I made zPlat because nobody else was really making a platformer engine of its kind. The key difference was not in what it offered in terms of functionality, but what it offered in terms of intent. If you go to zPlat's submission page, you'll see that the one screenshot I provided was not of the engine in play, but instead, it's a screenshot of the code and the *paragraphs* of commentary I made for individual lines explaining how the functions and variables interact and what the design decisions achieve.

Despite it having a fraction of the functionality that bigger engines had, despite it even being somewhat poor coding practice, it received praise and an impressive score. The reason for this is that was made to *teach* people how to code a platformer game.

When I was in High School, I submitted a tech demo of a game called Polish. It was meant to be a full game with graphics and lives and health and all of the other holdovers of arcade platformers that are going out of style, these days. The problem was that I didn't know how to code. Some controls overrode the other, the character got stuck in places, the controls were clumsy and the collisions were sketchy even under regular circumstances. I lacked a fundamental understanding of computers and I didn't know good techniques for coding.

One issue that I find with engines submitted as open source examples is that they provide code, some of it good enough to read, but it's hard to use them as learning tools, and there aren't very many project files that teach you concepts like finite state machines or how to properly calculate your controls. zPlat 8 was rewritten seven times because I kept finding amazing breakthroughs while studying all of the engines I encountered, and I had many ideas to expand into to reach beyond that.

That's the thing, though, is that there's a huge price in making your projects and engines more complex - the code becomes less simple, and simplicity doesn't teach. The major setback that I endured was navigating lines and lines of code from different authors and trying to factor in my own ideas formed from observing these engines simultaneously.

That strain also fails to count the ignorance that I had as an inexperienced developer. I created "action recognition" in my platformer engine, which was just a variable that tracked my character's status, which was sort of how a finite state engine works, except it wasn't structurally set up correctly, so the code is still really complicated. zPlat is anything but perfect, it in fact fails to perform a lot of good coding practice even for its own time.

zPlat attempted to combat its own growing complexity by only offering the most basic possible version of itself as a download, and then anything you could add on to it would be found in a forum thread where you could copy blocks of code that add new features while explaining how they work. zPlat was intended to be distributed as simply as possible and its complexity to be as modular as possible.

As an engine, however, it betrays its own purpose a bit (albeit less so than other engines) because it still is a compilation of techniques into one large project file. This makes it harder to digest than a collection of project files that each explain one concept at a time. I feel like the latter could be more advantageous.

I still feel like zPlat deserves to exist, however. It was intended to see contributions from the community, but sadly its support didn't get off the ground, and lucky it didn't, because the code is pretty bad in a lot of spots, even if it means well. I do think we need an engine like it. There are very experienced programmers out here who can code one particular thing at a time, make the most minimalist possible creations that explain programmer concepts and tools to educate other game developers. Just *how* do you make a binary tree in Game Maker? Some of us have years of knowledge and the capability to put into words just how the pieces of a puzzle fit together.

Open source code can be made to teach, is my philosophy, in small steps, in small solutions. In retrospect, despite its major shortcomings, zPlat as a personal project was very beneficial for my game development skills, and it gave me an ambition to learn how to communicate effectively, as well as provide a platform that I could share with other people. If we can work together on an engine that is designed to teach, we will be provide the community at whole a huge potential for learning.