COMPLETE: Zeux 2: Caverns of Zeux

[kjorteo]

Well, that wasn't supposed to happen. I mean, it wasn't on the list or anything, and I'm trying to be good about sticking to that now. But here we are, I suppose.

Basically, I have a few game ideas kicking around, from a Lolo clone to an RPG to that (probably) not serious Mega Man X fan game, but I've been stuck for ages on 1) ahahaha like I have time to make games on top of the novel and everything else in my life, and 2) what GCS/platform would I even use, anyway? 1 is still an issue so don't expect anything to be happening soon, if ever. For 2, I was curious about Megazeux, having spent my embarrassing teen phase in the ZZT community and never actually having gotten into what the "like ZZT only more powerful and can do sorcery" side of it was like. Admittedly Fusion is probably a better idea for flexibility and making something anyone would actually play, but I figured learning MZX could serve as an interim ZZT --> MZX --> ??? step between something I actually know and something modern devs actually use.

So obviously step one was to beat Caverns of Zeux, AKA The Game That Comes With MegaZeux. (Or it did until recently, anyway, and it's still a recommended first download even if it's technically decoupled now.) ZZT has Town, MZX has Caverns. I'm sure someone from the MZX community can explain why the first game ever made for MegaZeux was Zeux 2: Caverns of Zeux, and Zeux 1: Labyrinth of Zeux didn't come out until years later. I'm also sure they've probably addressed that so many times that I'm pointing out the equivalent of the "if it doesn't scan that must mean it's free" joke. Sorry, I'm new here.

Anyway, Caverns is fairly short and simple by actual game standards--any ZZT veteran would instantly recognize this as a standard "collect the 5 Things" quest game... except that it's not. Collecting all five rainbow gems is how you clear the first area. From there, there are six more bosses, seven pendants, six crystals... it feels like a hybrid of an N64-era Rare collectathon and Wonder Boy: Fail You Have Turned Into A Furry. (Really, any game where the clear moral of the story is "Be a dragon always" is okay with me.) It's long by ZZT standards, and by that I mean it took two days to beat rather than an hour, and it's... well, cavernous.

The biggest obstacle I experienced (other than that you can Sierra-softlock your game with no warning if you go into the wrong mouse hole first) is that there is a ton of backtracking and it is frequently unclear what area you just unlocked by accomplishing whatever goal you just accomplished. Once I was in a new area, I could find my way through and beat the boss easily enough, but if the boss didn't actually give me anything except a dead end and maybe turning me into a skeleton then the sense of "okay, now what?" necessitated a walkthrough on several occasions.

Still, as an MZX pack-in it's... well, to be honest, a little daunting. Coming from ZZT to MZX, Caverns already does some fairly complicated special effects and programming tricks that kind of make me afraid to try to break into it. I mean, this looks hard already, and this is coming from someone with ZZT experience looking at a language that reviews call easy to learn and is specifically designed to be a smooth ZZT-but-better transition. And that's for Caverns, which is, again, the Town of MegaZeux. If this is anything like ZZT, well, eventually the ZZT community hit a point where games that looked like Town weren't even allowed on Z2 anymore; the entire community had advanced so much that "your game must at least use STK I mean come on" was kind of a benchmark. If this is Baby's First MZX game, what do real MZX games look like nowadays?

(Answer: Like this or this, apparently. Holy fuck this was a bad idea.)

Comments

[xyzzysqrl]

... DOES Caverns of Zeux come with Megazeux? I recall a different game, but don't recall a title, just a sky with twinkling stars and a stick-figure to control in a side-scrolling platformy view.

It was probably someone's six room demo of their giant magnum opus. (Incomplete.)

[kjorteo]

From what I understand reading DigitalMZX's documentation and such: It used to, until around version 2.whatever of Megazeux when they decided to decouple the two. I'm guessing this was probably to spare people from redownloading Caverns every time they were just trying to do a Megazeux version upgrade [citation needed]. It is still highly recommended as a first game download.

[davidn]

The Zeux 1 situation is interesting :) The true first game, Labrynth of Zeux [sic] was a stand-alone single screen platform game that Janson and company released in 1993. After that, Megazeux was conceived as a successor to ZZT, and they opted to continue the story in their new engine - therefore the first Megazeux game is chapter 2 of Zeux, and chapters 3-5 follow as the registered second to fourth game worlds. Then, many years later, someone in the Megazeux community ported the first Zeux into Megazeux and the series is, while released in the wrong order, completely playable in one engine.

Caverns of Zeux is such an interesting game coming from ZZT... if it has one problem it's definitely the backtracking that you mentioned, as well as the unclear nature of where you're even supposed to be backtracking to (you're told about earthquakes early on, but it leaves you searching for which bunch of rocks have now moved out of the way every time you defeat a boss). But it's a great showcase of what Megazeux was first designed to do - ZZT-like gameplay with much more flexibility. I remember that I, too, was prepared for the game to be over once I'd defeated the guardians, only to find that I had just finished the first part of what became a mini-Metroid based in an extended ZZT-like world. Notably, Caverns has about the length and polish of the other three Zeux worlds combined - the fifth chapter Catacombs in particular is just a multi-floor maze and looks like it was made in about a week.

As I expounded upon in Dos's article about ZIG, these game creation systems occupy a strange and uncomfortable place today. I don't think there's much value in looking at Megazeux as a game creation system for a game that wouldn't specifically be targeted at the Megazeux community - it's about challenge and workarounds and squeezing things into a system that wasn't natively designed for them, and I think you'd quickly become frustrated and bogged down by its half-ZZT-like way of doing things. (I think that this is a major contributor to the way that I have to struggle to remember any non-Janson Megazeux game that was actually finished.)

I'm definitely an advocate of Fusion (or as it seems to have become these days, Five Nights At Freddy's Construction Kit) and it's more of a blank slate rather than an engine that you have to work around. Though it has its quirks that have built up over many years of evolution as well, which I'm hoping will be addressed in the upcoming Fusion 3.

No matter what choice you make, though, you're going to have to put in some time just exploring and learning. That sometimes doesn't come easily to people like us (especially, though I regret to say it, at our age), when we already have such a firmly established hold as to what we're good at and what we don't know. Trying to dive in and make your grand project first in any environment would never go smoothly - you'd have to invest time putting together experimental games, learning what you can do and how you might achieve it. But I'd be glad to help you out however I can!

[kjorteo]

Caverns definitely has a problem with unclear backtracking goals. I can think of numerous times when I beat a boss or reached the end of an area, looked at what I had gained from the experience (if anything at all!) and... just... had no earthly idea what I was supposed to do next with that. The "random earthquake clears the next way to the next area so just go there" method is only used by two of the seven guardians. The first instance is the first guardian, and the nearby village even mentions the earthquake when you report back to them that you beat it, so that one's fine... but then after several bosses training you to expect a spellbook or key or new form or something obvious like that, the... what, fifth? guardian does the earthquake thing again with no one saying anything--he drops literally nothing and his last words are just "AAAARGH!" and you're just supposed to remember that the Star Trek screen shaking when he blew up meant to check the cave all the way back in the first area. Also, casting the earthquake spell in the lava river room? Really?? And that mouse hole softlock out of nowhere is cruel enough to fit in just fine with almost any Sierra game.

Frustrated and bogged down... the idea was to try Megazeux because my ZZT familiarity would make it easier to adapt! But you're probably right; some of the games do look great and the "like ZZT" gives it a certain nostalgia that appeals to me, but I probably would just be putting in all that effort just to move from a ship that sunk ten years ago to one that sunk five years ago. *Sigh, grumble*

Then again, we're talking years of playing around with whatever I get into before I even advance to the point of being able to release anything, and I won't even start on that whole process until other years-long projects are dealt with. Honestly, this will probably never come to fruition, or if it does it won't be for a decade or more. It was just a random curiosity-itch.