffins, one at a time, and sell them to an NPC located on a summit, which has a wide view of the sky. Eight yellow objects clumped together represent the sun, and would travel a few steps West every time an item was delivered, from 6 AM on the right-hand side of the screen, to Noontime at the center.

At noon, something absurd would happen to the sun, like a rocket shooting out of the ground and blowing it to smithereens, or a straw extending from the ground, drinking the sun away like a juice box. The player would then be transported to a dark version of the game world, where torchlight is always needed to see. I dropped the summit and 'sun catastrophe' to focus on other parts of the game, and to condense player travel. I'll still have a dark version of the map, but it'll just take place at midnight.

But I am oh-so-hesitant to cut that sun animation. I tried sticking it into the central plaza area of the game, which has a much smaller view of the sky. It doesn't look right, because clearly the sun is not the area's light source. As a compromise, I'm shoehorning in a false lighting effect where the rooftops of buildings in the area change their shading very slightly as the sun travels westward. It's not perfect, it only affects one screen's worth of the town, and it uses a good chunk of my object budget, but hopefully it works out. This is a bit of a gamble. A GIF of the seven lighting states is attached.

I'd also like to figure out how to add some very small movement to the clouds, but I also don't want to push my luck.

10-hour night shifts leave me little time after work to sit in front of KevEdit, but a lot of time for 'what if I do XYZ' thoughts to cross my mind. I'm 4 days on, 3 off until July. Those three consecutive days off should be productive. I'm going to try and set a hard finish date for myself on or before July 6.

Current dabbling: I'd like one or two moments where an imposter player passes through an area that the player has either already been to, or will be visiting, and performs some echo of an action that has been done, or will be done. The ZZT player is a white smiley on a blue background, and AFAIK it's the only creature that doesn't change its background color to match fake walls / floors beneath it. For a non-player object to have a blue background, it must either 1) never move, or 2) only ever move over fake walls that have a blue background.

There seems to be a way to make it appear that an object has its own independent background color by using two auxiliary objects. These helpers move along with the main object in parallel, #putting down fakes in front of the object, and then #putting empty cells behind them. The empty cells that the object will walk over must have their background color pre-set. Although empty cells in ZZT are always rendered black, a fortuitous oversight in ZZT-OOP means that if you #put a fake over an empty cell, without specifying a color (ZZT-OOP can only specify bright foreground colors), the empty cell's color information is passed on to the fake.

The order of the objects in the stat listing is also crucial to making it work, to prevent the auxiliary objects from overwriting the imposter player with their #put commands.

@zero: sends movement signal to object @one
@one: lays down a fake wall in front of the imposter player, signals the fake player to move (@two), and also moves itself.
@two: the fake player object signals @three to act, and then moves. @two is capable of moving one step before @three acts, like a fly just barely escaping from a fly swatter.
@three: places an empty cell behind the player so that a trail of blue fake walls is not left, then moves itself.

@oneb and @threeb are a second set of auxiliary objects to follow the fake player in a different direction.

This is all pretty fragile, and vastly unnecessary, but it didn't take too long to put together, and might be fun to stick into a spoopy dark board somewhere.

I planned to have three areas in the game:

1) A surface overworld with dialogue-driven subquests (ostensibly a tutorial)
2) An underworld maze that requires torch lighting
3) Accessed from the underworld, puzzle/treasure rooms with no dialogue at all.

I have a pile of action-puzzle chamber ideas for #3, and a few ideas for #2, but I'm struggling to link them all together. Although #1 is mostly laid out, I'm having difficulty filling it with actual content. I'm going to try and determine a solution to this by end-of-day.

Attached is a stitched-together map of the overworld as it is right now. The bottom three boards will contain one passage each to the underworld.

Came up with some layouts for the Zones and Sectors (attached). The plan is to smash the two Sectors of a Zone into the same set of boards, so that the player can see further challenges before getting to them, I guess as teasers.

The Zone B layout gives me a place to insert that imposter effect I mentioned on 5 June. I'm hoping I can fit it in twice, but it depends on how much else is going on in that board at the same time.

Three puzzles / challenges per sector, two sectors sharing the same boards per zone, three zones = 18 puzzles. The puzzles I have so far are nothing special, but they were fun to implement in ZZT-OOP. How you progress through them is equally as important to their overall quality and stability.

I did a lot of work on the first act, slow and arduous, like carving. I'm teetering around 194KB now, which carries the dual sentiments of "lots of work done, good job" and "uh oh, I could be running out of space soon". It's a strange feeling to be earnestly counting bytes in 2018.

I am now firmly in "I just want to get this done and move on" territory. I'm cutting the puzzle rooms down to six, which is what I had in mind originally. I may need to renege on my goal to keep narration to a minimum, as the environment I've made is not as self-explanatory as I thought it would be. I'll hold off on making that decision until later.

One thing I forgot about, that absolutely I loved working on in ZZT, is threading dialogue with flag checks and label zaps to personalize reactions to the player's behavior. For example, if the player goes into an NPC's house, and immediately starts messing with that NPC's belongings without talking to them first, ZZT-OOP is very capable of catching that and having the NPC say something like "who are you, and why are you messing with my stuff?", and then have that blend back into the main NPC dialogue. Flags permitting, you can reference that behavior further into the game.

I'm on track to be done next week, assuming no unexpected things come up. I'm going to stop posting updates between now and then, as most of the unsure things that I've been writing about have either become clearer, or have been dropped altogether from the project. I just need to finish implementing the final act and ending, clean up the puzzles, and then go through some playtest-fix-playtest cycles until it's more or less done. It won't be the game I pictured in the beginning, it might not even be all that good, but it'll be something.

Almost there...

Been following since your first post and pretty excited to play it!

First thing I'd like to say after playing it is, Great Job!
I really enjoy cohesive Zzt worlds.
The good:
Your color schemes buildings and effects were all on point to create a solid place for puzzles and narration mechanics.
The puzzles I was able to complete took just enough figuring out to not be too entirely tedious.
The great:
I especially liked the color blocks puzzle.
Fitting those shapes in that square took just the right amount of tinkering after I figured out the mechanics, and left me feeling like I had accomplished something.
No time was spared creating the water and particle effects (ship effects).
The bad:
I like your idea of not having to give much explanation, but with several puzzles, no amount of tinkering was enough for me to figure them out.
(the ammo, scroll, boulder puzzles). But I'm not much good at puzzle games I the first place.
It would be nice to have an easy system to know how many Fowe dollars I had, and which kinds.
I'm not sure if you meant to, but I had to go underground and come out to the shopkeeper every time I wanted to exchange dollars. It took me 3 times to get enough gems.
Lastly, I wasn't familiar with the way you used the torches underground, and didn't figure out that I could use one to see better until the end of the game. I'm sure it would be intuitive for some people, but for me it just wasn't. I'm going to replay the entire game in a bit and see what I missed.

Overall I give the game a 4 out of 5 in its current state. Very well done.
Grrr… I'm going to have to make something now. Too bad Zzt is so funly frusterating.

Will put up a final release this Saturday.

Changes:

* The passages behind the red gates have been replaced with direct board links to the Dark Halls Labyrinth. whoops this was already done im losing my mind
* Force additional "Room is dark - need to light a torch!" messages when first encountering dark boards with black-on-black torch masks.
* Various cosmetic bug fixes, and compressed flag errors fixed.
* Remove branching paths from the labyrinth, making the player unlock all red gates in order to finish the game. The branching paths were from a time when I imagined that the labyrinth would be more like a standard video game dungeon, but as-is, they are just pretty conduits that lead to the puzzle boards.
* Red gates are locked up after their two puzzle boards are completed.
* Protocol board: the first object will default to having a script that causes it to move in a horseshoe pattern.
* Major oversights in the distribution of gems to the player from the pawn shop have been corrected.
* Most importantly, recoloured the "X" on the title screen to red.

Edit: It's up now.