My friend Narf took the lead on this one, so it has a different flavor from Gardens in a way I'm really happy with. There's more in the way of overarching narrative and lore. It's still a chain game, so it's all loose and free-form, but it feels more like we were working together to build a larger story than usual. I wouldn't want to approach the anthologies like this every time, but I enjoyed it a lot. It's also our largest collection by a mile, with wuzzy and sraëka both turning in massive RPGMaker games. Even my game is 20-30 minutes, way longer than my previous entries.
I made the fourth game in the collection, Worms: A Love Story. I wrote about my process making it in a blog post last October. The short version is that, thanks to the tireless efforts of its community (and asie's dev work in particular), ZZT's become a legitimately excellent and fully FOSS tool for making and sharing a certain flavor of freeware games online. I think it deserves a spot among the echelons of other robust high-level tools for making top-down games like Bitsy, Puzzlescript, and RPGMaker.
I really like how my game turned out. It's a purely cute wlw story game, one of my favorite kinds of game to make. I made it shortly after finishing the extremely delightful Anthology of the Killer collection, and it consequently wound up being the most "walk around and read fun flavor text" game I've made. I want to play with that form more, I like it a lot. Fair warning that it's less stand-alone than my previous Vextro entries; it calls back to the first three games quite a bit. Some friends have played it on its own and had a good time, so go about it however you like.
I'm planning to do some general upkeep and catch-up on my itch/blog/website over the next few weeks. (Did you notice I have a website again? I'll write about it properly once I've implemented a few more sections.) Once I've got my ducks in a row, I'll do a proper End of 2024 wrap-up post. Thanks as always for reading.
And remember: Keep! On! Digging!
