Your first game / programming project?

Mine was some simple chopter game in a some game maker tool on the C64 (mid '80), first real coded game in the late '80 (?) on the atari ST, some simple sprite based role playing game (never finished) in asm, better iso role playing game with a friend as artist on amiga (early '90), the same friend with who I'm developing Gnoblins now

Now I feel old...

I did something similar in Warcraft 3, but with a Bomberman game. That wasn't my first project that involved programming though.

My first project involved creating a heavily scripted map for Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault. In that game you have the map which is created in a level editor, and then you create a level script that goes along with it. I haven't played much of Quake 3, but I'm guessing this is the "Quake C" type stuff that that game had.

My vision was to create a level that was heavily scripted that had you fighting alongside squadmates that weren't cannon fodder. There was a medic in the original game, but I wrote a medic script from scratch that was more customizeable. You could tell the medic who to follow, how many health packs he had to give to others, etc. I eventually wanted to write AI for him to take cover during battles but I never figured that out.

The level that my YouTube video shows isn't the first project I did in MOHAA, but it was the culmination of everything I learned writing scripts for that game. Everything "scripted" that you see in the video is done via the level script. The squadmates following each other, the tank encounter, conversations, truck ride, etc were all done with my level script. A lot of things are broken as you can see, and I eventually gave up when I tried to implement wall climbing at the end.

The scripts involved mainly if statements and for loops. There were also several functions, which were either called with "thread function" which would execute the function in a separate thread, or "waitthread function" which would call the function and block until it returned. I asked LOADS of questions on the Medal Of Honor .Map forums, where the people there were extremely patient and helpful, and taught me a lot about programming (especially the user jv_map, or jvmap, I can't remember the spelling).

This was done in the Summer of 2003, when I was 14 too like Vexal. Then Call Of Duty was announced (by the original developers of MOHAA that went to form their own company) and they took the vision that I had for my map and made a complete game out of it

My first project was to cycle the TV screen through all 16 colors. It took about 40 lines of code in basic. I was six, reading the manuals that came with the computer (TI 99/4a). My teenage brother came home, asked me why I didn't use a loop, and got me hooked. I've been programming ever since.

I think my first program was something similar to Frob just flashing the border on a 48k Speccy. My first game was a simple text based adventure game where the user has been sucked down the toilet.

Text adventure in basic, Amiga 500, more or less 13-14 yo. Setting was a vampyre's castle.

I wrote a kind of game when I was 12. I had access to a 1K single board micro which had a 6 digit LED display and a hex keypad.

I coded a game where each segment of the display fired off at random and you had to press a key when a specific one fired.

I didn't have any storage device for the computer, no tape drive or anything, so I had to key in the hex for the game everytime I wanted to play it.

We got our hands on an Apple I a few years later. Man that was a different world.

It was a text aventure game in basic too, on an apple II.

It was a lot inspired by the "A thrilling fantasy adventure in which YOU are the hero" books I was reading (I was 7yo).

It was a text aventure game in basic too, on an apple II.

It was a lot inspired by the "A thrilling fantasy adventure in which YOU are the hero" books I was reading (I was 7yo).

Funny, I was just about to say pretty much the same exact thing.

The first "game" I made on the Commodore64 was something like a man dodging random obstacles on a scrolling screen. It was in Basic, and the scrolling of the obstacles was accomplished by printing them to the lowest row of the screen, which is the mechanism normally used for text scrolling The year was 1986 or so, when I was 8 years old.

My first project was to cycle the TV screen through all 16 colors. It took about 40 lines of code in basic. I was six, reading the manuals that came with the computer (TI 99/4a). My teenage brother came home, asked me why I didn't use a loop, and got me hooked. I've been programming ever since.

I started with a TI99/4a when I was 6 as well. The first game I made with it was an extension of the "Mr Bojangles" program that was listed in the manual. Did you have the manual with Bill Cosby on the cover as well?

I did an ascii (GFX!) adventure/RPG game where you moved a smiley-face around .

You could fight monsters (turn-based minigame with attack, magic or flee) and levelup.

There was even a shop where you could upgrade equipment (though it could easily be abused).

There were 6 different worlds/environments and a 7th locked one for the final boss.

Each level had random encounters and different enemies with different stats.

The game scaled poorly with player level however. Still, was quite impressed with my work, and took a fair bit of time before I could top it off.

Game was done in quick basic in the late 80s / early 90s, just before I started using the OHRRPGCE.

Reading these posts, I realize I'm a lot younger than a lot of you.

Did anyone else's dad try and teach them how to use Logo (the turtle drawing program) when they were really young?

Did anyone else's dad try and teach them how to use Logo (the turtle drawing program) when they were really young?

That software was lost in time and space as far as my memory is concerned.

Learned this in school I believe...

when I was young, I was mostly messing around with tools to manipulate Doom and Quake data in QBasic.

also went about as far as trying to do Wolf3D style rendering in QBasic, but it was very laggy even drawing a single block.

by the time I migrated to C (by this point, in middle-school, ~16 years ago), I had migrated mostly to trying to write OS stuff.

however, the relative lack of coding skills (spent years essentially dealing largely with disk-driver, filesystem, and kernel-space memory-management issues) and the ultimate realization that I had little hope of competing with existing OS's eventually killed this.

I had briefly recently considered a partial revival of this project, in the form of an OS built around partial Win32 emulation with either native or emulated x86, but this didn't get particularly far. in this case, at best, it would have been a small hobby project anyways, more likely something unlikely to ever see much use out of (maybe) people running it in VMware or QEMU or similar.

after the collapse of the original OS project (~ 2003/2004), a lot of the code was re-purposed (initially with globs of code ripped off of Quake glued on) as an attempt at making 3D modeling and mapping tools (but they were never particularly good in a user-interface sense). and also my 3D modeling and mapping skills are terrible in-general it seems.

I didn't really start looking seriously into game-development into around 2010 or so, and then (for sake of being free of GPL), decided to drop all Quake related code and use my 3D tools code as the basis for a 3D engine, and then spent years mostly battling with performance issues (as basically, one may find that performance will often be eaten up by endless "little things", *).

*: something may seem pretty fast in-isolation, but may often be not-so-fast when workloads are scaled up a bit, and when competing for CPU cycles with lots of other "pretty fast" things (and profilers don't really answer questions like "what in particular is going on that is making my framerates not-particularly-smooth?...").

now, it is now, and this has been my life thus far...

Why did you want to be free of the GPL?

Why did you want to be free of the GPL?

so I could license my engine and other stuff under whatever terms I felt like.

this meant discarding and needing to rewrite some amount of code, but this wasn't a huge loss.

generally, now I am using MIT/X11 licensing for most of my infrastructure and utility code (so people can basically do whatever with it), however my 3D engine proper is mostly proprietary (note that the source is still available, so it is sort of like MS Shared-Source or similar).

personally, I feel at present that MIT/X11 or BSD licensing is likely better for "things in general" than the GPL, and also GPL and LGPL puts some legal burden on users of the code (whereas with MIT and BSD, people can pretty much "do whatever").

the reason for putting most of the 3D engine under a proprietary license was so that people wouldn't be able to (legally) just grab all the engine source and run with it (or make their own games and not pay anything), and also so that I could (at least theoretically) ask for people to pay for it (and not just go put it up on download sites or whatever...).

though, Creative-Commons BY-NC-ND would be pretty close to the existing terms here, and I could potentially consider moving the 3D engine over to CC-BY-NC-ND or CC-BY-NC or similar at some point.

practically though, it doesn't really make a difference, as basically it is just going on donations and the honor system, though no one is donating anything or otherwise showing any real interest in the project.

It was a basically a horizontal shoot-em-up without the shooting part. You simply used the the mouse to move a string-ray-looking ship through a sea of ice blocks. If I remember correctly, ice blocks were used because the form of BASIC I was using could not perform real-time colorkeying or alpha blending--of course, it didn't help that I didn't even know what alpha blending was.

The valuable things I learned from this project were the importance of double buffering and level editors, and the limitations of a mouse as an input device .

Text adventure rip off of Aliens, written in BASIC on a VMS.

goto's all over the place!

My first programming "project" was probably a small Pascal program to calculate the dimensions of a rectangle in school :)

My first actual project was a small drawing program, intended to create button graphics for another program (which was never finished).

And my first proper game that will be finished (or so it seems atm) is a Zatacka clone. The game itself was simple, networking code is taking a lot more time :)