ZONR - Touch the largest zone

"Whatever happened to ZONR?"

One thing that always  surprises me is the "long tail" on my video games. My first game published by KlickTock was Little Things back in 2009. I still get a lot of email today about it. "When is it coming back to the store?". Little Things and Little Things Forever were premium app store hits on release. Doodle Find was #1 around the world back in 2010.

But it is challenging keeping these older games alive. I've written games in PTK, Cocos2D, Objective C and *ahem* Unity Engine. Other projects keep me far too busy to maintain these old games against frequent engine updates. Some were forced off the store by platform policy changes, and eventually I gave up and took them all down.

ZONR is a particularly interesting game. It was written in Objective-C and was only ever available for the iPhone and iPad.  It was written using Kanji engine; a particularly obscure engine even back in the day. The same engine was used to write the original Little Things. At launch it didn't even have font support; I had to cobble that together myself.

I have been interested lately in Godot Engine having used it a few years ago in the "Stop Waiting For Godot" game jam, but I've been brutally busy the last 2 years and hadn't been able to find any spare time. A recently query by a friend prompted me to think back to ZONR. A free game that had only a handful of downloads back in the day, but it had a lot of devoted fans and the games opened doors for me in the indie community.

So I decided to dive in and port the game to Godot. I still have all the source code, but I wasn't able to figure out how it all worked and I was flatly unable to get it to run again. Thankfully a YouTube channel covering mobile games had recorded game footage of it back in the day! So where there was elements of the code I was unable to figure out, I could just dive back to the video reference and make an accurate recreation.

Godot 4 has been fun to use. GDScript is great and the final codebase is nice and efficient. However, I was disappointed that the WebGL export has taken 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Unlike Gusano Go I was unable to get the WebGL version running on an iPhone. Android works, Chrome is great. Even Safari on my Mac, it runs very poorly. That's OK I'll push toward pushing native version of the app to iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows over the coming weekends.

Thanks for playing all my old titles and for continuing to be so devoted to Crossy Road too. I look forward to your emails another ten years down the line.

- Matt