This Maze Will Be Big Enough to Call Home Someday
A downloadable game
The year is 199X.
Final Fantasy III just came out on the Super Nintendo. When you finished the game, you knew two things: 1, that Shadow the Ninja was the coolest character ever, and, 2, that you were going to be a Game Designer.
THIS MAZE is a 3-5 player game about online teens co-designing their dream game using an archaic, text-based game editor. Draw ASCII characters on a map, sabotage your friends' ideas, and create a game that will make the XYZZY forums rave.
You'll get the following:
- Rules PDF: Two pages, front and back, full color.
- Black and white version of the rules, perfect for printing.
- Printable "Your Kid" character sheets, two to a page.
- Printable map sheet, with seven rooms pre-drawn.
- Blank map sheet, only featuring the character legend.
- Plaintext version of the rules, for use with screenreaders.
THIS MAZE was originally released as part of the award-winning Forgotten Palaces trilogy.
Thanks to Adal, Andi, Caleb, Zac, Dice Dojo, Windy City Games, and the ZZT community. This game uses the Lexend typeface by Bonnie Shaver-Troup, Thomas Jockin, Santiago Orozco, italics for Lexend by Héctor Gómez, and The Ultimate Old School PC Font Pack by VileR.
Fuck the IDF, free Palestine.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $4 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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This Maze Will Be Big Enough to Call Home Someday first gets points for the title alone: Love me a long title that evokes a specific vibe while using distinct language.
Aesthetics are very much my jam using black background and more neon-like colours to draw forth that ASCII graphics look. There is an included plaintext/printer-friendly version as well for those worried or too much a coward to spend all their black ink on it.
I also really like collaborative worldbuilding games and this is in that style but the framing of being kids making their dream game together is a fun twist that opens the avenue for playful jabbing or petty disagreements who's medium of battle is passive-aggressive creative changes through your young game designer characters.
Connections are simple but effective and having to give yourself a username + selecting a symbol to represent you is a solid way to do simple character creation that further seeps players in the overall theme.
Having a built-in timer that's based on actions instead of arbitrary or random? Love it. More collaborative worldbuilding games like that. And then, related to that, having a wrap-up procedure where everyone gets to create a forum post related to the game after it releases is excellent closure.
I look forward to trying this ASAP!
Let me know how it goes!