• Adventure
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• Other

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Change Log:

7/4/21 - Fixed a bug where you could still encounter Leah
after she is, uh, removed from the story in a certain path.

-What is this?-

When There Is No More Snow is a HYPER LOW RES SUPER RETRO
visual novel made in ZZT! It's a semi-autobiographical story
about a bunch of 8th graders in rural Michigan in 1995.

-How do I do this?

When you start the game, it will ask you for a game
controller. Pick K for Keyboard! Then it will ask you for a
video mode. Pick C for Color! Hit the Enter key to clear the
license screen and then either hit P to play the game or W
to bring up the Worlds menu, where you can hit the down
arrow key to select NSBONUS. Then hit Enter and P for play
and you can play the bonus world!

For the gameplay itself, you're basically just reading and
pressing right to move to the next screen or selecting items
from a menu with the up and down arrows and right to confirm
your choice. That's it! Have fun!

-What's it got?-

Features:

*10 unique endings!
*A giant self-indulgent bonus features package with deleted
 scenes, sound test, and a travelogue!
*Teen angst!
*Saxophones!
*UFOs!

-Who did this?-

​Credits:

Writing, Art, Music, Coding: Jeremy W. Kaufmann
Animated Gifs: Kkairos
Testing: Pogesoft, Johns, Lancer-X, Adult_Witch
Tools: Zeta, Zima, OpenZoo by Asie, Zedit2 by Lancer-X, SFX
Tracker by Lachesis, Fuse and Mixamo by Adobe, Blender by
Blender Foundation, FL Studio Pro by Image-Line, ZZT by Tim
Sweeney.

Yes, I made 3D models to create ascii graphics.

-What's it run on?-

Minimum specs: This will run on basically any computer that
supports HTML5 and if you do the downloadable version,
basically anything at all. You can even use real ZZT and run
it on a 286 if you're so inclined.

-Why?-

I was a ZZT kid in the '90s. I discovered ZZT the summer of
1994 when my family got AOL for the first time. Before that
my only Internet access was dialing into a local BBS that
had limited Internet support (email, usenet, and gopher was
the size of it, but hey, BBS door games were fun, right?)
I was searching the AOL file libraries for Zelda and Yoshi
and found Rotaj Russell's Link's Adventure games and Chris
Kohler's Yoshi games alongside seminal airline vandal sim
Corncob 3D. Kohler and Russell's games both told me I
needed something called ZZT 3.2, which I downloaded and
soon fell in love with.

I wanted to make video games bad and had struggled mightily
to make something worth playing in BASIC on my hand-me-down
Commodore 64. The best I managed was a weak text-based
craps game called Merv's Dice. With ZZT I could make
graphics! Simple, text-based graphics, sure, but graphics.
ZZT was so simple to use both of my younger sisters made
games that summer, too! We spent our summers with our
mom in California at that point and when summer ended we
had to go back to our dad in Michigan for the school year.
That meant leaving behind the 486 we had been ZZTing on
and going back to the quite obsolete C-64. Yeah, there
were neat things about it, but it was so slow and so old.
I spent the '94-'95 school year designing ZZT games on
graphic paper when I was supposed to be doing school work,
certain I could convert them to real games the next
summer.

My dad remarried and my new stepmom convinced him to let us
live where we wanted, so one of my sisters and I stayed in
California when the summer of '95 ended. I tried to finish
my first ZZT game before school started, but I couldn't
pull it off. I released Shattered Perspectives Preview
(a.k.a. SPREVIEW) in summer '95, sure I would finish
at least one of the games I previewed there (Survival,
Barney's Dead, and Robotech: Red) in a couple of months.
I did not. I finished Survival the following year
basically by giving up. That sounds bad, but really,
you will never finish a game if you don't give up. You
need to stop picking at it and just be done sooner or
later. With Survival I learned a lot more and got way
better at ZZT as I worked on it.

I started Survival in 1994 under the catchy name JEREMYS
when I knew very little. As I came back to in 1995, I 
learned rapidly and by the time I had it pretty much done
in 1996 I knew way more (including how to use STK and the
like). The problem was the earlier boards, i.e., the
start of the game, were made by a me that knew a lot
less and were a lot worse and a lot uglier. I started
trying to revise them to use STK and my greater knowledge
of ZZT coding and the like but I was also getting super
hard into MegaZeux and didn't want to spend my time
redoing ZZT stuff. But I felt bad about not finishing,
so finally i just forced myself to wrap it up and put it
out the way it was.

In '95 I had also become online friends with Russell and
Kohler and others like Aric McKeown, Kev Vance, and Dustin
Hubbard, all of whom were on the team that produced The
NL, an online ZZT/MegaZeux zine. (NL = News Letter.) We
didn't know what we were doing exactly and we sure didn't
use spell check but we had a lot of fun reviewing ZZT/MZX
games, promoting our friends, and talking shit. There was
a primitive mailing list (basically a never ending AOL
chain letter!) associated with The NL. By '96, I wanted
out of AOL because I couldn't handle per minute charges
past 10 hours a month. TEN HOURS A MONTH? I regularly
blow through ten hours on the Internet a day. But all
the NL stuff was on AOL so I basically pressured
everyone to make into a more open Internet thing
instead. On the one hand, this opened it up to way more
people! On the other hand, I think it splintered the
community. Also we were getting a little older and our
interests were changing. Some people went AWOL and
eventually Russell quit. I tried to take over and I
couldn't get it together.

I was running my own "company", SHATTERED PERSPECTIVES,
which started out as me and Stephen Williams, a.k.a.
Comthought, younger brother of Software Visions super-
star Matt Williams. SP soon ballooned to six people
because I doggedly kept asking people to join. I'm
not entirely sure why that worked. Jairska was a noob
that I wanted to mentor. I helped him with animations
and sprite designs on his MZX game Woofarfegnugan,
but then he abruptly released it in a pretty rushed,
kinda ugly state. I thought I would help him work on
it for weeks and he just spit it out and everyone
hated it and I just quietly said nothing about my
involvement because it was embarrassing! He
didn't exactly quit SP, but we stopped talking and he
was never OFFICIALLY part of the team since he didn't
even mention SP on his title screen.

Stephen and I put out a collaborative ZZT game called
ZZT Shorts. It was a collection of mini games and a
really great idea. I mean, it was great for me
because I have such a difficult time focusing on one
project and this made it much smaller and way more
doable. It was intended to be my ZZT swansong. After
I finished ZZT Shorts I was going to devote myself to
MegaZeux! I had a bunch of games in progress:

Magic Quest: a sort of sloppy Zelda-meets-Final
Fantasy riff. This was my first MZX game. I gave up
on it pretty early on as I learned more MZX skills,
but I have fond memories of working on it during
summer 1996.

Cronus Book One: DreamZ. Oh yes, I was was going to
make a REAL RPG. What's that? RPGs are really long
and difficult to develop? I wanted to make a multi-
game story. That was dumb.

Lifespan: Space shooter along the lines of Raiden
(or Xevious if you want to be old school) that
used my patented sort of working "giant sprite
of a bunch of Robots moving together" tech that
mostly worked.

Saucer Invasion 3001: A way more advanced take on
the same crap as Lifespan except it had a super
long animated intro.

Fish in a Barrel: Another vertical shooter based
on the same tech except you controlled a gun
underwater shooting fish so it felt more like
Space Invaders or Galaga.

Space Trash: This was also a space shooter but
it was more like you moved a crosshairs around
and shoot spaceships. It didn't work very well.

Flight: An RPG/flight sim I guess? I never got
very far on it and could only find several
loose boards floating around now. The idea
was you had walk around and chat with people
story crap ala an RPG but no random battles.
You went to flight school and would fly around
an airplane that used the same large sprite
tech as Lifespan et cetera.

A Dink in the Grass: Oh yes, I was making a
Zelda parody too, also using the big sprite
technology. I did not finish that either!

!nsane-X: This was a platformer with a kind
of a lot of frames of animation. I released
a Christmas themed demo right before Christmas
1997 I think it was... and never finished
the full game. It was about a floating
cartoon brain collecting bones and stuff.
If I had actually finished it this could
have been good.

There were several more I never got very
far on including one I specifically
remember called Paranoia (I mostly just
made a title screen! Cool) but I started
getting into C/C++, took a class on C++
at school, and basically lost interest in
fighting the limitations of MegaZeux. I made
text-based strategy game called something
like Total Global Thermonuclear War in C++
and then fell in love with MUSHes (online
text-based roleplaying games) and all my coding
skills went to that for a bit.

There were several other members of SP,
DemonSpitt (wrote simple games in BASIC like
INSANITY, DISGRACE, 666, VISIONZ, and... 
a Simon game), Dutch King (wrote in Pascal!
and made Attack and Tank Battle, also simple
games), and QP7 (another BASIC guy, wrote
nifty puzzle games Capsule and Box Boss)
but we basically all lost touch

I finished high school and worked for a
real video game company as a production
assistant (everything from localization to QA
to helping with marketing), then I went back
to college, got my film degree, and then
worked for one of the largest video game
publishers in the world... and hated it. I quit
to do creative writing for games at an AI
company that was trying to get into games.
I ended up having to step in as the game
designer as well because it was not
working out great and... then the whole
project was canceled. Disillusioned with the
bad pay and instability in the games industry,
I got a normal boring tech job and after a
few crappy years, started getting paid a lot
more.

Many years have gone by and with the 30th
anniversary of ZZT, I wanted to return to my
roots and make a new ZZT game! Yeah, it's not
MY 30th anniversary of ZZT since I didn't start
until 1994, but whatever. Playing the old
games I made as a dumb teenager I struck me
that they do not at all reflect the confused
feelings an inner turmoil I felt when I 
actually was a teenager. I wanted to make a
new game that was truer to how life actually
was for me as a teen and I figured 1995 before
I moved to California was a good setting.
So that's the game I made! Hope you enjoy it.

-Jeremy W. Kaufmann a.k.a. DeadPhrog
April 28th, 2021