I used to be a part of the MegaZeux community years ago. It was a group where curious creatives would come together and learn how to program or to create digital art. The releases for MegaZeux have been plagued with demos, "engines", and utilities. Relatively few finished games have actually been released, which really isn't surprising considering how complicated games can be. But it was a great and supportive community where people cut their teeth learning game development concepts.

It's interesting to see some go on to bigger projects in programming (Gilead Kutnick aka Exophase) or music (Sai'ke, Emalkay), and animation (can't remember the name of who I'm thinking of for this one in particular, but he released some very well-made animations on Newgrounds before entering the industry).

MegaZeux has a built in language called Robotic that was basically a limited BASIC, but organized in entities called "robots". There were also graphical hacks that let developers adjust the appearance of the ASCII characters or change the color palette. There was a lot to it for the time.

The Day of Zeux, or "DoZ", was always a fun test where teams would organize and create a game in 24 hours based on a specific topic given by judges. My first entry humbled me pretty hard since I went into it cocky about my capabilities, but my teammates abandoned development and we came in dead last. I tried in a later year and my team then created a game about escaping from a prison, which even had multiple endings. We didn't win, but we were near the top that time.

If it wasn't for MegaZeux, I probably wouldn't be a full time developer today.

I hope college went well for RoSS. Also, long live Frozen Cow Industries