Far too many unfinished ZZT games to work on at once

[H1~~]

You wouldn't know it from lookin' at my lack of posts (at time of writing)... and no presence in the ZZT community online prior... or any distributed ZZT games... but
I'm dealing with a particular issue here and I was hopin' for some advice from the good folks of ZZT's community... and I don't think... a lot of 'em are unfamiliar with it.
It's not that I'm working on a lot of ZZT games...
It's not that I've got a lot going on at once in my 'Online life'...


It's this one specific issue about HOW having so many unfiished projects gets in the way of doin' any of 'em at once.
This is only just ZZT, too, I've done '2-percent done' things for everything from Commander Keen in 1990 to BioShock in 2007...
Mainly for Quake and Quake 3 Arena and other games on its engine.
However this is's ZZT...
where storytelling and code efficiency and individual tile layouts trump how 'cool' something looks and filesize limits and any sort of formal shader system...
and I know you probbaly don't apprciate this sort of request...
from someone who has no prior precedence, prominence, or repute of any sort in the ZZT community...
but I need some help here.


One of these was some dumb 'epic adventure across' worlds things when I had my first major ambitions about ZZT game-making.
I did have one big fumble where I somehow went over the 100 board limit and had to export the boards one by one via KevEdit or some other as ZZT's editor would not load the .zzt file...
Nowadays I would easily see that as a big technical hassle... but I had thought this was some big dramatic thing at the time... further demonstrating my lack of real originality I had then...
Its storyline was SUPPOSED to be all epically revealed as you progress through the game and go back and find more world areas open up (Legend of Zelda style) all in one single .zzt file...
Someone who's character name starts with a Z ('original'! ) and finds more meaning to their name starting with Z as the game goes along (really 'original'! ) and then
ventures across worlds picking up lost companions on a plane crash that landed them on the edge an Island before trekking across a series of 8 villages and helping them
resolve their own twisted Societal conflicts each of 8 different natures before getting to a space shuttle at the last minutes before its launch on a weird mission and taking the fight to
some faceless oppressor across the stars only to have it revealed that their control of you was doing the RIGHT thing 'cause you were
fucking up their twisted plans to save the universe in ways that others wouldn't immediately understand and thus try to thwart them... which you did...
and now for winning the game you wind up dooming the universe (REALLY REALLY REALLY 'origina'l! )...


Another one was some dumb effort to string along 5 or more other small-scale 'unfinished games' on the basis of some 'journey across worlds'...
to loosely string a story together to explain goin' through them.


Some dumb ripoff of the 'Pirates! ' ZZT game (or it would have been)...
A game loosely based on a 'world map setup' where the main map across 4 boards in smallscale takes you between villages and dungeons...
inspired by this actually being done in another game (but I forget its name and filename)...
Something about a 'time warp' and travelling to repair breaches in chronological fabric...
Though that was more in short-scale and was more of a 'Trippy Comedy' game and didn't really conflict with the overall story arc 'going across worlds' in being so.
I've had my share in 'art worlds' taking the player across some dumb single-board art setups (so rather 'joke art worlds')... couldn't finish that either... dammit.


Essentailly you are some dumb emotionally tormented High School kid stalked by two faceless dudes at points along the way and keep fallin' asleep and having wierd seemingly real dreams.
Until you finally get back home to your bed and fall asleep one last time...
and wind up takin' the river raft to some Utopian society of 'talking stuffed animals' and a lake with water you can breathe in (10 year old fantasies abound right here)...
Until you find out they had to answer to some God they reallllly didn't like their way of doing things... but because he was God... they had to do what he asked.
In order to be their own truly free society where no one opresses any other they had to answer to him on ocassion and treat him like he's King and can do no wrong and all that...
but BIG TWIST...
they only managed to be some truly free society by concentrating the ills of societal repression on God distributively...
So you went to confront him 'cause you didn't agree with the ends justifying the means to acheive this weird 10-year old kid imagining of a true societal utopia.
Not understanding the way they manage to do it and the lengths they went to to maintain it and why these free thinkers then dumbed themselves down to talk to God without offending him.
Which you don't then do for him and manage to beat him in a good argument.


Excpet God is infallible.
So for beating God in an argument using reason, you who dared to use reason against the one concentrated against that in this free thinking utopia of a society, are now at fault...
because it casts this element of using reason over brute force, real freedom, shared between intellectuals and brutes alike... as WHAT he was wrong about in the argument... and for that...
that is now the one element that Society now lacks forever. And as someone for whom that was THE most important thing in their life... it's only that much worse... and it's your fault alone.


Yet now in the final moments as the world's fabric of realiy crumbles in the face of this one facet of character of individuals burning down to become forever impossible to be better had...
You are hurled through a portal to another reality entirely...
and it is now your task to travel across worlds that face these same issues...
of abuse of authority... about forcing your own values over another... and of how Society cannot better work in other ways...
and right wrongs while you can there doing so much for them only to have to leave just when things are getting good...
learning all along the way greater effectiveness, how better to reach these faster, and the depths of severity to which Societies can be so BAD in these elements...
All in whole other sets of reality itself.
Only working your return to where you had your fall...
to right your wrong there...
and forever make up for the loss you caused there against what you believe in more than anyone else by then returning that to the Utopaiac way it was before far and beyond...
even managing to then get the God they had HAD to rely on the concentration of the ills into to get it to work before to share in it as well...
from what you had learned in your journey...


Then there was teh Cannibal Isle rip-off...
which was on the basis of washing ashore and making your way out of caves winding up in some village society of Tribal Anthro Dragons (or 'Drag' people for short)...
You aslo get to the island's outskirts via being either the sole survivor or one of few survivors of a plane crash.
Yeah I really don't have as many ideas going around in these unfinished ZZT games as their 'compelling storylines' intended for them to have would have you beleive.
It was SUPPOSED to be some incredibly bad sci-fi torture fanfic where the Drags would systematically torture visitors and even their own members at random...
Revealed dramatically when you go exploring into the forbidden-to-enter cave complexes and warned of the dangers and fully forewanred and all that good stuff.
For whatever reasons maybe religious devotion to False Gods that later turned out to be real actually justifying the necessity only to determine that it wasn't justified anyway...
Until you dared defy them and beat a lotta psycho bosses to show them that this was wrong...


I wouldn't even call these ZZT games and just call them ZZT game attempts.
Seriously, 80 percent of the ideas worked out, 2 percent of the actual board work done.


Make no mistake that I have been keeping up with ZZT's community enthusiasm in my own ways depite never talkin' with any of 'em online.
I've experimented with using player clones for teleports and made whole world boards focused on this theme in particular to get through it from the last to the next.
I have gone back through old ZZT world files and serially replaced long streches of idential 'pattern and color' combinations...
with floodfills of differnt 'STK tiles'...
in specific combinations of WHICH but random as to WHERE...
I've had my share of having the work on a ZZT world broken up by the want to do a whole board of 'ZZT art on a screen'...
only it's just a whole lotta gradient-fill show-offing and doesn't have to do much with the game...
hence interrupting all the world-making.
I even encountered the 'scroll turning into red key' ZZT crash bug...
where if you touch a red key that a scroll turns into it crashes the game with a 'runtime error'...
independently on my own before encountering it elsewhere.
I was doin' that in some dumb set-up where you take a stay in a hotel room for the night... and
wind up venturing into some wierd mazes around the room... and
meet a new AND KEY character in the game bound and gagged in a closet
He was a cocky and sarcastic with good insight... dragon anthro... character...
I guess I thought dark purple dragons were cool at that point and thus especially an Anthro of one.
Except it also involved old-school 'key puzzles' as seen in Dungeons of ZZT (ZZT), Zoo of ZZT (SuperZZT), and parts of Zeux II: Caverns of Zeux (MegaZeux)...
I later happened upon that bein' done in another ZZT game...
happened in an 'art world' where they gave you the 'quit option' in some hilarious way...
and a scroll turns into a red key thus crashing the game.
I thougt there was some WEIRD E.S.P. for the community going on there.
I guess I musta figured I was just well into ZZT's 'engine tricks' and thus a total coincidence like that wasn't unlikely.


I COULD just take these stories and make them into good ol' fashioned fanfiction... except that then they are actually deep and insightful and are good at storytelling... 'surprise' right?
Just so dramatically contrasting 'fanfic' notions by actually being these deeply resounding adventure stories while still having all the fucked-upness required to fit into the genre.
Yet I find ZZT to be a far better canvas on which to paint this exact sort of storytelling than anything else I know... and
at any rate I do still have these to finish along with my other 'game mods' of very old PC games from before 'game mods' was even a term... but
I figured I'd start on that with my old unfinished ZZT games... or rather... unfinished attempts at ZZT games... and now
I do have at least one other player I know of 'newer games' (I met them in one such that OTHERS consider it an 'older PC game' but for me it's really one of the 'newer games' ones)...
and they resumed my interest in ZZT because I shared my love of ZZT with them... and they had seemed they could really get into it... and suggested I try to ressurect it myself...
after thinking it had died... from a combination of lack of front-page site updates... and that the site went down for about 2 weeks recently.


I COULD just deadbolt myself to finish these not only to get them done but to the envisioning of what they were originally supposed to be.
I COULD just scrap these entirely and do just the storytelling part in them that I had orignally imagined for them as full-on epics to be told in the more fitting form of 'fucked up anime fanfics'.
I COULD EVEN just forget about my hopes of finishing this all and just try to bear with it haunting me about it never getting done and DEAL with that having been my determination.
However I find myself at a crossroads...
and unlike in Town of ZZT... even though I am just at the start of my long adventures in ZZT... after having not even really started for years after it came out...
I will only be able to go down one path whichever I choose...

[Commodore]

We grow accustomed to the Dark --
When light is put away --
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye --

A Moment -- We uncertain step
For newness of the night --
Then -- fit our Vision to the Dark --
And meet the Road -- erect --

And so of larger -- Darkness --
Those Evenings of the Brain --
When not a Moon disclose a sign --
Or Star -- come out -- within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead --
But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight --
And Life steps almost straight.

[H1~~]

You want me to forge my own path rather than asking what others would have me do don't you?
Note to self: Find better ways to give advice in what is literally Poetry...

[Quantum P.]

I can't tell you how many abandoned projects I have under my belt. I had tons of fun working on them, so they did serve a purpose -- but they were never finished.

I think that's true for many people. It doesn't look that way, because people almost never see your unfinished projects. But I suspect that there's more people in your boat than you realize.

Some of the most fun I've had is in short (often collaborative) projects. I have a lot of fun, and I get the joy of sharing something. I also think shorter projects are more convenient to play, for people who have limited time or like casual gaming. Big hint, ZZTV 11 is accepting channel signups right now, and ZZTV channels make awesome short projects...

I don't know a lot about how to manage long projects. I did make a 4-world space game once, and it was a happy accident that I decided to release it in parts -- because I felt pressure from other people to get it done. Even then, there was a 16-month delay between parts 3 and 4.

(Did I tell you that I have a lot of unfinished projects? I'm still remembering new ones even as I finish this post.)

[H1~~]

Yes, well, considering my big fuck-up at the start as a 'newcomer claiming they have done ZZT for a long time and just hadn't been seen by the community before' (this is EXACTLY the thing that Zenith Nadir hates that Dr. Dos is talking about in the Site/Forum Rules! ) I wasn't inclined to expect others to believe me let alone try to help me on this.
I generally ask things more for conversation... as even if I can do this on my own... it's nice to talk about it dammit.

[Saxxon]

The unfinished projects keep your skills sharp between finished ones.

[H1~~]

I'm considering just creating a map of all the 'game ideas' that have gone into my 'unfinished games' and organizing them into some... ideal combination... of which ones get into which few games.
Don't get your hopes up. Just a thought at this point. I'm considering something along the lines of a classic 'shootout with a lone Boss object' to tide me over refamiliarizing myself with ZZT-OOP.

[Commodore]

I've often just had one off ideas and draw them on paper, or make a mock-up in zzt and later when I'm working on something I'll look back and see if I can't adapt them. Unfinished stuff is good fodder for incorporating into something else. Some boards from Archaeologist Simulator were from unfinished games. In particular the Grecian dark areas, which was originally just an outline of a wrapping level I did at some point. There were boards I had made for experimenting with flimsy's edge/dead-player clone trick, and that became the first board, and gave me the impetus to continue to use the trick throughout the game.