Zelda Fan Game Central

Mario · Oct 11, 2017 at 5:58 PM

Last time I mentioned Simple Machines Forum and this community has some Lore with that. But overall ZFGC has plenty of lore worth posting about. Just not completed fan games, it's extremely rare for any Zelda fan game to be completed.

My first Fan Game site was Zelda Fan Games HeadQuarters, which later became Zelda Fan Game Network (and is now Dead). This site was never too big but it was pretty fun early on. It mainly catered towards ClickTeam products for game making, which left a bit of a void open. On the other side of the web, Daniel Barras, AKA TheRealMethuselah (named as such cuz he was older than other people online and really liked christianity) was working on a Zelda project in Game Maker, Ocarina of Time 2D. He decided to create a Zelda Fan Game community of his own, and this one was more about the Game Maker software.

ZFGC started out as an ezboard, and its one of the handful of reasons I have plenty of experience with ezboard. (ezboard was 90% terrible, but had some neat things that other boards didn't offer). ZFGC gained a pretty decent share of members. It ran on ezboard for maybe a year? but eventually the community got fed up with both the software and how TRM was running the place (one of his favorite sayings was, If You Dont Like It, Leave lol) moved over to InvisionFree. Ezboard has some crazy history of its own so I don't think the original board is up but the InvisionFree one sure is. Eventually the community outgrew InvisionFree and moved over to Simple Machines Forum software and got their own domain. They built a website on top of it and this is what they're running today.

But it's not like they've been running the same stuff for the entirety of when they first used it until today. Much like MFGG had a split, ZFGC staff eventually realized they didn't care that much about fan games anymore. So they worked with some other friends of theirs and used the ZFGC community and built their own website about Video Games in general called Gamers Advanced. Instead of a split you just get a total direction change?? It was neat to see but Gamers Advanced didn't last too long. Obviously dedicated ZFGC members were like WTF and a few were full of nostalgia, so they created a new iteration of ZFGC called ZFGC-X on InvisionFree. This was a thing for a while until eventually they worked together with old ZFGC staff and got the original zfgc.com up and running which it's been quietly doing til this day.

Simple Machines Forum software... isn't great. It was one of the best options at the weird point where IPB 1.3 was pretty much unusable, phpBB was always phpBB, and MyBB hadn't really found its stride yet. It's still a pretty OK piece of software but development really hasn't gone anywhere with it. It was stuck in this weird limbo of having a 2.0 version in Beta for years and years (where they werent adding any features either) while the 1.x release was severely neglected. As far as I know the 2.x series has gone Live but it hasn't really gotten any big updates since then. Anyway this is all important because SMF development is actually tied to ZFGC. At some point the ZFGC staff became developers for SMF- SMF existed before they did but I guess they liked the software so much they jumped on it. This was around the period where development stopped (interesting coincidence I guess??). So anyway even if MyBB or some other software becomes THE software for forums, they're gonna stick with this one probably. Which is fine, it Works, its just kinda eh.

Anyway I have NO IDEA how the site is run now, this was all stuff from memory (and probably not super accurate). So let's give that a look. I remember they had a pretty decent resource management software that was definitely Newer and shinier than MFGG's, but when I click on Resources or Projects I just get a MediaWiki installation?? I mean, I guess that's easier to manage since its more freeform. Looking at the Updates, the Sprites page hasn't been updated since 2015 and the Projects category was created around 2012 (unfortunately Categories you cant really see when they last had additions). So IDK if this is really the place to go for Zelda Fan Game Resources. At least MFGG has been consistently updated for longer than many of us have been born.

Ok lets check the Community. First things first they have a chat in the header. It's an IRC channel! They've ran IRC for Ever really and it was actually the first big IRC channel I was a part of and I hung out there for years. I tried joining their server recently but the SSL server didnt work at all so I guess Ill skip that. When I head to the forums they link a Discord channel so I guess they're transitioning over to that now. Not a lot of people in it, but it's a start.

On the forums I can see that there's lots of boards about game development and the site. They seem OK with activity, probably a bit more active than what BibbyTeam gets but way less than MFGG or even us. As far as Community Boards go I can see an Entertainment board but that's it. It seems like they went the Minus World way and merged Gaming and other Entertainment into one board at some point. I guess you get more boards when you Log In? I'm not sure as I'm too lazy to make a new account and/or find an existing account.

Notable incidents I can think of is uhh one time when I was running NCFC some ZFGC members decided they wanted their Project to WIN so they got everyone they know to give it a Like (we had just introduced Likes for Projects) and were mad when the Most Likes didnt win the event. Mecha the Slag more or less told them they were clowns for thinking that would work and uhh obviously everyone was upset with each other. The bigger problem was our whole judging process wasn't clear or fair so it was decided to rework that for future events. IDK anything about ZFGC or NCFC these days tho so dont ask me.

I'd probably put this down as like an alternate reality MFGG. It's about Zelda instead and there's similarities but a lot of differences too. Zelda fan games just aren't as successful as Mario ones either, so it's a bit sadder than MFGG. (actually as I was posting this I noticed they have a channel for developing the next version of their site in Discord. I imagine this project has been a thing since as long as MFGG's forever Lets Build a New Site one too so They may actually be the same exact site??) I imagine a really good zelda fan game has the potential to blow away most projects on MFGG though so let me know when that happens.

oh yeah also i was blown away by this:

[Image: 9km2V.png]

its one of those fuckin 2000s era forum sig graphics but a tumblr link in it. It's such a powerful mix of old and new, a real good piece of Art there.

anyway thats it for this one