Diff for 2018 ZZT Project

Sun, 05/27/2018 - 07:31 by qrleonSun, 05/27/2018 - 07:33 by qrleon

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2018 ZZT Project

Capture d’écran de 2018-05-27 10-52-58.png

I'm working a lot of graveyard shifts lately, and have found myself turning to ZZT to burn idle time when I'm home and nothing's open. ZZT is technically very simple, but I find myself going OCD messing around with details in KevEdit, and the time just melts away.

I made a handful of draft game/puzzle boards, but I'm lukewarm about the overall story / circumstances I've plotted out. Struggling to make it all fit together. I've sunk too much time into it to stop now, though. The World file is over 100 kilobytes. The recommended safe maximum is about 250KB. I really don't want to split this into two files, so this should be an effective hard limit on what I can put in. I'm going to try and get the game at least mostly laid out by the time I return to day shifts.

I plan to make heavy use of dark rooms for the central hub, and use the black torch/passage effect to highlight contours of what would otherwise be a completely grey screen except for the little torch-carrying player. The problem with dark rooms in ZZT is that torches only last for about 22 seconds, so even if you have a large supply, you have to keep pressing T to light them. So I want dark rooms to play a significant role, but not for the player to be stuck doing too many consecutive tasks at once in the dark.

Indicating all contours in dark rooms is also a potentially dangerous design choice, as it can lull the player into a false sense of security: they may delay lighting a torch because they can "see" the path ahead, even though they may be walking straight into a newly-spawned set of enemies. The solution is likely to make the paths a little more winding within the space between the contours. I'll have to do some tests.