Nanogame 24HOZZT finished!

The contest is over, start submitting those ballots! Voting stops tomorrow at midnight GMT. All the games are zipped together here.

Nanogame 24HOZZT ballot

The themes for this contest were: Sandwiches and Elections. The following games were submitted by the deadline.

=- Pancake's Election Game -= by Pancake
The Ultimate Sandwich by Quantum P.
Sandwich Quest by Schrödinger's Cat
Royal Sandwich by qrleon

The voting categories are:
A. Relevance to Theme (how well the game stays on topic)
B. Most Visually Appealing (how good the graphics are, relatively speaking.)
C. Best Use of Space (how much the game makes of the one board permitted)
and the bonus category is:
*. Funniest Dialogue (a reward for humor)

EDIT: and Best in Show, of course. Sorry for forgetting earlier.

Please select the first, second, and third best games for each category (not counting your own) and send me your ballot in the following format:

Relevance to Theme:
1.
2.
3.
Most Visually Appealing:
1.
2.
3.
Best Use of Space:
1.
2.
3.
Funniest Dialogue:
1.
2.
3.
Best in Show:
1.
2.
3.

Nanogame contest

EDIT: The contest has begun! The themes are: Elections and Sandwiches. You don't have to use both. The judging will be based on Relevance to Theme, Most Visually Appealing, Best use of Space, and a "bonus" category I will reveal when the judging starts.

Email me your finished game (as a zipped .zzt file, please, even if it IS only one board) when you are done. Resubmissions are allowed, but use common sense and don't send me hourly updates or I'll have to dig through all of them at the end and I might not get the right file into the judging.

FOLLOWING IS THE PRE-CONTEST ANNOUNCEMENT AND EMBEDDED TIMER.

Okay, I'm choosing a list of possible themes and judging categories for the Nanogame Contest. It starts when there is one day left on this countdown clock.

Rules: Anonymity available upon request, but not required. Email me your submissions when you are done. Late submissions will not be graded. KevEdit and ZZTAE are allowed. Games must be one board in length (including the title screen). Questions may be asked on the z2 thread or in the Meebo Box in my last post (I will have to sleep, however).

EDIT: I registered #nupanick on irc.slashnet.org, you can go there too.

My Meebo Room

Guess what? I can embed things in HTML here, too. Here's my Meebo room, in case I need to host a chat someday. Meebo is an awesome chat website that works with a number of chat protocols, including AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Google Chat (but not IRC). You can log onto all your IM accounts at once using the Meebo interface, and you can host your own chatrooms on Meebo's own chat protocol. Here it is.

What is ZZT?

Now I'll use this space to explain something I've gotten all too tired of explaining: What is this ZZT thing I talk about? Well, since if you're reading this you're probably connected to the internet, you can look it up on Wikipedia but for those of you who want to hear my personal opinion I'll give it in full here.
*a-hem.*
ZZT is a dos game with a level editor. That's the gist of it. Now into the interesting stuff. ZZT doesn't stand for anything, the title was chosen to be arbitrarily late in the alphabet and is unrelated to any band or song. The level editor was originally subscription-based but is now freeware and is in fact built into the game, allowing anyone to make their own level. The game itself tends to consist of running around, shooting monsters, and grabbing items (but if you make your own levels you can change this, of course). The levels are saved as separate files and can be easily distributed (which is allowed now that the game is freeware) and can be found on a number of websites, although the biggest archive of games I've found so far is on z2. z2 is cool but the forums are extremely violent and sarcastic so if you don't want to have to wade through the sarcasm I'd suggest Belsambar. Belsambar has much less activity (I post there, and there's some spammers, and maybe some random people who show up, feel like they're in a giant empty room, and leave), but at least you won't have to carry a metaphorical marker and posterboard to tell people when you're not being sarcastic.
Oh, did I mention? ZZT has practically no graphics. That is, where you might expect graphics, even a pixelated animation, there is ascii. That is, you have mostly letters and numbers and stuff, but also a decent-sized set of lines, rectangles, and smiley faces (not the sideways kind, real smiley faces!). To get an idea of what I mean, here's a screenshot:

This screenshot is from a game I'm making for the sole purpose of teaching new players how the built-in tools in ZZT work, because some people starting with the new games take time to learn the basics of shooting monsters, pushing blocks, and navigating mazes.
There are even ZZT games about ZZT games, like Syndrome, a game listing all the Syndromes shown by first-time ZZTers when they make their first games. These include "big empty room syndrome," "not enough ammo syndrome," and "I-gotta-fill-up-the-screen syndrome." Playing this game should help you figure out what not to do, if you want to make a game.
There are external editors that let you use a few more colors, copy and paste large chunks of a room, or import object code from text files. Oh, yeah, you can program your own objects to make the game more customized. You can do most of what you need from the built-in editor, though, and there's all sorts of games inspired by ZZT in some way, like MegaZeux, Plastic, Zig, Bang, and others. Choose whichever suits your style best, but ZZT is a good place to start because it's simpler than most of those.

I started a group for ZZTers on Steam but that gets less activity than Belsambar. There are IRC chatrooms where ZZTers sometimes meet but thet's only a community hub, if you actually want to talk about ZZT your best bet is Belsambar or z2.

Maybe I'll give a tutorial next time, please leave your comment if you want to see more like this.