Our first time (games)

edited in General
So branching off from that other thread, what were your first game? Did you keep it?

My first game was probably a board game from when I was like 12, based on Ganbare Goeman 1 on SNES where you walk around Old Tokyo and beat up bad guys with a pipe, a yoyo and collected gold and lucky cats.

My first digital game was made in Turbo Pascal in standard 9, a Space Invader game where the invaders swarmed randomly (cos I couldn't be bothered to write paths) and fell when you shot them. It was pretty cool and had a few levels. Aced computer science :P

My second was in Matric a year later, and it was called Tiltris, where the game field tilted more the heavier either side got, and you lost if all your stuff tipped over. It was more like Columns than Tetris cos Tetris was harder to make XD

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Unfortunately all of these Turbo Pascal wonders from way back went bye-bye when my computer was stolen many years ago. Boo.

Share your firsts!

Comments

  • Mine was last year in 2012. It was this game called Sarif and is playable at sarif.clay.io. I have been doing rapid prototyping over the course of 2013 so no new games except maybe Montez (witch I posted a thread about, but no one is replying) :P
  • I love this question actually! My first game was about 10 years ago. My first completed game was a vertical scroller made with game maker 3(i think). My word, those were the days of concept drawings! So many drawings! lol. My first C++ game was also about 5 years ago. The same type of game.. (-_-)
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    My very first game was a hard-coded CYOA done in QBASIC when I was 12 or 13. It was terrible.
  • @Tuism thanks for making this thread.

    This is a bit of a repeat and sadly no screen shots ;) the first game I finished was a 2 player versus game. Playing AT-AT (actually the 2 legged AT walkers.)

    One keyboard shared. Written in Basic on the Spectravideo 328i. Was very proud to have as many as 5 animations for the walking. (back then 2 was pretty standard. Esp since we would have to calculate the byte values per 8 pixels and type the data in.)

    Single screen platforms you could jump up through not down through and solid ones. 3 Different levels to play on. 2 missiles per player on screen at any time. Moved slowly which made the screen seam bigger.

    This was the first game I finished, ofc back then it was played at home with friends no release. That was 1987 back in standard 7.
  • I made my first two games last year, link will be provided below:

    My first game was made last year (2012) at Learn3D and iscalled Rage of the Squirrel, and it was playable at the Learn3D stand at the rAge expo last year. This is a 2D game where you must defend the expo from invading robots. It is a 2D game made with C# and XNA.

    My second game, Eclipse of the Stars, was made with C# and Unity, and it was my second project. It has bad camera angles, and can be quite difficult. So enjoy.

    Rage of the Squirrel:
    http://www.mediafire.com/download/8e45dne4zcqg5l6/Rage_of_the_Squirrel.rar (42mb, download, install, play)

    Eclipse of the Stars:
    http://www.mediafire.com/download/6jkbp160cevpno2/Eclipse_of_the_Stars.rar (43mb, download, play, no install needed)
    Thanked by 1tbulford
  • My first was earlier this year. "Space Buggy Music Trivia", it was a music trivia RPG with a racing flavor done as a Windows form application in C#. I was busy working through a C# text book and wanted to try out what I was learning as I went through the chapters. It was confusing, exciting and over way too quickly (much like my other first time :) ) It can be found somewhere on this forum.
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    Very cool topic.

    I started modding games when I was 14 - first project I did was to take the Quake 1 guy and make him a MP model for Quake 2. From there it evolved into doing full on mods with a team of other guys from the states.

    I actually found a screenie the other day from one of my first mods *shudder*:
    image

    My first actual game was called Stickman Olympics... made it during the craze of all the stick figure flash 4 movies haha!
    I might have the exe somewhere on my home pc, will post it if I can find it :D

  • Hard to say for certain what my 'first' was. Made terrible, terrible interactive 'things' in Q-Basic when I was around 6. Messed around with Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem map builders in primary school. Did my first map scripting in High-School for Half-Life.

    I started playing MUDs in high-school and got seriously into one called KnightNet. A very old South-African MUD that doesn't exist any more. Became the de-facto owner and administrator of the server and dove into the wonderful world of CircleMUD coding and scripting.

    All of those contributed to my interest in GameDev and I remember each aspect with great fondness.

    Need to play MUD again. To Medievia!
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    I started out with OHRRPGCE when I was 10 years old. Because it was DOS based, all the game art had to be drawn with the built-in graphics editor using a keyboard. I shudder just thinking about it.
  • @duncanbellsa: Ah, Q2DM1. Showing one of the holes into the skybox too...
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    I used to make Space Quest style games on paper and get my friends to play. I was in primary school, so the games were mostly about cheese factories (I got a lot of mileage out of cheese related jokes back then). The rooms were all drawn on pages of my book, and I used other bits of paper to cover up the inactive rooms. And I think I had some kind of inventory that worked via the same logic.

    That's the first game I remember making that I can remember what it was.

    My first digital game was in high school using Turbo Pascal. It was my attempt at a Tamagotchi, except I'd never actually played with a Tamagotchi, and my game was about trapped humans who grew older slowly whom required cheese for sustenance. I think there was a little bit of risk reward built in, in that feeding them a lot of cheese could make them slow and make it tricky for them to walk to the next cheese, but feeding them healthy food would speed up their metabolisms and they would starve quicker.
  • No idea when, but when I was a wee youthlet in the 80s, computer magazines used to come with program listings that you could type in. Some had you typing in raw HEX, but every so often there were ones with readable code.

    I dabbled a lot in code at the time, even going so far as to write my own paint program for lack of being able to buy one (stores just stocked games) but my most complete game started from a ZX Spectrum BASIC listing of a simple Moon Buggy style game. I was enamoured with Defender, so I replaced the buggy with a helicopter, made it scroll bi-directionally, and gave it laser beams, flying enemies and some stranded pilots to pick up.

    Started as not my own code, but happy to say the end result did not resemble its origins at all.
  • @Squidcor the first version of Toxic Bunny released in 1996 was drawn exactly like that. Fortunately Caleb was and is a drummer although we did go through a few keyboards as the space bars didn't last and those were the old style click button ones.
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    My first game was a platformer in QBasic somewhere in high school that I made with my good programmer geek friend Hermien (I also had a good friend named Herman).

    We figured out how to draw thick pixels using 256!!!! colours. (Before that, the 16 hideous default colours were the max). We spent quit a bit of time designing props pixel-for-pixel, and typing in the pallet numbers in dozens of arrays... (Geez, all that time...) Your character had no animation, so he was sliding along, and jumped stiff-legged from platform to platform. In the end we had a single, very minimalistic level, there were monsters of some sort that you could shoot. At that time I never would have thought I'd become a game developer for real. The days...
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    I used to draw mazes by hand for my classmates in primary school. The best system I came up with had the mazes on paper with flaps for "rooms", when you reached a room you'd lift up the flap and see what you got. Sometimes it was a piece of equipment, sometimes it was an entrance to another maze. I could swap the back pages to totally change how people were playing it, so everyone got the same mazes but a different game. I really enjoyed drawing the mazes and trying to figure out confusing passages and ways to lead my friends in directions they didn't expect.

    I kept trying to make games in Logo as soon as I learned that, I kinda got a tennis thing going eventually, but it wasn't much fun. High school introduced turbo pascal and I had a million random things I kept trying to make, but the one that eventually worked was a version of TRON that the system admin wrote to show me how game loops actually functioned. It was magic, you could do stuff without waiting for the keyboard! Then I spent ages adding to it, putting in turbo boosts and obstacles and tournaments and music and blah. Kept getting kicked out of the computer center for playing games, the only defense was to show prefects that this was my own code. Then my friends would play it too and bullshit that they'd written their own ones.

    I used to come in to the computer center to write tests and find out that I'd been locked out as punishment again. Someone would have told the teacher in charge that they'd gotten TRON from me. I was working with a client years ago and that same teacher randomly saw me (they'd moved to a new job in the same institution) and barged into the office to warn them that "Games are all that one thinks about, everything will be games with him!" to which my client responded "Yes, that's what we're paying him for."
  • "Yes, that's what we're paying him for."
    Epic win. :D

    --
    I made a bunch of horrible stuff in Klik&Play, but they were mainly just modifications of the games that came with it. Maybe my first "proper" game was a text-based multiplayer rpg in Delphi; except I didn't know how to write network code, so all of the clients would write to a shared text file, and then I'd keep having to build in workarounds for when clients tried to access the file simultaneously and got garbage data... Sigh. :)
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    I made a bunch of horrible stuff in Klik&Play
    OMG Klik&Play, I remember that. Maxis made that... Hahaha :) There was also a thing in the old Amiga days called SEUCK... Shoot Em Up Construction Kit. I never did get it but read every single copy of Amiga magazine I could get my hands on with it. Man.

    You made Network code MMORPG as your first project XD It's completely true, this obsession with MMORPGs as first project... thing :P
  • @duncanbellsa: Ah, Q2DM1. Showing one of the holes into the skybox too...
    hehe yup, the worst part about the screenie is that I comp'd it in photoshop. The functionality was working but we didnt have the animation working properly yet. So print screened the textured view of the model an plonked it on a screenshot. And that horrid "gold" text... eugh...

    Who would have thought I would some day become a graphic designer... :D

    Sidenote: I did however love Quake 2 - it took me ages to move on to another engine. At one point I wanted to re-create Splinter Cell in Quake 2...
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    The first game I tried to make was a crimsonland clone done in flash. I think I got as far as hordes of programmer art (aka red blocks) attacking and a single weapon before I got a real job and no longer had time for ninja zombie robots.

    One redeemable fact was that I spent more time on the loading screen than anything else and actually managed to do some not terrible art for it. Because you know more important than having a good game is having a sexy loader:

    image
  • Hmm... I doubt that I have these memories in the right order, but let's see...

    I remember a game that I played with a friend when I was small: I would set up an environment with various toys, including various things that stood as weapon emplacements, and he would drive a "ship" down it, shooting the things that I had placed there.

    At some point I got a Commodore 64, and recall tinkering with various little game-like things in BASIC, either trivial modifications of the examples in the manual or silly little menu-based/IF things. I don't think that I ever managed to figure out how to save a given project for later work. :/

    My first "real" digital games, however, were probably those that I created using Klik 'n Play, and later its successor, The Games Factory; I made a great many games of various sorts with those two programs, some of which I still remember fondly. ^_^

    I got into "proper programming", I think, with my high school Computer Science classes, which introduced me to Turbo Pascal. Aside from actual assignments -- most of which I don't seem to recall -- I made a little game called "Kill the Monster". I'll leave the object of the game for you to guess. :P

    As I recall, "Kill the Monster" was built up over time; I started with a character (literally: it was the ASCII smiley face :P) that the player could move around with the keyboard, then, in some order, I added shooting for the player, and enemy (the eponymous "monster") that moved around and attempted to shoot the player, an ammunition count and ammunition crates for the player, a simple scoring system, difficulty levels and scoreboards that were saved between runs. As an artefact of its origins, the executable was simply "man.exe".

    Alas, some change (related to Turbo Pascal programs compiled on older machines being run on new machines, I think) caused Kill the Monster to stop working on subsequent machines, and in time it seems to have been lost, save for memory.
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    Around 2003, I made a text-based fighting game in Turbo Pascal I was fairly proud of at the time. I thought I'd lost it, but I found it again on an old backup disk last year sometime.

    My first game with graphics was a simple platformer I threw together in GameMaker about 8 years ago, but I never actually finished it. I did all the animations pixel by pixel in MS Paint. There's a download of it here, although it's probably not worth your time.
  • I remember sitting with a friend when I was about 12 and us both really wanting to play Cluedo, but not having any of the board implements - so we made the entire game.

    The first game i actually *designed* was a little game I like to call TF2-puzzler. You get to be a pyro and go through different levels of different enemies shooting at you at random. All timed, and you have the cart to push too :)
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