COMPLETE: Shades of Gray

[kjorteo]

More Museum of ZZT delving for me! Thanks as always to Dr. Dos for all his work preserving ZZT's legacy.

Shades of Gray (ShadesofGrey.zip with an e for the filename, but referred to as Shades of Gray with an a in every other instance?) is the first release by Flimsy Parkins. I mused on him before when I played Sixteen Easy Pieces. If Shades of Gray was his first game, then from it we can discern that he was, uh, kind of always like that.

However, at the same time, Shades of Gray is almost the exact opposite of Sixteen Easy Pieces. Sixteen Easy Pieces is a pure puzzle game made entirely out of premade assets in basic ZZT colors, whereas Shades of Gray is an STK and object-filled special effects extravaganza used in the service of a Town of ZZT-like action/adventure.

In fact, "Town of ZZT-like" is what drew me to this title, and why I'm using my Hauksness icon for this post. Flimsy has taken the actual Town of ZZT and corrupted and deconstructed it, in perhaps a foreshadowing of the infamous Flimsy's Town of ZZT edit (which I'm still hoping someone will someday explain to me.) Shades of Gray is Town of ZZT after the end: someone or something has invaded Town and stolen all of its colors, leaving everything a gray, depressing ruin. Your job is to investigate and find out what happened.

At first, it's a post-apocalyptic nostalgia trip that reminds me of an even bleaker version of Ruins of ZZT by Dr. Dos, the "Ancient Technology" Ludum Dare game that used ZZT's status as an antiquated memory as the basis of the plot. It takes every location you knew and loved and mercilessly shows you what they look like after age, decay, and loss of color. The Three Lakes are a pale shadow of their former challenge now that the lakes have partially dried up and most of the spinning guns no longer function. You may have hated being stuck on the Rube Board when you were younger, but when all the difficult puzzle parts were all but destroyed before you even got there... well, there's something sad and pitiable about that. This game makes me feel sorry for The Town of ZZT.

Once the player acclimates to the melancholy, though, the second notable and striking thing about Shades of Gray is the way its decay shuffles Town's progression around. Just like how some parts that used to stop you are now almost entirely non-factors (RIP Castle of Lots n' Lots of Evil,) other areas that used to be straightforward paths have caved in, requiring some creative shortcut or alternate route. As an example, you still need to access The Mixer at one point, but the path from the central town hub through the forest has collapsed. Instead, you must now take the once-mostly-useless secret passage from the Armory to the space behind the notes in the House of Blues, as one of the notes now collapses to let you through when touched.

It's brilliant, but (much like Sixteen Easy Pieces,) it is perhaps inaccessible to newcomers. Shades of Gray is meant for people who know Town back and forth, the kind of people who read that previous paragraph and instantly knew what I meant without having to look it up. The game certainly doesn't tell you that there's a secret passage from the Armory to the House of Blues. Why would it? It's Town, you should know that already. And even then, some of the secret passages--which are for required plot items that you need to complete the game, mind you--are hidden perhaps a touch too well. I still needed to go through the Museum's board viewer on two occasions. (Thank you so much for the Object and Fake Wall highlight views, Dos. You are a lifesaver.)

Still, if you can put up with the, uh, arcane Flimsy nonsense, then Shades of Gray is a very worthy way to look back on the foundational bedrock of ZZT. It even calls back to what is perhaps the most time-honored tradition in the history of the ZZT community: ending on a cliffhanger to be resolved in a future game which was never made.

Comments

[xaq_the_aereon]

I like to think that this is the end result of Town driving players to overuse the #ZAP command to get past obstacles.

[kjorteo]

?ZAP command! The #ZAP command is something else completely unrelated, because of course it is, this is ZZT, nothing makes sense ever.

[xaq_the_aereon]

Oh, right. Wow, been a while since I've used that...

[davidn]

What a surprisingly melancholy experience for ZZT. It hits harder now than it would have then, I think, because of the feeling of decay lining up with real-world time - visiting the Town of ZZT again and seeing the rot of ages now that everyone's moved on to New Pork City. But it's a great theme for Flimsy to exercise his talent of messing with other people's ZZT worlds - despite the random madness there's real skill there, with the detail in the crumbling keys and the note falling off the House of Blues, which is honestly one of my favourite little effects I've ever seen in a ZZT world. And I wondered how he created the bomb effect, thinking he just turned it into a real detonated bomb at the last second - but the breakables generated at the explosion are coloured empties that become breakables to make them visible! That's just genius.

I definitely had to look through the world viewer a lot as well - I completely missed the points bonus falling (because I was standing to the south of it, as you naturally would) and the secret passage above the three lakes. And I zapped through the conveyors near the end because my fingers don't work that way. I'm also wondering if there's a reason behind the way he binds a couple of objects that you'd expect to have their own code to inaccessible ones elsewhere on the board (the guardian and the bomb on the Rube Board, for example) - I can't remember any ZZT-OOP reason to do that.

[chalcedony_starlings]

^δ₁ For that last: it sounds like a leftover from development. If you think you might want to move an object around a lot during editing or ever have multiple of them, then placing an inert object with the code and then binding to it gives you more flexibility: you can remove the active object temporarily, and it's harder to accidentally erase the object with the real code.

[kjorteo]

I know I did that a lot in all the never-finished never-released scrapped Adventure of Sam remakes I was always working on (you'll have to take my word for this,) which had RPG-like encounters with objects wandering the map that fought you through dialogue when you touched them or they touched you. I'd always hide the original one somewhere in the walls, and all the ones the player engaged with were simple #binds.

The reason I did this was primarily out of an incorrect, irrational fear that letting the player interact with the original would somehow break everything (if the player defeats the original and it dies and is removed from the board, what if the #binding objects stop working because there's nothing to #bind anymore? I'm sure that's not actually how that works, but young me didn't want to chance it. ZZT is finnicky, people get superstitious.) Of course, I also found after the fact that that also made it a lot easier to move and swap around and add and erase enemies as needed for room balance without wiping out the original code.

[chalcedony_starlings]

^δ₁IIRC, any subsequent #bind commands which are executed would no longer be able to find the object by its original name, that is, if there are no remaining copies of it on the board. But the vast majority of uses of #bind are unconditional and at the beginning, and they update the code pointers when they execute—there's no double indirection. So the #die/#become generally happens afterward and has no effect on the other objects that are already bound.

So it's mainly a potential problem if some object is going to die very early, or you're doing Interesting things with rebinding (see the MORPH/PHROM state-switching in PM's TETR for an example of the sort of thing that might be affected).

[kjorteo]

It's definitely the sort of game that accidentally became much more poignant with age. The kind of ideas that Dos explored in Ruins of ZZT weren't there yet back then, as the community was still active. I'm guessing a forgotten and crumbling Town of ZZT would have been an interesting novelty at best.

Now? Ouch.

That said, the special effects in this game are astonishing. I had to go through the viewer after the fact just to look up how in the world he did a lot of the things that happened, and some I'm still not sure I 100% understand even when looking at the source code. The bomb effect is incredible. I love how it being a custom object allowed for things like the countdown slowing down, and the #play command to play a sad little fart of a final explosion sound effect rather than the usual piercing bomb blast jingle. It's just so... fitting and appropriate with everything else on that board, and in that game.