Astral
| astral | |
| Active Period | 199x to Present |
| Notable releases | CRT shaders Ravenfall |
| Vaporware | tons |
| Companies | Square of MegaZeux Mystical Winds |
About
David "astral" Cravens (b. 1986) is a software development manager for a large hospital system in South Carolina. He specializes in building bespoke agile workflows for teams and process improvement, as well as software architecture and designing applications to encompass and enforce business processes. Game development is one of his hobbies, as is shitposting in Discord and swinging well above his fighting weight attempting to help people with problems in their lives.
He has a wife and two boys (b. 2010, b. 2014) and lives in the heart of South Carolina, which is one of the stinking armpits of the south.
astral has a wide range of skills owing to his soul-crushingly severe ADHD. He is a general handyman, capable of home repair and renovation, auto repair, plumbing, electrical work, small electronics repair, and in general just fixing anything that breaks. He can also draw and digitally paint. About the only thing he can't do with some competency is music.
astral's primary programming language is currently Java, though he has fundamental proficiency in a variety of languages, including C, C++, Python, T-SQL, and PowerShell. His favorite editors are any given JetBrains product and Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
astral has a twitter account here.
History
90s
Beginning life as a privately prolific ZZTer (never releasing on account of impostor syndrome and anxiety) David joined the MegaZeux community with a different name some time in the nineties (he doesn't remember exactly when), back when mWorld was the primary site and a lot of MZX discussion still happened in mailing lists. He had a bad habit of lying to people about his age and competency, and never actually released a game.
00s
David adopted the name astral in 2001. He joined Square of MegaZeux early, when Akwende first announced its creation and stunned the community with the screenshots from Final Fantasy: Dynasty Prelude. After SoM exploded, astral joined Nanobot's Mystical Winds where he wrote PNOG!, one of the few games he's actually finished and put on the internet. It's a DOS pong clone written with Borland C++ 4.5.1 and leans heavily on Borland's graphics.h. When Nanobot left the community, astral took over leadership of Mystical Winds and proceeded to pile-drive it straight into the ground.
astral never appeared on the forum much, still having less than 500 posts in the 17 years he's been going by astral. He frequently lurked on the IRC channel, and was much more interactive there than anywhere else. One time he fucked up judging a Day of Zeux and they threw his scores out. He won a few BKZX contests, which are a protoform of the game jam.
He became staff on Zeuxworld when it opened, and was an evangelist for Zig, a clone of ZZT and MegaZeux. While staff on Zeuxworld he wrote an article advocating agile game development and iterative prototyping and design, even though at the time he had no idea what that was and just thought it was a good idea.
For a brief time he was digistaff, but notoriously kept accidentally locking threads trying to use the forum from his HTC Droid Eris. He was given the role to attempt a face lift of DigitalMZX (code named Voltron, since many community members banded together to help DMZX leap forward) led by MZXGiant. After falling out with several members on IRC astral left the community for roughly 10 years, without having completed the face-lift (classic astral) and showing up only occasionally, making an ass of himself while drunk.
10s
During a brief spurt of inspiration in the 2010s, he wrote the ZZT game Ravenfall despite the fact that there weren't really any ZZTers around left to play it. It contains entirely too many written words and dull gameplay segments, interspersed with passable ZZT art.
astral returned to the community in 2017, via the Discord server. Older and significantly more tame (and tremendously less alcoholic), having figured out the ADHD thing, he's a much more tolerable human and enjoys talking about games, software engineering, management, Magic: the Gathering, and anything else going on in #mzx.
He wrote the two CRT shaders, one stolen and one a ridiculous trig-using monstrosity. He occasionally files feature requests and bug reports.
Current Projects
astral is currently working on an unnamed metroidvania game with the working title godscroller.
astral is also currently considering working on a beginner's guide to MegaZeux to live on the web and help increase the community's exposure to the thriving indie community that has erupted since MegaZeux first hit the scene way back in the 90s.