Being a kid making games in the early 2000s (jaytholen.net)

49 pointsby farmerbb7 hours ago12 comments

waltbosz 41 minutes ago

When I was a kid making games, I used ZZT. My brother recently got back into it and started teaching his kids for to make ZZT games. I found the programming language too constrictive. It didn't have great support for things like variables and loops. I still enjoyed it. My brother reasoned that the small instruction set makes it easy for his kids to learn to code in it. I suppose that's true. But he never learned to code in higher level languages, so he doesn't really know how frustrating it is to have to write so much ZZT code to accomplish something which would be so simple in another language.

debo_ 34 minutes ago

My earliest "gnarly bug" experience was that the "set flag" operations in ZZT are limited to 8 flags, but it doesn't throw an error if you exceed that limit; it just wraps to the zeroth flag. It took me a full year to figure it out as a ten-year old.

jrootabega an hour ago

If you like the website you should try his game mentioned there, Hypnospace Outlaw. It's hours of reading stuff like that. And you can get all the Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream you want.

Aeolun 34 minutes ago

The only thing I ever used to make games was OHRRPGE

It was hilarious. I didn't know what I was doing, but the dos aesthetics and the many options for FF style attacks made me really happy at the time.

erdemo an hour ago

Whoever maintains this blog website should definitely improve the site's nostalgia theme to make the content more readable.

It could represent how the web was in the 90s, but it doesn't represent what readers like these days. I sent this post to my friend and said to just open it in reader mode. Our eyes are not as sharp as in the 90s my friend.

MacNCheese23 25 minutes ago

i so disagree - and please don't generalize and talk about "what readers like these days" you != everyone

sandrae an hour ago

The website and the theme of the website are perfect for each other. Jay, if you are reading this, please don't change a thing.

debo_ an hour ago

My favorite game-making experiences as a kid (early 90s) were:

- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly

- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.

I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.

[0] https://museumofzzt.com/

glimshe 2 hours ago

Frames and patterned background... And to think this was once cutting edge <sigh>

On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.

maybewhenthesun 2 hours ago

But it perfectly captures what the site is about. ;-)

QuantumNomad_ an hour ago

Exactly! I read it on the phone and I enjoyed the nostalgic look of the page.

I was even thinking, this is what the web used to be.

If instead of this it was written on another Medium blog or as a bunch of tweets, it wouldn’t have had the same impact that it does for me. It is the way that it should be, for the story it is telling.