When I was a kid making games, I used ZZT. My brother recently got back into it and started teaching his kids for to make ZZT games. I found the programming language too constrictive. It didn't have great support for things like variables and loops. I still enjoyed it. My brother reasoned that the small instruction set makes it easy for his kids to learn to code in it. I suppose that's true. But he never learned to code in higher level languages, so he doesn't really know how frustrating it is to have to write so much ZZT code to accomplish something which would be so simple in another language.
My earliest "gnarly bug" experience was that the "set flag" operations in ZZT are limited to 8 flags, but it doesn't throw an error if you exceed that limit; it just wraps to the zeroth flag. It took me a full year to figure it out as a ten-year old.
If you like the website you should try his game mentioned there, Hypnospace Outlaw. It's hours of reading stuff like that. And you can get all the Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream you want.
Whoever maintains this blog website should definitely improve the site's nostalgia theme to make the content more readable.
It could represent how the web was in the 90s, but it doesn't represent what readers like these days. I sent this post to my friend and said to just open it in reader mode. Our eyes are not as sharp as in the 90s my friend.
My favorite game-making experiences as a kid (early 90s) were:
- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly
- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.
I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.
Exactly! I read it on the phone and I enjoyed the nostalgic look of the page.
I was even thinking, this is what the web used to be.
If instead of this it was written on another Medium blog or as a bunch of tweets, it wouldn’t have had the same impact that it does for me. It is the way that it should be, for the story it is telling.
It was hilarious. I didn't know what I was doing, but the dos aesthetics and the many options for FF style attacks made me really happy at the time.
It could represent how the web was in the 90s, but it doesn't represent what readers like these days. I sent this post to my friend and said to just open it in reader mode. Our eyes are not as sharp as in the 90s my friend.
- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly
- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.
I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.
[0] https://museumofzzt.com/
On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.
I was even thinking, this is what the web used to be.
If instead of this it was written on another Medium blog or as a bunch of tweets, it wouldn’t have had the same impact that it does for me. It is the way that it should be, for the story it is telling.