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[impulse9]

I made my first game when I was very young, probably around 12. It was a batch-script driven text adventure game. It was about a guy wandering around in a mystical forest. I will never forget the feelings of overwhelming joy that came about upon discovering the CHOICE command.

[D-TurboKiller]

So one day my 10-year old self finds an old Game Maker copy (4.1, was it?) and decides to make 3 games... at the same time. And they were finished in very different times, though it didn't take me more than a year to finish all 3, and it only took me that long due to lazyness. Please note that I don't consider these my first REAL games, those may come one day, if they ever get done.

Here's the folder with the 3 games, if you dare. Best played when REALLY high.



Well, then, entering the very first game, Adventure v0.9, or as I like to call it, A 10-year old's NIGHTMARE FUEL, v0.9:

Oh god my worst nightmare

This game had 2 modes: Adventure Mode, where you'd venture through 3 levels and collect the little dots (big ones = moar points), then reach the exit; and Lava Trouble Mode, where you'd have to venture through a level completely filled with lava hazards to win... except the whole thing is colored red and so is the lava, so it's pretty much impossible.

So lets talk about this utter failure some more. The main "character" is... well, what the hell IS that? Maybe it was a weird-ass UFO or something, but it looks like a pizza shit, so lets treat it as such. You start with -1 lives (Brilliant!) and collect the golden heart (worth 2 lives) to turn it to normal. Those green things are acid, as soon as you touch them you start losing health REALLY fast (like, half-a-second-you're-dead fast). Later on, you meet moving spikes that get stuck in you, a few health items (that make you go over 100 health, woot), and lava that pretty much kills you almost instantly.

This is, without a doubt, a game that makes me rage instantly whenever I look at it. It's so incredibly pathetic in every form that I find it unbelievable I ever conceived such a monstrosity. Then again, it was a lesson learnt for good: even if I make something ugly as hell, I'll never make something so broken and un-fun ever again.



...what, you're still alive? Well then, get ready for ROUND TWO: BRICK BLASTING HAS NEVER BEEN SO STRAIGHT

No, I didn't shrink the image. The game is THAT small.

Brick Blaster, unlike the other two games, could actually have been remotely decent, as a coffee break anyway. The game had quite a few levels spanning five episodes (which you could cheat through by tapping the numbers 1-5), and you'd use 1 paddle for the first 3 episodes, 2 for the 4th episode, and 4 for the 5th episode. There were quite a few power-ups (including one that would instantly kill you and one that'd teleport you to the next level). What could possibly go wrong?

The answer would be everything. For one, the game window was so tiny and the levels so small you could barely play the game. All the powerups weren't centered. Playing with 2 paddles is hard and 4 is almost impossible due to its small size. Worst of all, the ball physics were almost non-existent, as every collision was pixel-perfect in a way that most of the time it'd be either completely vertical or horizontal. And how would you fix it? By making the ball hit the very ends of your paddle. Seriously. You could actually be stuck with the ball never getting to you, though thankfully I had a Restart button added (with a cost of one life). Even if you could play decently, though, the mouse would go off-screen... and so would the paddles! And if you clicked outside the screen, you'd have to click inside the game to have sound.  Bah.

Oh, and, Default Windows Backgrounds, free random sounds and music, yay! Though the last episode had some background made out of a 3D program or something.
Still the best out of the three games, though.



And now, it's time for Target v2.1 (seriously, what's with the version numbers in the exe files?), aka
FINAL ROUND: SUPER SHITTY GRASSY SHOOTING GALLERY

With High-Definition Grass, 15 1-hit kill reloadable weapons and no HUD whatsoever! Oh, what fun!

Target is a gallery shooter, if that wasn't obvious already. It has 3 modes: Test Mode (aka infinite lives), Sniper Mode (targets randomly placed and you could only use a sniper), and Challenge Mode (Push 8 targets back as long as you can... a few seconds, at best). It was also the last game I made, so it uses a newer version of GM. Not that it makes it any less shittier.

Lots of lame grassy shootan. Not much to say about it, because it's completely pointless. Most of the time it' just targets coming towards you and you shoot them, and then they respawn at the start. That's pretty much it. But hey, 15 weapons, including an overpowered Wall Gun! Still more fun than Adventure v0.9, somehow.



So, yeah, whatever you folks made, I probably made worse in my youth. But it was the igniter for what was to come next, and I learned a LOT over time. About 10 years later, here I am posting these nightmares, and without any REAL game to showcase, though I have a few prototypes for testing purposes. Thanks to my incredibly vast gaming experience, I've become a sort of enlightened hermit gamer, whatever that is. One of these I might finally make a full effort into a pure gameplay-focused game, but until then, I'll be improving my skills, mostly GM 8.1 coding, especially now that I finally have a decent idea of what to make.

Oh, and you guys are awesome for posting your first ever projects. It's nothing to be ashamed, but rather something to remind you that you can and will do better.

[Squid Party]

I just love these names!

[impulse9]

@D-TurboKiller: wow, that green pattern is eye-burning.

[DrDerekDoctors]

Alas my first game was on the ZX Spectrum and is lost to the sands of time, so instead I'm going to do a mock-up of it in Ascii, because it really looked no better than that.

      #
      #             O
      #
   ###################
      #
      #

      o

There you go, it was called Mum Amok, and you played the lower case 'o', and your mum was the upper case 'O', who homed in on you via incredibly simplistic rules. As you can tell, it was shit.

[DustyDrake]

My first few were bad...

Mine was a game where you played as a 'ninja' (Really just a greyscaled megaman with a black-white gradient visor)

Then, A game where you played as a fighter/monk/wizard hybrid thing using final fantasy 1 sprites. It was a platformer by the way...

THEN, a game I called Metroid Retro, from when I was reading a lot of Planet Zebeth

And then finally a spy vs spy game I tried to make.

[richardjames13]

My first games were made in the mid 80's on a VIC-20. I can't remember which one I wrote first it was either a text adventure game (no interaction just movement from room to room) Or it was some sort of shoot em up, no scrolling it had some sort of sprite that looked like a sail boat and missiles went left or right around the screen.

I haver no copies of these, they were produced before I had a tape drive to save them.

[baconman]

Now THAT'S kickin' it old-school...

[rvalenzuela]

My first game was created in flash and was done as a school project.It used pixel art and it was about a cannibal cat that shoot lazers from its eyes, the enemies were evil marzipan peach, hipster iguana, demon pug and sexy fox. 

Here's the title screen without the title and menu

[Virion]

My first game was a simple Flash-based scissors paper stone game.  
Made in 2006, it's a very simple game it only took me 5 days to finish and it's a single player game. The opponent will randomly choose one of the gestures (used 3 random numbers!) and the one who lose in that round will have the HP deducted lol. Ahhhh those were the good old days.

[Garlicguy]

My first game that I ever finished was called, Death Car Brothers, which was twisted metal with Mario character rip-offs. It can still be found by way of google I think. I've made about 50 crappy little games in my early teen years, 3 of which I actually finished. Back then, I wasn't any good at drawing sprites, so I would edit megaman sprites and such.

[dewlap]

I made some text adventure for the amstrad cpc464 when i was 10 ish. It was full of bad spelling and only used if's and goto's. The only commands you could input were yes and no so it was quite linear. I dont remember it well but follows an example of what it may have been like.

Do you want to go noth?
:no
Do you want to go south?
:yes
There is a troll. Do you want to fite it?