HyperZoo

HyperZoo (name TBC) is a very, very, very WIP retro-style action-adventure game creation system in Bevy. It's inspired primarily by early 90s systems like ZZT and MegaZeux, but with a few quirks of its own.

• Top-down action-adventure flavoured action: box puzzles, shooting, inventory management, etc.
• High-fidelity 8x8 tile graphics!
• Semiotic: a (WIP) actor-model programming language similar to ZZT-OOP or Robotic!
• Free and open-source!

Chapter 1: Escape from HyperZoo

This is the planned demo game for HyperZoo.

You are Max Colby, a cat burglar.  (Literally - with fur and pointy ears.)  You've been banged up in the ZOO, a strange prison, after one too many night-time 'furniture moving jobs'.  Your goal is simple: escape!

 
All current and future work on Escape (anything in its world directory) is licenced as CC0 to allow for experimentation, self-documentation of how to use and modify HyperZoo, and shameless cribbing.  Go wild :)

Planned features

Please note that HyperZoo is in very early development, with only a tiny fraction of what I'd like to have in it actually working as of writing.  On the roadmap is:

• Proper handling of multi-board games
• A completed demo game
• A more comprehensive built-in editor
• More built-in puzzle pieces, enemies, items, and Semiotic features
• Documentation

Consider releases here and on HyperZoo's sourcehut to be early previews - as HyperZoo progresses, I'll have more to share, and this page will start to look a lot less bare :-)

With thanks to...

• The people who inspired HyperZoo in the first place:
  • Tim Sweeney (yes, that one) - ZZT
  • Alexis Janson - MegaZeux, Zeux series (Chronos Stasis in particular - Escape in its current early state owes more than its fair share to it)
  • eevee - the 'Succeeding MegaZeux' article that led me to start making this in the first place
• The attendees of the ConFuzzled 2026 Indie Game Showcase who played and offered feedback on an early version of HyperZoo
  • Including telling me to start an itch.io