Variety (Game-specific)

Variety, a game released on May 22nd, 2020, contains a fork of ZZT by WiL.

There is a customized VZZT.EXE available for use. […] Run VARIETY.BAT to use it. It is not required; the game is fully backwards compatible and will play just fine with vanilla ZZT; however, it adds a number of enhancements to the experience.

VZZT.EXE makes the following changes to the ZZT engine:

• The program skips the configuration screen and immediately begins engine execution with keyboard controls and color graphics.
• The sound effects for passage use, transporter use, item pickups, bomb activation, door unlocking, and cheat entry are changed to shorter sequences.
• If a torch is lit, the torch cycles will never deplete, even if the world sets the value to exactly 1, so the torch will remain lit. To compensate, the torch light is much smaller than in standard ZZT, creating a 9×7 circle as opposed to ZZT's 15×9. Collecting a torch or using the “TORCHES” cheat will cause Ü to be displayed in place of the torch number, and set the torch cycles to 30,000 (which is already set by the VARIETY.ZZT world file).
• For some reason, the darkness effect does not cover the first column of the screen; anything in the first column will be shown even if the room is dark. The game's dark boards all include light-grey water in the first column to cover this up, so this is not obvious unless you turn on darkness in a different board.
• Whenever the player scrolls a text window, there is a random chance that a line beginning with the character Ü will either indent itself by one character or turn from yellow to black. Both of these will be undone the next time the player scrolls the window.
• If the flag infected is set, the player color changes to white-on-black and begins to alternate between white and light grey, along with occasionally flickering between characters 1 and 2.
• If the flag dread is set, the player color changes to dark grey and begins to rapidly switch between text characters. At the same time, the gameplay status bar numbers and key display will be changed to flickering, garbled text. Should the player quit the game, much of the title screen menu will be covered in the character Ü. Note, however, that the gameplay status bar change will only occur if the torch cycles are not 0, and it will only animate if the torch cycles are exactly 30,000 (which is set by the VARIETY.ZZT world file).
• If the flag hype is set, the engine will run at turbo speed, as if an endgame event had occurred. If the flag is then cleared, the engine will return to whichever speed setting the player used.

• Download