*********W*H*E*N*T*H*E*R*E*I*S*N*O*M*O*R*E*S*N*O*W********** zUUfHHHaHPAqS5NbR9E&g8QBB########BQQ8&&EERRDRRRddddddd55555A 2jzsHPaa3Pq5ddRD&QB##@@@@@@@#############Bg&E00RRRddbd53sfkc y2UsHWAq5bRE&QB#@@####BQQ&&#ENdqadBdAAS&B##B###B88&0E0RSfzy1 zKsHWA5dD&QB####BQ&RNNRfjAt&Nkr*rk#x^**8qIdIzdg#@@#BQgDdAKcc IKsHPSdE8B##Bg&5PAbNHA&5WR&QB&dbQQ#HaA8QEK&n1kjdRB#@#Q8gRqfy UKfHAd&QBQ&9NWssaq8QQgDRqWAPqAAH3WqRRR&8g&8E0R&5bHHD#@#B895H ykjKA90R5HfPANqR8dAy]|~!"_",_---'-,:;xyHSR&8QBBQB8QQ&@@#B8&N }}nyzzjHHAbdNRdA2v~".-:^/]u}uc}r!,.` ```,^uW&QB#####QR#@#BEN **v7k5NdbN5WoY^!-''-~]yzKKKszrrxik]^- `_^kE8QQ#BQgQ@##QE !~/s&ERNIu]*~:-```"izUkcoKAD5}',cxqKl^` '"xNQQB##QB@@#Bg :=r5yxu7\--!".` `:c3AWzqIlyd#Qk*)vN535* ':7gBQ###@@@#B& --=)xr~!~:`:,.``.\Wl]}58##@@@@@&y]qNNg5- -~RBQB#####B&N -!*,_:>*=);~=:-':iAiv)kEE#@@@@#Bdyokk9R: `-s0QB88Q8DSzl ``_;=-..,!~=!:":"^t1}}]cKR&###Q5ycky50f. `":ixI9q5N5Hjnx -``_!!>~:,.`.-'```,)]}i}1Hzot2Il7Y2HRU: '"!*vv}jtkjyuv*= '` `-:!*)r^,.--'`` ``._~xz2}cyc1yHRR]-` `.-,:!~/i}c1}x/>!, ``` '.,\}}xv\r!-!*-_. ``-!r]]22n*_'```'...--"=|xv\xv*=:,__ ` `'.-!\ncllyuxr*^;);!!_".--......-:!":!~^^/7iv*~~:-``'. ` `..-!v2Kffyccycn]}yk}xxx*:*xvxxxx7x/x7}1]r^=:_.'` ` `` `.-:!=*ijaPAqPHA5WsUKskljk2jkkl1lc}i]x\r~!!,'` `` `'--:=^x1o3NRd5aKfHszyyykcyyli]xv\/vr^=!"-` *********S*H*A*T*T*E*R*E*D*P*E*R*S*P*E*C*T*I*V*E*S********** 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