Re:MegaZeux: Game creation system released in 1994 and still...
by mntmoss on Sunday December 22, 2019 @11:34PM
(#21861488)
As someone who frequently dabbled in but rarely contributed to the MZX scene, I can concur. There were a lot of formative experiences in it, even though the nature of the tools, unlike ZZT which has always been very productive for a certain kind of gameplay, often drove creators away from completion and into demoscene-esque hacking to break the limits and make their games more like "real" games. I was most engaged with it in its first years before going open-source, 1995-98 or so. The development since then has made it even more of a curiosity, with so many ways to customize your project in a way that will vastly expand its potential scope.
But it was a friendly environment to start in, and didn't try to push you towards professionalizing as tends to be the case with modern game engines - there were plenty of MZX games that I enjoyed and completed in test mode after getting softlocked by some bug and going out to the editor to fix it. There's a lesson in that, for sure - far different from the climate of Steam review comments.
Re:MegaZeux: Game creation system released in 1994 and still...
by throwaway53678 on Sunday December 22, 2019 @11:20PM
(#21861465)
Exophase is the best programmer I’ve ever met. Also, he’s the one that accomplished the port from DOS to Windows (IIRC, having nothing but the decompiled binaries to work from) back in the early 2000’s, and is probably the reason there’s still a community today. I could see MZX having died out otherwise.
Re:MegaZeux: Game creation system released in 1994 and still...
by Minor49er on Monday December 23, 2019 @01:20AM
(#21861822)
He's a great dev. Despite that, a friend and I would troll him pretty hard on IRC. There was a user who popped on at some point named Elig who was good friends with him. We speculated that it was a fake alter ego of his (Elig is Gile backwards, short for Gilead).
Also his name Exophase came about because someone asked him to name a boss, but it was too cool a name for someone's game, so he used it for himself
It's interesting to see some go on to bigger projects in programming (Gilead Kutnick aka Exophase) or music (Sai'ke, Emalkay), and animation (can't remember the name of who I'm thinking of for this one in particular, but he released some very well-made animations on Newgrounds before entering the industry).
MegaZeux has a built in language called Robotic that was basically a limited BASIC, but organized in entities called "robots". There were also graphical hacks that let developers adjust the appearance of the ASCII characters or change the color palette. There was a lot to it for the time.
The Day of Zeux, or "DoZ", was always a fun test where teams would organize and create a game in 24 hours based on a specific topic given by judges. My first entry humbled me pretty hard since I went into it cocky about my capabilities, but my teammates abandoned development and we came in dead last. I tried in a later year and my team then created a game about escaping from a prison, which even had multiple endings. We didn't win, but we were near the top that time.
If it wasn't for MegaZeux, I probably wouldn't be a full time developer today.
I hope college went well for RoSS. Also, long live Frozen Cow Industries