Ichiro wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 6:55 amWere you inspired by the CANS series or Insanifest for MZX, because I'm getting a lot of that vibe.
It probably seems that way because there was a very particular formula for a scene that most Megazeux games included, where some random person from the Megazeux community would appear as a cameo, say whatever catchphrase they used to be known for saying on IRC (or just the first random, meaningless sentence that came into the game creator's head, and then for years afterward, people would assume it was that person's catchphrase, even if they never actually said it,) and then they'd usually die gorily, partly to make them stop talking and partly because the game was made by a 13-year-old boy in the 90s for whom the funniest things in the universe were blood and swear words. (Though in hindsight, that was at least better than being a 13-year-old boy in 2021, for whom the funniest thing in the universe is endlessly repeating the same 2 or 3 lines from Shrek, a movie released well before he was born, while pretending to have deep and devoutly held opinions about which memes are "outdated" or "forced", and which memes aren't those things.)
Technically, STOAT.rpg follows that same formula, but I think it's a lot more purposeful than the MZX games that used to use that formula; even ignoring the subtext about the actual OHRRPGCE community, there is a plot (a very simple one, but it is there, and it works deceptively well, both as a cautionary tale and as a sendup of End of Evangelion) where it matters that you've been gorily killing everyone you've met.
Incidentally, I've always thought that if I ever created a game engine, it would be called "Merveilleux", it would come with a demo game (like Vikings of Midgard or Wandering Hamster) that would include as many stupid puns based on French words that end in "eux" as possible, and it would be designed as a
successor to Megazeux (that link is pretty much the best explanation of what Megazeux is and why anyone cares about it, for anyone for whom this all sounds like gibberish,) with sprite- and tile-based graphics, with the ability to define a library of universal robots that could be placed on any board, and would be guaranteed to behave the same way on all boards (sort of like the "Global NPCs" feature that was recently added to the OHRRPGCE, come to think of it,) and without the restriction of robots only being to execute 40 commands per frame (although since Megazeux has been ported to run on modern operating systems, the current version of Megazeux itself no longer has that limitation either.)
I also wanted this engine to define robots not just through each robot having its own script that determines everything it does, but in terms of properties that can be shared between robots, that other robots can react to, and that can have functions associated with them that will be added to any robot's script if it has that property. So for instance, you could define a "flying" modifier, which would override a robot's movement functions with functions that didn't check for certain obstacles in the robot's way before letting it move, and that way, there could be a flying version of any robot.
Or you could define "weak against fire", "normal damage from fire", and "resistant to fire" modifiers, each of which would add an (identically named) function to a robot's code that would be called when it was hit by a fire-elemental attack and would decrease an HP variable (which would have a value local to each robot) by a different amount, and you could give each robot one of those modifiers. This would eliminate any need to duplicate the same damage code across scripts for different robots, and provide a way to implement powerups or equipment to give the player resistance to fire (you would just need to change which modifier the player robot had.)
I've written up some notes about how a scripting language could be implemented to do these things. It's all in my backlog of things that I sincerely want to do someday, in my copious free time, but in practice I'm almost certainly not going to live long enough to finish them. There it joins building a (several) fursuits, learning to model and animate things in Blender, properly learning to play keyboards, proving that if P = NP then N = 1, and furthermore.
Of course, ever since
Baba Is You was released, if I actually did create a game engine that incorporated that modifier idea, nobody would ever believe I didn't rip it off from that game. And that's terribly unfair, because the truth is, I got that idea by ripping it off from the Super Mario series, and the way those games feature variations of basic enemies with added abilities (e. g. Parakoopa = Koopa + flying ability, Buzzy Beetle = Koopa + fire immunity, Fire Piranha Plant = Piranha Plant + fireball-shooting ability.)
However, I don't hold any ill will against Baba Is You, and you should absolutely play Baba Is You, because it's hands down one of the best puzzle games of all time, and because it's so thoughtfully designed that I think it's a necessity to play for anyone who aspires to design games themselves, not just because of the great variety of puzzle concepts and properties that can be given to objects, but because of what a great job it does of teaching you about advanced interactions between objects without ever stopping the game to explain anything verbally. Each of the early levels (both in the game as a whole and in each world) is designed to teach you about a very specific trick you'll need to use later on, and all of those bits of information become tools you need to put together to solve the later levels.