May 16
ZZT is dead (no, really)
the long-running game archive z2 just declared zzt dead, and why not - it’s served its purpose: allowing people who aren’t programmers or digital artists an avenue to game creation before game maker or construct existed. now they do.
I’m glad to see a nice send-off for ZZT by the main indie community, but I disagree with the idea that game maker and construct “[allow] people who aren’t programmers or digital artists an avenue to game creation”— as a total non-“artist” when it comes to graphics/art design, I feel completely unable to use those or any other modern game creation systems. As Anna pointed out earlier in the same article, all of the graphical assets were made for you in ZZT and there was no way to extend them. That’s what, to this day, makes the thought of ZZT appealing to me above and beyond anything else. Unless there is a whole set of free basic graphical assets available for Game Maker that I’m not aware of, which may be something I should look into and possibly follow up on here. (Not that it matters that much anyway, since those two tools are *still* Windows only, which seems so silly in a world where I can run ZZT and Megazeux in MacOS but they’re the ones who are “dead”.)
