Comments on: How far were you into programming when you started making games?

By: Videogame Biscuit

Videogame Biscuit — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:58:43 +0000

I started thinking about making video games as soon as I wrote my first “Hello world” program on a Commodore 64. Since that would have required serious assembly programming, I never even got started on that. Interest flared up again when I learned Turbo Pascal in high school, but again I never succeeded in building something that worked. I wrote a few regular applications in Turbo Pascal and later Delphi, but my first serious attempt at making games was when I picked up “DirectX in 24 hours”. I managed to get a Tetris clone up and running, but it was incredibly buggy and crashed all the time. After that I gave OpenGL a shot, but I realized that building a game engine from scratch when you’re working alone takes too much time. A month ago I got myself a copy of Torque Game Builder and that seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. Let’s hope I will finally finish a decent game!

By: ET

ET — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:03:11 +0000

Well, just as Nick did, I too started programming with games. I doodled a little bit with Turbo Basic and did very simple and small games but still very enjoying to play :) I was so proud of myself! Then I moved to Visual Basic, then C, then a small dedicated RPG game engine, called “verge” with whom I did lots of demos and stuff.
But I never actually finished a game since the Turbo Basic era :’(
I guess i prefer pitching new ideas for games and try them out rather than developping the whole thing myself :/
I’m what you could call a Lazy Boy hehe

By: 0xCAFE

0xCAFE — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:28:26 +0000

Let me add my own two cents :P

The first game I built for myself (not a school project) was a Zelda 1 clone. It was not very polished but Link could move around a tile with basic collision detection. I was close (about 75%) of pixel-perfect collision detection. It was written in C (MS DOS) and was quite fast. Loading .gif files for sprites.

When I was building the engine, I needed a map to test, so I paused the game dev to start a basic map editor. It used a bunch of cheap sprites and used the mouse to “draw” the map. It was also written in C (MS DOS).

I have also made the usual Minesweeper (who didn’t! :D)

Then, when I had some time on my hands I read the book “Developing Games in Java” by David Brackeen (http://www.amazon.com/Developing-Games-Java-David-Brackeen/dp/1592730051) and built yet another Zelda clone. The whole point was to try and do the same thing in Java. I have made a cleaner interface, it ran fullscreen on Windows and used real Zelda sprites I copied with an emulator. It was not so complicated (much less than the first time).

And the third demo I made was a basic Mega Man X animated sprites. I used treads to animate the breathing of Mega Man, jumping running, etc.

That’s about what I have done a few years ago. Since then, I did not do much in the game dev domain.

See ya!

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:29:12 +0000

One was a simple duck hunt clone, the other was semi-original. The semi-original one was based off of a game from EGP , I think the title of it was “Consumed by Fire.” I basically recreated that, and added a whole lot of features and polish, that I thought it needed. I guess you could say both were clones.

By: tioneB

tioneB — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:35:08 +0000

Thanks for your encouraging words Nick!

Oh and what were those 2 games? Simple game clone? Original Ideas?
I'm curious about others first steps in game programming and reading the topic on gamedev.net have been really interesting.

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:43:31 +0000

Hehe, this one is easy. I started programming by making games. Although, to this day, I haven’t completed more than 2 games. The 2 games I have completed are pretty simple games, but I’m very proud of them as well. ;)

I’ve been reading your blog because of the engine you are making, looks very interesting. Keep up the good work. :)