About

About Zach:

I love to tinker! Ever since I was a kid, I remember getting in trouble for taking apart my toys. Being sucked into tech at a young age I always felt a calling to things like Video Games, Comic Books, Sci-Fi, anything geeky. Building Computers my entire life and tinkering with everything I could get my hands on I always felt like I had an Engineer's mind. Maybe it is the ADHD, but I digress haha.

Growing up my favorite game was a not so well known MMORPG developed by Sierra called The Realm Online. I played The Realm for years and years - it debuted in the early 90s!
The Realm was eventually shut down, and for a long time was just.. gone. Until I saw a random post on Reddit of all places about a new private server for The Realm opening up soon. I was ecstatic - my favorite game was back (and now free!). I quickly responded to the Reddit post expressing my interest, and was invited to the server to play. I developed a close relationship with the one hosting the private server, and when they could no longer maintain the server they passed it along to me.

When I came into posession of The Realm Private Server, 'Sacred Temple', I quickly had to learn how to maintain it, and eventually had to learn how to modify and build the ancient C++ and SCI code. For the next 5 years, I would expand my knowledge of C++ and SCI (A dead programming language developed by Sierra in the 80s) to figure out how to code and maintain this game/server. There is little to no documentation for SCI, and very little notage in the code itself. Despite these obstacles, I learned. Catering to a playerbase of roughly 500-600 players, I led development and recruited a kickass team. Tons of development and systematic leaps of progression and about 5 years later the current owners of the IP decided to bring the game back to life officially. I was extended an invitation to join the official team, and I accepted - closing down my private server, locking down my discords and removing any links/trace to my code or anything online.

Alas, my stay on the official team was short lived. We shared dramatically different opinions on the direction the game should take. Due to having signed an NDA my work on The Realm Online came to an end. That is when I started to tinker with modding some of my favorite games at the time. I was really obsessed with Vampire Survivors around the time it only had a few characters to select and a single level. As my obsession grew I began to feel the itch of wanting to develop, wanting to make something for people - so I looked into how hard it would be to mofify the game to include some changes - and as it turns out it was pretty simple! The game was at the time launching more or less with the entire source code as an obfuscated javascript file. Others online figured out how to deobfuscate it, and once I got my hands on the deobfuscated code it was off to the races. I ended up developing a relatively popular modpack for Vampire Surivors;

Custom Content Bundle Pack

This was when I realized I could really scratch that creative itch modding games, games I love even! I got really into Stardew Valley with my girlfriend, and while we played with mods I kept feeling like there were aspects of the game that were coming up short, and I knew that if others could mod the game I probably could too! So I looked at a whole bunch of the mods I was running in my game and their code, looked at a bunch of posts on reddit and joined the Stardew discord, their modders section helped a ton, and is where I learned the most. I ended up developing 7 mods for Stardew Valley, with one totalling at nearly 20k downloads.

King Kai's Weapon and Magic Expansion
Artisanal Honey Mead
High-Tech Backpacks (More Backpack Upgrades)
Mayor's Town
Arborist's Catalogue
Woods Elsewhere Unofficial Update
SDV NPC Sheet Generator
This is actually a tool I wrote to help generate random NPCs for Stardew Valley.

After Stardew, I moved on to making Minecraft mods. I started with porting some of my favorite mods to a modern version. My favorite modpack is Stoneblock 2 and the primary resource generation method in that modpack is breeding chickens. The chickens mod, and the sister mod Roost were stuck on 1.12, so I ported them to 1.21.1 and combined them into a single mod. Missing Fluid Cows I was going to initially port the equally stuck on 1.12 mod Fluid Cows, but decided to fold the functionality into my Modern Chickens mod. After adding a ton of features to Modern Chickens, I went on to port up the Human Companions mod; Modern Companions on 1.21.1 - adding a plethora of features there as well.

Although modding is great and definitely scratches the itch, It was not completely scratching the itch. I wanted to create something.. *more*. I have had a game in mind for years that I have wanted to make and have finally gotten around to beginning the work on Project Aurora Zeta (Placeholder name).

Project Aurora Zeta is my current project, while I still go back and update/fix my mods when I can but most of my attention is devoted to my game - and I am in love with it! Game Development, so far, has been really awarding and super fun. I have no plans on stopping - maybe one day you'll have played it!