Posted September 09, 2019 by LostTrainDude
zFRAG is already a week old!
First of all, thanks to all of you who enjoyed, shared, and supported this little game and started to defrag their life one cluster at a time.
I wanted to share with you some details and other interesting findings.
First, I'll address some of the questions I have been asked in the last few days!
Currently the game runs only on Windows (7 SP1+, and newer), macOS (10.12+) and Linux, although I have not much feedback about the last one.
It is written in C# and developed using the Unity game engine. It would be lovely to see it run on other systems as well (I have been asked about ASM/Raspbian) and at some point in the future (as soon as I can make it readable, that is) I will likely share its source!
I spent some time searching on freesound.org and other similar websites but I couldn't find anything suitable and that not required heavy post production to make looping as seamless as possible.
Luckily, a few hours into the project I had someone point me out to TwitchDefrags, which is a beautiful project I did not know it existed, and recorded a few seconds of its audio emulation of the disk defrag sounds.
Why, it's IBM VGA9 from The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack, of course!
I started working on it on August 30, Friday, and released it on September 1, Sunday.
It was kind of an impromptu solo 48 hours long game jam.
I did not make any research whatsoever when I decided to make this. But, since its release, a bunch of similar projects were kindly pointed out to me.
TwitchDefrags is a 24/7 live Twitch Stream where you can endlessly watch simulated hard disks being defragged. Yes, it is as beautiful as it sounds.
Defragging in PICO-8! How cool is that?! A lot, as per many other PICO-8 projects. It is non-interactive, but very polished and soothing as disk defrag software should be!
Thanks to Arcoran for pointing this out to me
I can't really run this, for some reason, but I have spotted some screenshots around. It looks *good*!