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Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production (share.google)
submitted 9 months ago* by to c/games@lemmy.world
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The glory days of Epic Games are long gone and Tim Sweeney is a god damn moron.

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[–] 7 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

Lesser known, but I cannot recommend enough going back and exploring the worlds of ZZT (and by extension, MegaZeux) as an early, amateur game engine. The projects are raw but endearing and an absolutely wonderful time capsule that still has a niche but dedicated following.

https://museumofzzt.com/

https://www.digitalmzx.com/

Some day when I have the time, I'd like to make an extended engine similar to this. Something with a simple scripting language, extreme flexibility in character and color sets. Ability to run and host your own game worlds over SSH or something similar. Just like a real spit in the face for triple A and going the complete opposite direction of minimal but super accessible.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    somehow missed zzt entirely, never played it, seen some random screenshots back in the day and thought it was some kind of weird nethack -clone with occasional ascii graphics. But also the only few screenshots I recall looked like nethack, with ascii smiley -character instead lf @ as user avatar.

    So... it's some kind of game engine which you can script to make any kind of game, kinda?

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    That's it exactly.

    It's unfortunately a lot more limited than you may expect, it's designed around very limited ideas, but that said it's still incredibly flexible and seeing how people have designed complex games around those limitations is half the fun.

    MegaZeux is a fan extension of it (skipping over SuperZZT) that expands it further and breaks a lot of those limitations, but still has certain odd assumptions about gameplay very much from its era.

    You can actually play right in browser, try Zeux 2: Caverns of Zeux, https://www.digitalmzx.com/show.php?id=182

    It's the first game released by the developer on the engine which is intended to show off a bunch of the ideas they had. It has a surprise ending that leads into a very bizarre Zeux 3 (which I haven't beat yet). Zeux 1 was on ZZT but I think was remade for the engine at some point.

    Spend an afternoon poking around the site and just trying a few games in your browser, see what it's about! Then check out the help files and look at the scripting. The biggest downside for me is that if/then statements can ONLY EVER lead to jumps. You can't process simple logic without jumping to a label to do so ...

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