I never really have been one to complete projects that I start, but back in 199X or so (when I was in High School) I encountered a simple game development engine called ZZT. Coded by Tim Sweeney of Epic MegaGames, it used ANSI characters to present very simple graphics, and most games focused on an ANSI smiley face moving about and shooting small white dots at other ANSI characters. It had a simple programming language included called ZZT-OOP, and no method for reproducing sound other than from the PC speaker. Wikipedia tells me it was released in 1991, although I didn’t discover it until late, I think from a BBS.
With this engine I created a game I called Nerd-Boy’s Day at School. It was about what you’d expect… a self-insertion game featuring a character analogous to me, and attending a school the layout of which was identical to the small Baptist school that I attended (approximately 100 students in grades K thru 12). The ZZT-OOP Language allowed the main smiley face to detect collisions with other smiley faces and present a simple dialog box (although without the possibility of responses) which I used to create conversations with classmates who were similar to my own.
The game centered around confronting one of the teachers of the school who I particularly hated, an arrogant, domineering man called Stark who frequently mocked the students, or shouted at them in rage. I believe the “plot,” such as it was, consisted of this Stark holing up in the Church Sanctuary attached to the School, directing his minions thru Machiavellian machinations to discredit the current Principal, so that he could take over the school and rule it with an iron fist.
It differed little from other ZZT games: I dubbed the little white bullets as “spitwads” which, when fired at opponents, were capable of incapacitating them, and most of your time was spent trying to collect them from hidden caches discovered by pressing against invisible walls and suchlike. In fact, I think I made the game hard enough that it was impossible to complete without discovering these caches — if you didn’t, you would run out of spitwads long before the end.
There were various “monster rooms” which featured randomly moving ANSI characters that I explained as “rowdy basketball players” or “playing elementary schoolers” and which could kill the player at a touch. Shooting them cleared them from the screen. As the movement was very quick, the game was too difficult.
I eventually played through the game myself, testing all of its aspects, including the battle with Stark the final boss which I coded in a fairly complex serious of “patterns” instead of having him move randomly. I remember I had to play the scene many times in order to beat him, although I’m fairly certain there were checkpoints throughout the game.
Nobody else even tried the game, not even my friends. I can’t remember if I uploaded the game to any of my town’s local BBS’s or the Internet, and of course it is nowhere to be found through Google (I guess there’s a small chance a BBS could have copied it to some ZZT archive). Given the difficulty of the ANSI opponents and the sparse “spitwads,” I assume most people would have abandoned the game shortly after they started it.